Blog post comparing Aspergers and Psychopathy

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I have not read the post because I don't want to spend the next few days crying and feeling miserable. Again. People like that are not worth my time.

It seems to me that the person who wrote this article got hurt in a relationship with someone with AS which is sad and I'm sorry that happened to her. Abuse is abuse as far as I'm concerned and just as with any other group of people, people on the spectrum or NT's can be both good and bad. I don't know what really happened in her relationship so I'm not going to judge. It could be that the person with AS was fine and the person who wrote the article had some issues. Or it could be that the person with AS was abusive and the lady was fine. Or it could be that both people in the relationship had some responsibility for what happened. I'm sad she had a bad time but then she seems to go to assume that all people on the spectrum are like that person (and a friend she had with AS at one time too). So with a sample size of two she is demonising what current statistics say is 148 million people worldwide with AS. I think this kind of hatred comes from the same root as other kinds of prejudice and says more about the person writing the article than about people with AS.

On top of that I have studied empathy in autistic people, psychopaths and NT people and the current scientific literature in this field. Current understanding is that there are two types of empathy in humans and they work in two seperate neural pathways. (E.g. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/132/3/617)





One is called cognitive empathy and is to do with the theory of the mind. It is about being able to guess accurately what someone else is feeling and know what is going on, approximately, in their mind. Autistic people do do badly at this generally speaking. We frequently guess wrongly and fail to pick up visual body language cues to someone's feelings. This means that if someone hints that they are feeling sad or tired or happy I will not get it. I can't do the subtle communication stuff which regular folk take for granted.

The other type of empathy humans have is emotional empathy. This is the feeling we have inside for others when we know what they are feeling. According to most of the current research autistic people have at least the same and frequently more emotional empathy than regular folk. So when we do get what's going on for another person (or animal or plant) we are very understanding and feel for them deeply.

It's interesting that the article's author, Ms Birch, draws parallel between psychopaths and people with AS because these two groups are actually opposites with respect to the two types of empathy. A psychopath is a master at cognitive empathy and can know what you are feeling and use it to his advantage, to manipulate and get exactly what he or she wants. They are not bothered by hurting people because they don't feel any emotional empathy - the part of the psychopath brain which deals with this (medial prefrontal cortex I think) is damaged or not developed.

On the other hand people on the Autistic Spectrum frequently have poor cognitive empathy and cannot guess what people are feeling, we cannot manupulate or manage complex social interactions well. However, once we understand, usually through direct verbal communication or even writing, what some else is feeling we feel more empathy than NT's.

I think the difficulty with NT / AS relationships is that, in a relationship like that both people need to find ways of communicating their feelings and giving to each other what each person needs. It is the communication of emotion which is frequently difficult for people with AS. What I've found helps most for this is to ask for the NT person to be direct about their feelings and needs 'I'm feeling really sad' will bring online my AS empathy and then I can comfort them and listen to their troubles. Walking around with a particular facial look, or sighing or other any non-direct communication will not work because those things are context sensitive and have many different meanings depending on the context and so I can never know what is meant. It is even more difficult I think for those couples who have one partner with AS when that person is undiagnosed. At least when you know about it both partners can work together to make their communication work but if it's not known about then things can he very hard I think, for both people.

Wow, what a hate-filled site they have there. There's even comments about this site:

"They do not live on the same Earth we do. Wrong Planet is the perfect name for their website. For people supposedly so "smart" they truly are just plain stupid."

Dammit. I can't fix the quote tags now, that bloody CAPTCHA!

I feel sorry for her. It does sound like the guy was trying his best and I am sorry she was hurt he didn't come out sooner and that she was traumatized because she felt deceived. I am not offended if she doesn't want to date someone with it. Now she and other women on ASPartners think anyone is aspie if they disagree with them about this. I understand why someone wouldn't want to date someone with AS. It's about compatibility and everyone wants something and if you can't provide it for them, it's a deal breaker. I am probably in the minority for them when I say this. But I get it, everyone has their own view on what empathy is. For Megan in the comments, she doesn't see it as empathy if you need to have it explained to you about their point of view even though she doesn't think it's a bad thing.

I never gave my husband flowers either or either of my ex boyfriends. I never saw the point in it and I just thought it was something people chose to do because their partner likes flowers. My husband got me flowers once and all I said was "Put them in the vase" and he never got me flowers again, instead he only got me candy bars because he knows it's what I like and I really show my interest for it. I didn't realize then what the flowers were meant for, I only thought he just bought them because they were pretty and he just wanted some. I am sure this behavior might have hurt an NT. But the logical thing was putting them in the vase because that is what my mother always did when she got flowers and picked them from her garden. But I can't recall my dad buying any flowers for my mother when I was a child. I had only seen it in movies so I thought it was a TV thing. But I guess this lack of experience might be the real reason than AS. Sometimes people are ignorant of something not because of a social issue but because of lack of experience and lack of exposure to it. And it's a possibility I might not remember him doing it because I didn't understand and I only thought it was just something he was doing because he liked them.

Yeah.

I had been wondering if maybe she had been in a genuinely abusive relationship with someone with A.S. and was projecting that onto every other A.S. person wrongly, yes, but in a way that I could see as mistaken or misguided.

Then I read her account of her bf from AS Partners, and wow - the guy sounded really awkward, and sounds like they didn't see eye to eye on things, but from that to create a rather intensive SECOND website called Heartless Aspergers from that experience...Holy crap.

You know, I think it calls into question her experience with psychopaths too. Because based on her AS trashing, it seems like her whole mode of dealing with bad relationships is to trash people. Obsessively. Maybe she did date a psychopath. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she has to have labels to judge people for, just to PROVE that they were the ones at fault after a relationship. It's not enough to have personal issues with her ex, she has to make something about them intrinsically and provably wrong - and that means demonizing the entire concept of AS. Because it means she can prove her ex was the bad guy.

In any case, seeing her experience with her AS boyfriend makes me realize that her website and articles are not merely ignorant, but genuinely malicious.

Just to let you know, I was going to let this thread die but I've just seen on the original blog post that started this thread that the author claims to have contacted Alex to get this thread removed. Personal attacks, seriously? So, the observation that she doesn't seem to understand how a stigma affects any group of people according to what she wrote in her blog post and that her blog actually creates and/or propagates a stigma towards AS people is not a criticism of her article but a personal attack on her? I'm sorry but a lot of the posts that I made in this thread was actually a direct criticism of what was written, even quoting directly from the article, and the forum rules of WP do not prohibit us from having opinions about something else written on the internet, whether offensive or not. At least as far as I'm aware.

Here are a bunch of things in the article that made it's credibility take a significant drop.

When she quoted the thing about how any of us who are offended by the article need to "go back to tracking weather statistics".

When she called meltdowns "adult tantrums" as if we we were doing it for attention when in reality that's the last thing we want.

When she claims that we try to act like neurotipicals because we are trying to be manipulative and we don't invest any emotion into anything, ignoring the fact that most of us have to do it because we were/are bullied for being different and we are afraid of being judged for being who we are. [sarcasm]Thanks a lot article, you are really helping with that.[/sarcasm]

When she assumes that we are incapable of being anything but mind blind. I am aware that everyone else has their own emotions and thoughts. Granted I developed this awareness later in life then most people do, but it's there now.

When she claims that we don't care about other people's suffering. I care, it's just that I have a hard time figuring out when it's happening and when I do I often don't know how to respond to it properly.

And especially when she assumed that all aspies are the same.

If she does contact Alex it will be another opportunity for her to learn how misguided her smear campaign is. Manipulation, hot air and trying to control others are traits that tend to occur together, and any 'threats' need to be seen through that lens.