Lack of emotional comprehension and empathy.

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I lack affective empathy. Not because I think they're being silly or anything, I just don't care.

I can feel certain emotions, such as fear, anger and sad. I don't know how intense they are compared to others though. That's very hard to judge. I don't feel things like love or happy. Even though we may not sense our emotional self, it does still exist. Our emotions are displayed in our behaviour. Because we are distant from our emotions, sometimes it's like being given a blank page and being asked to read it. It becomes very confusing. Also, very often when we try to use them it usually ends up bad. Because they are so distant, we often just get into the habit of ignoring that whole side of things.

I have two sons that were very emotionally distant (ADHD and AS). When they felt bad, not only did they not know why they felt bad, but they did not even know that they felt bad. It would take about three days from the event for it to become obvious in their behaviour. I basically had to do their emotional work for them. Their younger sister was the opposite (ADHD). She was swimming in her emotions. They pushed her from pillar to post. I once asked the boys “You can't make friends, your sister can't not make friends. Who's got the bigger problem.” They both said “She does.”

Even though we may not sense our emotional selves, it does still exist and influence us. It is important to learn it in order to tent to it. Even though events may happen that we don't respond to, it often is a blessing to not experience them, but they can still cause problems later. Such as anxiety.

As for empathy. I think that empathy is very misunderstood. Empathy is a mode of function. The magical, gooey, fluffing sort of thing that just makes everything better, I think is an extreme interpretation of it. For an NT to be good at that they would have to be very sensitive, have a compassionate nature, and few issues of their own. Most don't fit that category. Empathy is how NTs interpret and communicate. They sense all the little indicators and try and pattern match it through their own data bank. They then assume the closest match as what that means, compared against themselves. Empathy is not actually a very good means of identifying and communicating, but accuracy is not a high priority for NTs. For example, in women talk “That dress really accentuates your figure” can mean “You look good in that” or “You're a fat cow.” The woman that offered the compliment may have legitimately meant it. But if the woman receiving it herself practices covert insults, when she runs it through her pattern matching process she matches it with “She called me fat.” It doesn't matter what the truth is, she's a b***h because I think she is, and your either on my side or her's. Because we don't so much use this mode of function, even genuine empathy often appears to us as competition, condescension or passive aggression. Empathy is a mode of function. Empathy does not mean nice.

While AS people may not use this mode of functioning so much, they are definitely capable of sympathy and compassion.

I am diagnosed with Asperger's and have troubles with emotional comprehension and empathy.
So now what? What am I? Schizoid? Schizotypal? Antisocial? Label me, people!
Just joking. It doesn't matter how much people try to deny it, Asperger's causes me issues with emotional stuff in general. It might not to other people, but to me it does. We're all different.

From what I can tell everyone is different.

Some aspies are very emotional and some are not. Some are emotional about certain things, some aren't at all.

I have an incredibly strong sense of empathy, but just because I can logically explain to myself why an individual may feel the way they do, it doesn't mean I understand it on an emotional level.

There is a constant battle in me that I would consider to be like Emotion Versus Logic.

I can logically explain to myself anything, make myself understand what is going on, but my emotions don't click with it very good.

I scare myself most of the time because of how fake I am.

Example just the other day one of my friends' mom came over and started talking to me about her problems. Honestly I hate when she comes over because she never stops complaining to me about things.
She LOVES me, but egh. It's because I make myself easy to talk to, good listener, comfort her, what not.
Logically I can explain to myself, "she's depressed, lonely, needs someone to talk to, make her feel better" but as far as feelings good I don't feel anything about it on an emotional level. I just feel annoyed and irritated when she comes because I just want to go and do whatever it was I was doing and not have to sit there and listen to her, but I do anyway because I understand that that would be considered rude and that is not how I want to be perceived in the world.

You see those posts because most people are not clear on what the word EMPATHY means. They think it means the same thing as SYMPATHY and that is incorrect.

Empathy is not the ability to feel emotion. Empathy is the ability to recognize the emotional states of others by observing nonverbal signals and to exhibit the appropriate response.

The ability to identify with and resonate with another person's emotional state is Sympathy.

If you walk into a room and see someone standing and staring out a window, can you immediately discern from their appearance and behavior whether they are:

A) Watching the kids walk home from school
B) Feeling sad and alone
C) Trying to recall where they left their keys
D) Remembering a joke they heard on TV last night

If your answer is "Probably, yes," then your Empathy skills are excellent. If your answer is "Not unless they tell me," that's typically Aspergian.

Once I am aware of their emotional state, even if I know what the proper response ought to be, I often find myself unable to do it. For instance, even if I'm certain someone needs a hug, I may find it so awkward that I can't make the moment work naturally, so I do nothing - but it isn't because I don't care. It's because empathy skills don't come naturally to me.

The truth is though, unless people tell me what's on their minds (or burst into tears), I'm generally oblivious to what they're thinking or feeling.

I find that I can irritate my family by my most frequent questions: "what are you thinking?" and "how are you feeling?"

But if I don't ask, I don't know--and things can be worse. Better to slightly annoy with these questions than assume everything is fine and wander through their lives like a bull in a china shop.

For what it's worth, what you experience was my understanding of what lack of empathy was. Although I'm not sure the true definition of empathy is actually that separate from sympathy, it's definitely far more useful and telling to separate sympathy from empathy the way Willard defines them. I suggest you define them the way he does, and say that you lack sympathy because you yourself lack emotions.




I think I'm in a better position to understand you than most people who've replied. I have been depressed for 10+ years, (I think because of my celiac disease) and at some point during it the depression became very apathetic. What you say here is how I felt. My emotions were very muted. Furthemore, I think I have actually always had issues 'reliving' emotional experiences. However, I differ greatly from you in that I have experienced, for most of my life, what I think are regular strength emotions. Because of this, I have names for the emotions I felt, and I will remember that I experienced that emotion for some specific event, but the emotion itself will be long gone and I can't drudge it up. Smells can bring about an emotional memory still, although that doesn't happen very often. Oddly (well, not that odd, I know why this is the case, the olfactory bulb isn't as connected to the rest of the cortex as all your other sensory systems) I can feel emotions as a memory then, but not necessarily an event.




I find this all very upsetting actually. An existence without emotions is one of the saddest things I can conceive. I've experienced both sides, the regular emotion side, and what you seem to experience everyday, and I would, gosh, do something drastic like give up my limbs if I knew that would somehow mean I'd always be an emotional person. But the way it is, (and I know your mindset), there's no reason for you to be upset by it. I suppose that's a blessing.
I suppose the best analogy would be if you never had one of your perceptions, sight or hearing or something, and you didn't know what you were missing and everyone else were walking around saying things like 'that looks so awesome!'. Except that emotions aren't a perception, so it's not even that good of an analogy. Emotions/feelings are their own, unique category of thing. They are what I live for. I'm a little odd in that I like lots of negative ones too. I guess that's what's called being a masochist. It's when you get a positive and negative response to something.

Do you fear death? What keeps you living? Do you want to live? If you want to live, you at least have a concept of emotions I think, even if only a very basic one. Importantly it could be one that you can draw on at any given point in time as your existence is in the here and now, not a memory. Being apathetic I often contemplated suicide because life became pointless to me. I also contemplated suicide when I was constantly in pain too. I attempted suicide in both emotional states too I should say.

Physical pain is tied to emotional pain too. If you want to know if you respond emotionally to pain, get someone to hurt you unknowingly, at some unknown point when you're not expecting it. Then purposefully set up a situation where you will be able to anticipate pain, like you'll see that same person hurt you and you'll know what they're going to do. You should feel more pain from the 2nd situation if you have emotional reactions to pain.

I find it odd that you are diagnosed as being bi-polar when you claim you have very weak emotions. Bi-polar people are supposed to have emotional extremes, not emotional un-extremes.

I seriously thought you meant literally, they're skin was thick and I was about to comment that I have the most sensitive skin.. LOL

Until I looked it up to make sure..


Yup.

There are different kinds of people with A.S. Some are hypersensitive to touch; others hyposensitive. The same with feelings and with empathy. I'm an Aspie of the type who is hypersensitive and prone to emotional overload and dissociative shut downs. I feel others' pain so acutely that I can hardly bear it at times. As for my own feelings, I have generalized anxiety disorder and am ruled by my emotions.

Am I afraid of death? Not really because it's inevitable. I don't want to die now though. I do have things I want to do while I'm alive. Like I explained I do have some emotions, I'm just unsure if I feel them the way most people describe. I can laugh at jokes, I can get angry if something angers me, but soon as it's done, I seem to forget about it. What other people describe as more complex emotions I have a lot of difficulty understanding them or why people feel them.

I have questioned my bipolar dx as well but I can see why I was diagnosed. I do have the symptoms of switches in energy levels. What psychiatrists have told me is depressive episodes is nothing like what I hear other people describe, I actually cannot relate to other peoples depressive symptoms at all. I do go though fazes where I will sleep all day and have no motivation though but I wont be sad. I seem to have no problem with getting angry either but I get over it very quickly. There is no preexisting diagnostic label that really fits me.

It's not upsetting to me at all to be this way. I actually wouldn't want to be like other people. The emotional reactions I observe in other people seem ridiculous to me and I do not understand why they act the way they do. I cannot comprehend why someone would want to feel anything bad either. It seems a lot of people say they're unemotional when they're actually depressed. I'm not even sure if it's possible to have no emotions at all without being brain dead because even things like hunger and movement may have a basic emotional desire.

me too.

"It seems a lot of people say they're unemotional when they're actually depressed."

Those 2 things aren't mutually exclusive. Depression has many different forms, even within one individual. Doesn't help that depression medication and other mood altering drugs are well-known to create apathy.

A depressed unemotional person will know that they've felt more emotional before, and that can affect how they think or see things. Perhaps this is why you can't relate? That aspect of it, when the person's thinking about things, will make their experience vastly different from what you're like. But if the person's just living from one moment to the next, not bothering to review past experiences and somehow altering their expectations about the future, I see no reason why what they experience, in those moments, would be different from you experience as standard, at least not from what you've described.

It's no coincidence that common advice given to a depressed individual is to live within the moment. It makes everything matter less.

That said, are you on bipolar medication? It will likely make you even less emotional.

You haven't mentioned mania at all, the up part of being bi-polar. How is that characterized for you?

Funny thing is, I am on meds, and while I hear people saying that they made them like a zombie, they have had an opposite effect on me. They have actually made me experience emotion more. I think it may be because they treat negative symptoms such as flattened emotions. When I've been off them I don't notice much until I reflect on how I acted but I have been described as being zombie like and I am generally mean and uncaring. On meds I am friendlier and seem to have fun. They have also helped me think more clearly. I would say my schizoaffective disorder is 90% gone with them.
On why I was diagnosed bipolar, it probably had to do with my behavior which has gotten me in quite a bit of legal trouble in the past. I can describe a few things, a lot of it has to do with reckless behavior. I have had multiple accidents and have been in the hospital for many things, not on purpose but from doing impulsive things for no reason. I've also been arrested several times and done things like spend all my rent money on scratch tickets. There have been times I have been paranoid and flipped out over stupid things I suspected. Often it has been beneficial too when I stay up hyper cleaning the house or getting a bunch of work done. I'm often told my plans are grandiose but it seems to me like most people are pessistimic. I do plan to run for president in 2020 because even though I don't know much about politics I think I can do better than Bush or Obama. I have time machine plans and understand the true workings of the universe and will be successful in my music career. I'm not going to get into everything I've done because I realize most people think I'm full of crap so I keep most my ideas and adventures to myself.
I often do not understand why some things that seem like normal behavior to me is considered symptoms of disorders by psychiatry. I do not seem to notice most peoples anomalies. Most my friends have some sort of diagnosis and I don't notice at all except in people who are severely effected to where you cannot have a conversation with them. I know the education of psychology but it seems like everything is considered abnormal.

I guess I should have thought about your name more when you posted, about you having schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia itself. All the knowledge I have about that is from textbooks, I've never known someone (at least someone who divulged it) who's been on that spectrum. I gather your meds are for that then, and from what I remember about learning about it, yeah, it makes total sense that you'd be more emotional if they helped negative symptoms. I understand the bipolar diagnosis now too.

Have you read about a likely connection between schizophrenia and celiac disease/gluten intolerance ? Here's a good summary article about it.http://bioinformatics.pbf.hr/cms/images ... celiac.pdf

Your aspirations do seem a little crazy to me too, not going to lie.
As for even the possibility of time travel, my view is this: if it were possible to travel backwards in time at least, we, as a society, would already know about it. Given that, forward time travel seems less likely also, although if we could truly put people in stasis and then bring them back to life, that's essentially time travel right there.

Just because you're abnormal, doesn't mean that everything about being abnormal has to be negative.

"I have time machine plans and understand the true workings of the universe."

Wouldn't it have been funny to have lived in 1904 and to have heard a young Einstein say this? There does seem to be a fine line between delusion and genius. I've crossed over from genius into delusion a number of times in my life.

But back to the topic:

I think that if a person is suffering from profound personal psychological duress (AS, depression, personality disorder) it would be natural for that person to do all she could to shut out others' emotional input as a matter of survival.

Time travel works by creating alternate realities. When you go back the timeline you came from remains unaffected so nobody would know.
About celiac and gluten, I've heard those are related to autism as well. I seem to have a healthy digestive system though.
I don't think anything's negative about being abnormal. I think the hardest thing for me is life for me is like being a visiting alien. I can get along with the humans fine but I don't work with them well. The more I attempt to conform the less I can function, so I do my own thing in life. I wouldn't want to live like everyone else does anyways. It seems like they all do the same boring things.