Being autistic in our ableist societies is full of cruel ironies. One of the cruelest and most damaging is the myth of the unempathetic autistic. We are portrayed as robotic savants in TV and movies, reduced to an unfeeling trait. Whenever there’s a school shooting, out come the autism and mental illness tropes. Empathy myths marginalize and criminalize us.
While some of us identify as low-empathy, a great many of use are the opposite. Our broad spectrum is reduced to a caricature.
An Exhausting Flood
One of the hallmarks of autism is sensory overwhelm. Many of us are hypersensory to the point of overload, meltdown, and burnout. The intensity of sensation is a flood. The world is perceived in high fidelity. We are hypersensitive to our environment, other people’s energy, and the emotional climate around us.
It’s that myth again that autistic people don’t have empathy, when in fact we often have so much that it’s hard to deal with. That empathy is what helps me to write characters and imagine how they’re feeling.
Autism Awareness Week: Stop telling me I don’t ‘look’ autistic | Metro News
Many experience this as hyper-empathy, an exhausting flood, a painful over-abundance of empathy that we must tamp down to avoid meltdown. We’re not hypo-empathetic; we’re hyper-empathetic to the point of distress. Some describe their empathy surges as automatic, instinctual, and uncontrollable.
Autistic People’s Experience of Empathy and the Autistic Empathy Deficit Narrative | Autism in Adulthood
I am highly empathetic to the point of over-empathizing. I may not always be able to process cognitively what I’m experiencing (see point below), but I am overwhelmed by the emotional responses of people around me — which includes things I read on the internet, because I’m experiencing them as the other person does. (Not in the way of, I know how it is to be them when I’m not them or don’t have the same experiences, but in the way of, their anger settles in me, or their sadness settles in me, and I can’t get rid of it.)
Autistic Hoya: Why do I think I’m autistic . . .
You might not be able to see this flood from the outside. Autistic folks can have difficulties with verbal expression and communication, particularly in neurotypical social settings. Exposure anxiety and situational mutism make it difficult to dare expressive volume. Alexithymia makes it difficult to describe emotional states. The overwhelming empathy is corked up inside. Just because you can’t perceive it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
There’s also the matter of titration. How much of the empathy flood is appropriate to share in a given social situation? What concentration of empathy does the moment call for? I have trouble deciding what is enough, so I usually keep it in. Autistics often comment that sharing and empathizing is easier with other autistics than with allistics.
Autism, empathy, and the mind-blindness of everyday people – Karla McLaren
Empathy Exercise
Empathy and communication go two ways, and neurotypical society hasn’t shown much interest in meeting neurodivergent folks halfway. Reciprocity is a basic tenet of social skills, and the neurotypical default is usually incapable of reciprocity outside of its usual scripts. We autistics are called mind-blind by folks who have made zero effort to understand and empathize with neurodivergent minds, who are ignorant of alternative matrices of sociality and social intelligence.
Try an empathy exercise. You’re in a noisy social situation. You are hyper-sensory, anxious, and shy. You are mainlining sights, sounds, scents, and textures while navigating social cues and assumptions made by and for minds different than yours. Now, exchange social styrofoam with strangers who refuse to understand or think beyond their own minds.
Perspective-taking is two-sided.
The Actual Monsters
We are tired of being called unempathetic robots and monsters by the actual monsters, monsters like Ole Ivar Lovaas—the twisted father of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and conversion therapy. He applied his abusive, torturous techniques to autistic kids and “sissy boys” to make them “indistinguishable from their peers”. He had little regard for their humanity—they were engineering projects.
CW: child abuse, dehumanization
He explained to Psychology Today, “You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense- they have hair, a nose, and a mouth- but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”
Silberman, Steve (2015-08-25). NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 285). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This charlatan still influences popular conceptions of autism. There are many like him who abuse autistic people, often for money as part of their jobs. “Pinch the nose to release the jaw” and spraying ammonia in mouths are failures to recognize another’s humanity.
Who are the unempathetic monsters?
- Why I Left ABA | Socially Anxious Advocate
- I Abused Children For A Living – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- I Abused Children And SO DO YOU: A Response To An ABA Apologist – Diary Of A Birdmad girl
- I’m an ABA therapist, I’ve noticed a lot of the adult autistic community speaking out against ABA – neurowonderful
- I’m sorry, but that’s not earning your token
- ‘Cardgate’ Scandal Uncovers Widespread Disrespect of Autistic People | NOS Magazine
- The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists
- Applied Behaviour Analysis – Personal Reflections
- Read what one autistic adult had to say the day she realised that the therapy she went through as a child was actually ABA.
- Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology
- The Double Empathy Problem: Developing Empathy and Reciprocity in Neurotypical Adults
/CW
Even those of us autistic people who identify as low-empathy have more empathy than this. Low-empathy does not mean immoral and cruel. Are autistic folks unempathetic, or do you, society, have an underdeveloped sense of reciprocity and justice?
A Mismatch of Salience | Pavilion Publishing and Media
Autism, Society, and Empathy
I’m also autistic. And public perceptions dictate that autistic and empathetic shouldn’t go together.
The truth, unsurprisingly, is that you can be empathetic (even highly so) and autistic. You can be extroverted and autistic. You can be outgoing and autistic. You can be a people person and autistic. Of course there are autistic folks who are introverted as well, but as the saying goes, “If you met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” Ascribing generalizations to a diverse group of people only serves to harm us.
According to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), “The idea that autistic people lack empathy is a damaging stereotype that isn’t supported by research. Self-advocates have consistently said that we have different communication styles from others, not a lack of empathy.”
Physicians assumed I couldn’t be autistic and also as emotionally available as I am, and they often misunderstood traits of autism — special interests, oversensitivity to lights and sound, autistic meltdowns and shutdowns — as signs of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
At the same time, my different communication styles, coupled with my pronounced empathy, made it harder for me to figure out my place in the world.
What It Means To Be Highly Empathetic, And Autistic
Historically, there has been much debate about the extent to which autistic individuals experience empathy. I am using the phrase “autistic individuals” rather than “individuals with autism,” per the recommendation from the Autism Self-Advocacy Network. Recent studies indicate that while autistics may experience and demonstrate empathy in different ways from neurotypicals, they do indeed experience it, sometimes to intense degrees. The debate is well summarized here.
Strategies for Neurotypical People to Develop Empathy for Autistic People | The Enthusiastic Life
Some excellent work has been done on empathy and autism. Damian Milton‘s ideas on The Double Empathy Problem are fascinating; recognising that it is as difficult for non-autistics to empathise with autistics, as it is for autistics to empathise with non-autistics.
It is finally being understood that many autistics don’t lack empathy, some may have more empathy than average, it’s just not shown in a non-autistic way. Autism doesn’t mean not feeling things deeply. It doesn’t mean not caring about others. We are not less human or less loving, we just show it in different ways.
The more time I spend on this Earth, the more I realise that true empathy needs an excellent imagination to go with it.
Growing up, people did not empathise with my sensory issues, because they could not imagine someone else feeling something they did not.
There have been times when friends have been blasé about something I’m hurt by, only to apologise later on in life when they have finally experienced the same, and can now understand my feelings. They were not able to imagine how it felt without direct experience.
There is a persistent stereotype that people with autism are individuals who lack empathy and cannot understand emotion. It’s true that many people with autism don’t show emotion in ways that people without the condition would recognize.
But the notion that people with autism generally lack empathy and cannot recognize feelings is wrong. Holding such a view can distort our perception of these individuals and possibly delay effective treatments.
Empathy, Imagination and Autism – Autism and expectations
Many of these individuals said they experience typical, or even excessive, empathy at times. One of our volunteers, for example, described in detail his intense empathic reaction to his sister’s distress at a family funeral.
People with alexithymia may still care about others’ feelings, however. The inability to recognize and understand anger might make it difficult to respond empathically to anger specifically. But alexithymic individuals know that anger is a negative state and are affected by others being in this state. In fact, in a separate test we conducted last year, people with alexithymia showed more distress in response to witnessing others’ pain than did individuals without alexithymia.
People with Autism Can Read Emotions, Feel Empathy – Scientific American and People with autism can read emotions, feel empathy | Spectrum | Autism Research News
These preliminary data found that while individuals with AS seem to have impairments in inferring others’ mental states (cognitive empathy), they are as empathically concerned for others (emotional empathy) as control subjects.
Differentiating Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Individuals with Asperger Syndrome | Max Planck Institute for Human Development
One strength of NeuroTribes is the respect Silberman shows to those with firsthand knowledge of what it means to be autistic, a perspective that sometimes surprises. In scientific circles, for example, autistic people are often said to lack empathy, to be “mind-blind.” The idea is now an old one. Researchers can calculate an “empathy quotient” by asking questions like, “I prefer animals to humans,” and “I find it difficult to judge if something is rude.” Other data come from experiments on how people make sense of faces. Autistic people tend to avoid looking at eyes and, presented with isolated images of eyes, have trouble imagining what the depicted person might be feeling. This perspective-taking is referred to as cognitive empathy, or theory of mind, and is distinct from the ability to feel what another feels. In a passage about autism-activist Jim Sinclair, Silberman offers a subtle, humane challenge to the conventional wisdom of researchers. Sinclair is hurt by the description of autism he reads in a pamphlet. “I didn’t consider myself to be someone who didn’t have empathy,” Sinclair says. He wasn’t someone who “lacked the ability to form emotional bonds, and wasn’t interested in relating to others.” As Sinclair describes watching a documentary about another man with autism, there is a jarring incongruity between the scientists’ interpretation of the man’s behavior and Sinclair’s nuanced insights. Where a researcher claims the subject is oblivious, Sinclair sees a familiar struggle to communicate.
If empathy is the ability to inhabit another’s mind, Sinclair’s anecdote suggests that estimates of empathy should be calibrated for just how far one must travel to do so. NeuroTribes amasses a disturbing number of statements by autism researchers who seem unable to make the trip themselves. One clinician describes autism as a terminal illness and autistic children as dead souls. Others consider them “shells” or “husks.” The most unnerving revelation occurs when Silberman profiles Ivar Lovaas, the developer of a common therapy known as Applied Behavior Analysis. In a 1974 interview, Lovaas says that autistic children “are not people in the psychological sense.” He combats an autistic child’s self-injurious behavior by striking her, and his therapy rooms deliver corrective shocks through gridded floors. Spoons of sherbet serve as rewards—a method that seems less sweet when Lovaas reports that “it is a pleasure to work with a child who is on mild food deprivation.” Today’s behavioral therapies tend toward Lovaas-lite, an exacting but benign regimen of small treats, but just last year the Food and Drug Administration held a panel to discuss the use of electrical shock to modify self-injuring and aggressive behavior among autistic patients. Although representatives of a Massachusetts clinic argued it was a necessary treatment of last resort, the panel recommended banning the apparatus used in the procedure.
Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes and the History of Autism – The Atlantic
“From the time I was little, I wanted to put a stop to violence of any kind, and I have carried that passion with me to all of my work now against state-sponsored violence against multiply marginalized folks.
“Knowing that injustice or violence exist anywhere is deeply painful for me, whether it directly targets me or not, and I believe that I must do anything within my capacity to work for a world where none of us have to be afraid anymore. If I were not autistic, I am certain I would not have the same drive as I do now.”
7 activists tell us the best thing about being autistic
However, a majority of participants reported experiencing hyper-empathy and extreme empathic responses. Seventy-eight percent of participants responded yes to the yes/no question about whether they had ever experienced hyper-empathy or extreme levels of empathy. This also came through clearly in the qualitative comments. Participants who reported experiencing a lack of empathy might have referred to understanding thoughts and feelings (i.e., cognitive empathy), whereas those who reported a surfeit of empathy were more typically speaking of emotional resonance or affective empathy.
For example, “I have experienced overwhelming empathy most of my life”; “Some people on the spectrum are incredibly empathetic, almost to a fault”; “I absorb other people’s emotions, and I almost know how people are feeling before they are aware of it themselves.”
One participant framed her empathy in positive terms (“I consider empathy my superpower”), whereas most used relatively negative language. Many talked about feeling overwhelmed (“It is like a huge wave of emotion that sweeps me off my feet”; “It is emotionally overpowering”; “I often feel overwhelmed with anger/grief/happiness on behalf of other people”) and experiencing an emotional response that is so powerful and uncontrollable that it causes distress (“[It is a] deep sad feeling”; “It feels crushing”; “It is overwhelming, makes me feel anxious”).
Often, this sense of distress was somatized as participants described it in terms of pain or other physical manifestation (“I feel nauseous”; “I feel empathy so much that it’s painful”; “I feel physical pain in my body”; “I feel a horrible sensation in my body like my innards are being twisted”). Participants also reported negative consequences of this distress (“It is all encompassing and can be debilitating”; “I get a surging emotion from deep inside that renders speech difficult”; “It makes my knees feel as if they are about to buckle”), most commonly in terms of a withdrawal response (“Sometimes I get overwhelmed and shut down”; “[I] find it hard to deal with, which causes me to shutdown”).
This “shutting down” is a functional (avoidant) coping response to an aversive emotional state, but one participant reported a more long-term and adaptive coping journey: “With anti-depressants and years of therapy I now can cope with most of my empathy.”
This study aimed at exploring both autistic experiences of empathy and the response of autistic people to the empathy deficit narrative using qualitative analysis. The main finding is that the autistic experience of empathy is complex. In contrast to a simple deficit narrative, most participants rejected the idea that autistic people lacked empathy, and many reported experiences of hyper-empathy. In total, seventy eight percent of participants indicated having experienced hyper-empathy (yes/no question) and this was reflected across many of the qualitative comments.
This finding may align with quantitative findings that autistic people have, on average, a heightened affective empathic response relative to non-autistic people. Experiences of hyper-empathy are common anecdotally among the autism community, and have been picked up tangentially across the academic literature. As yet, however, there has been limited theoretical and empirical work looking at this as a specific phenomenon worthy of study in its own right.
In other words, when people with autism don’t look others in the eye, it doesn’t mean they don’t care, said Hadjikhani.
Study: Overstimulation, not indifference, makes eye contact hard for people with autism
He replies by noting a particularly satisfying experiment he conducted in 2010, that proved, with brain scanning (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is the full term, fMRI), that you can be diagnosed with autism but still show empathy. Equally and just as importantly, the experiment showed that non-autistics may lack empathy.
The condition that describes this lack of empathy is called alexithymia, and affects roughly 8% of the general population, says Bird. Autism affects 1% of the population. ‘Alexithymia and autism are completely independent of each other,’ he says, ‘…yet even now we are told time and again that autistic people lack empathy. Of course some do, but many do not, and this is really important because it has large consequences for how they are treated by society and whether, for a practical example, they can volunteer their time or find work.’
‘Ask anyone in the field,’ says Bird, ‘what characterizes autism, and they’ll say a lack of empathy. An autistic person can’t recognize emotions. Sometimes they can’t engage in moral reasoning. We think that’s completely wrong. Completely inaccurate.’
His broader message to the community is that ‘individuals with autism are not unempathic, psychopathic monsters. This is really important. We can’t be wrong about that one. …I have heard so many stories about people who simply cannot get jobs or even volunteer their time because of this damaging myth, which causes additional frustration for the parents of autistic individuals. Individuals with alexithymia are also not psychopaths of course, although they may struggle to understand emotions in a typical way.’
Message of hope for people with autism | Oxford Today
This plays into the lie that autistic people lack empathy. A myth that is increasingly being debunked.
But You Haven’t Seen it Yet: Why Critiquing Marketing of Future Portrayals of Disability is Important | crippledscholar
The ‘double empathy problem’ refers to the mutual incomprehension that occurs between people of different dispositional outlooks and personal conceptual understandings when attempts are made to communicate meaning.
In a sense it is a ‘double problem’ as both people experience it, and so it is not a singular problem located in any one person.
The ’empathy’ problem being a ‘two-way street’ has been mentioned by both ‘autistic writers’ (Sinclair, 1993) and non-autistic writers alike (Hacking, 2009)
From finding a voice to being understood: exploring the double empathy problem
Some autistic/similar people say they have higher empathy then neurotypical people, some lower, some say no difference. #autchat
Today we’ll talk about all types of empathy experiences. #autchat
Q1: What is the experience of empathy like for you? Feelings, thoughts, sensations? #autchat
Q2: Are there situations where you try to increase your empathy? Where you try to lower it? If so, what do you do? #autchat
Q3: Do you think your life would be different if your experience of empathy were different? How so? #autchat
Q4: Do you think your experiences of empathy are different in degree from neurotypical people? In type? #autchat
Experience of empathy – autchat
Is “normal back-and-forth communication” in short snippets of superficial information all that desirable? Or would it be more helpful if the conversationalists dove into greater detail from time to time?
Depathologizing Asperger’s / autism ~ In a way, neurotypical people might meet the criteria, too – the silent wave
Toward a Behavior of Reciprocity
Theory of mind is declared the native domain of neurotypicals; a kind of transcendent ability that is regarded the basis for communication and, in more inflated estimations, is celebrated as the very thing that defines us as human. A lack of theory of mind, or “mind-blindness”, on the other hand, is attributed to autistics as a kind of deficit. This supposed deficit is expressed as a lack of empathy on the part of autistics, sometimes carefully parsed as a lack of cognitive empathy (the ability to know what another person is thinking/feeling), but far too often, sloppily conflated with a lack of affective empathy (the ability to feel compassion for another person).
And this is where the neurotypical belief in theory of mind becomes a liability. Not just a liability – a disability.
A belief in theory of mind makes it unnecessary for neurotypicals to engage in real perspective-taking, since they are able, instead, to fall back on projection. Differences that they discover in autistic thinking are dismissed as pathology, not as a failure in the neurotypical’s supposed skill in theory of mind or perspective-taking.
The belief in a theory of mind is a disability – Semiotic Spectrumite