Feeling for and feeling with

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I hear that.

i have not very many feelings at all about anything.
i have only simple feelings like happy and sad and annoyed and i always forget the 4th one.

i always thought it was due to my AS that i have very few feelings, but after being on this site for a while, i realized that many people here with AS have lots of feelings.

there maybe another type of neural damage or genetic insufficiency that results in my poverty of feelings. so i am not talking as a representative of AS when i say what i am going to say. also, i am only talking about people and NOT animals in what i will say,

i do not seem to have sympathy or empathy. to me they mean almost the same thing.
"sympathy" is sharing other's feelings and "empathy" is entering into their feelings.
i can not discern much difference in the definition (except for maybe the intensity).
that does not mean i do not care about anyone.

i was not "moved" by the earthquake (no pun intended) in haiti. i see the TV reports constantly and i have a hard time paying attention to them. i was playing a game when i first saw the story break, and i tried to watch, but when i saw that there was not going to be a tsunami, i was distracted back into the game again.
all i saw was people wailing in the streets, and i see so much of that and i am not very attuned to it. i see people wailing in iraq after suicide bombers, and people in bangladesh crying frantically after flood devastation etc etc.
i do not seem to focus on the feeling that the crying person is having. i just see them crying and that is that.
this sounds very harsh and i know i will be criticized but i can not tell whether the crying people are exaggerating because they know they are being filmed. i can not tell if they are angry or sad as those 2 feelings look alike when i see them in other people.

i do sometimes try to imagine myself in their situation and i wonder what i would feel.
i have a hard time imagining being in their situation, so i usually am unsuccessful in calculating what they feel.

if i could do something to stop them crying i would. but "positive counseling" is something i am not able to do.
if someone who has no money asks me for $2 to buy some food however, i will give them $20 because i feel sorry for them.
i can vaguely imagine what it would be like to be broke and with no home and no support. sometimes i feel undeserved of my comfort because i know i am not a better person than the beggar. how could i refuse to give some of my undeserved luck to someone who was unlucky in their life's course.
but if the begging person starts to tell me about how he came to be that way, or how he feels about it, i am not interested and i continue on my way.
it is of no use for me to try to understand what he is feeling because i am incapable of doing so, and even if he spent the whole $20 on calories to have the energy to describe it for me, it would be a waste of his time and a waste of the energy i gave him.

an example of how i can not help is when my mother died (2003) and my father suddenly became old and terribly depressed. he was 84 and still rode horses and managed all his properties, and when my mother died, he became feeble and lost his mind in depression. i was very disturbed to see my father that way.
my sisters all said things to him like "dad...we're all grieving with you. you're not alone...ok?"
those words of solace did not make my father feel any better at all. i moved in with him for a few months to care for him because my sisters all live hundreds of miles away and had to go home.
at night he would get drunk and cry and even though i did not know what he was feeling, i very much did not want him to feel that way.

he used to say
dad: jeez mark. it's hard to believe she's gone
me: she does not even know she is gone (she died during a general anesthetic in a low risk operation)
dad: but i bloody well know it!
me: and so do i, but one day neither of us will know it when we die as well.
dad: i hope that's bloody soon for me!

so i do care, but i can not hug a person and let them feel that i feel like them because i do not feel anything except dissatisfaction at their state.

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when 9/11 happened, i woke up at i think about 2am and saw live coverage on my TV that was still on. i thought "yawn...hmmmm....this is too realistic to be a movie trailer.....errrr....what in f*cks name is happening?!?!?" and i sat up alert.
then when i saw the world trade centers go down i could not believe it.
i thought "what grotesque destruction!" as i saw the 110 storey towers collapse.
at that time i never even conceived of people inside the towers, and i was tired and after about an hour i thought "well my flight simulator scenery is now out of date" and i went back to sleep.

the next day at work (i worked in a suit in an office 9-5 then), they had a TV on and everyone was watching the coverage. at this point the editors had identified people in the footage that were jumping out of the windows to their death with arrows.
when i first saw the footage (when i woke up) without the arrows i thought it was falling debris.
the people in the office all collectively went "ooooohhhhh!! !!" as they watched the person plummeting to their death, and they looked away just before the person hit the ground. i did not look away and some people who did look away looked at my face instead to see how i responded to what they did not see, and they were very annoyed (i learned later that day) that i did not respond with any facial expression to what i saw.

i wondered whether it was true footage of people jumping out, so i got my stopwatch from my bag, and because they were replaying that scene so many times, i was able to click the watch at the point they jumped out and then click it again when they hit the ground and i was satisfied that it was what i expected.
i was demonized by the staff who noticed my lack of empathy.
but i did not personally know the falling people, or see their faces, or understand what they were thinking.

later on as i was going to sleep at home, i did put myself in the position of being faced with a choice of being burned to death from behind, or jumping, and i got very anxious and i realized that those falling people really were in that circumstance and i did feel very sorry for them. they experienced something that would kill my mind with panic and i wish it did not happen to them but it is over now.

sorry for the long post and i think many people will not identify but i do not think i have broken any rules.

I find that when I am around other people, even relatives, and see something that invokes any outpouring of emotion, I become immediately detached to the situation. It is not that I am incapable of feeling sympathy, it is that I am incapable of handling the emotions of those around me.

When I am alone, things can be a little different. I am able to feel empathy/sympathy for someone, but as mentioned in several posts, it is usually in situations of someone being victimized, because I can identify with that. Heck, I once actually teared up for the caveman in a Geico commercial because of the way he was being treated!

I still have trouble with my feelings, though. When I heard about the earthquake in Haiti, my first thought was, "at least there are fewer people the Earth has to take care of". It is callous, but I'm always fighting against logic when it comes to these things.

I've noticed that several people here seem to be emotionally detached from family, and I'm the same way. I always thought it was because I was a foster child for some time, but that may not be the case. Perhaps Asperger's plays a greater role in that than I thought.

I can feel (what I think is) empathy sometimes when I read an eloquent, powerful description of what someone is going through, or hear a good song about it. Through the words and/or music, I can place myself in their shoes.

This takes time, of course, and when someone is going through something right in front of me and isn't willing or able to talk about it, I don't do so well.

My main reaction to 9/11 was relief: I'd heard dire predictions about terrorists crop-dusting anthrax or making a bomb out of loose nuclear material or otherwise depopulating an entire city. When it turned out that their big move was to crash a couple of airplanes into office buildings, I was like "that's it?" This feeling intensified over the ensuing months as it became clear that the best thing terrorists could manage to do with anthrax was to mail it to individuals. Not that I wasn't worried that there was more to come, or that some of it might end up happening to me, but none of what actually happened struck me as the Shocking Disaster that I'd been expecting and dreading.

When Katrina hit, my thoughts ran along the lines of "natural selection at work". This was not at all affected by the fact that I grew up a couple of hours away from New Orleans.

Also, 9/11 also brought thoughts such as "Can you use ethernet cable to rappel down a building? There was bound to be tons of it behind the walls of the offices. Maybe skyscrapers should come with rope ladders on each floor. How well would a parachute work?"

This is a great thread, Aimless. I have enjoyed reading all of the posts, but because B9's post addresses many aspects of this subject in a way that is very similar to my own experience, I will respond to his/her comments. Sorry B9, haven't checked your profile to see if you are male or female.
Quoting B9

Since there is so much difference of opinion on the difference between sympathy and empathy, I started the thread with a definition to go by. It is the way I personally understand the difference and what my mother explained to me as a child. I checked the official definitions and surprise surprise it's not very clear. So taking the definition of sympathy as understanding someone's distress and empathy as physically feeling someone's distress along with them; I'd have to say sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I think the difference is whether I hear about it or whether I see it. If it's a matter of missing mirror neurons perhaps the fact that the information comes in through a different channel has something to do with it.

9/11/2001 was my 21st birthday, I was asleep in the seat of my car in my moms driveway, woke up thinking "huh, 21 feels just like 6 did", and noticed that what should have been slightly more surreal (seeing the tower on fire, and the second plane hit just as I walked in) than day to day life really didn't strike me as odd.

I would have tried the ethernet rappel thing if necessary, or attempted to slow my fall by dragging my fingertips down the windows while using my feet to control my aerodynamics as I slid, and hoped for the best, assuming I couldn't smash the window a floor down and get down there, a la Die Hard.

In all likelihood though, I simply wouldn't have been up in the building, there is no reason for me to go up there, as I would never pursue work like that, or go up that high without the intent to BASE jump anyways.


Did I have sympathy for the people? Yes. Empathy? No.

I didn't cry, it would feel weird to be upset about it.


Yet, I can't watch news reports about Alex the Parrot dying without crying.

Course, I have a history of catching odd events like that on the news the few times I watch it.

I vaguely recall Reagan being shot when I was just a wee baby and looked at the TV.

I watched every shuttle launch they put on TV from 83~86 til Challenger blew up in front of me and I thought to myself "what the hell, did they slap this thing together out of legos?", saw various random things live on the news, Pinatubo coverage, a couple of airshow accidents, plane crashes in the background of news coverages, and 9/11 was just another one of those oddly normal moments for me.


I do get to state honestly though that my 21st birthday was a national tragedy, which should be somewhat surreal, yet isn't.