Do you have empathy for yourself?

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It has taken me many years to be able to answers yes to that question.

I am curious as to how others with AS respond to this question.

If you answer is no, what do do think might help you be kind and loving to yourself?

If your answer is yes, what life's events and experiences do you feel have lead you to being kind and forgiving to yourself?

Finally, do you think that loving yourself (in that healthy integrated way) had enabled you to be more empathic to others?

Empathy is defined as the capacity to recognize feelings that are being experienced by another sentient being. It doesn't, then, seem like the term could apply to one's own self.

I do a lot of the time but can be hard on myself sometimes as well. I think its can be very helpful as it gives you confidence and also makes you more empathetic towards others.

i have empathy for myself. my mother was understanding of me generally, and i followed her example. as i grew up, i substituted my values for hers, but still owe her a debt of love.

I feel a lot of sympathy in most cases, but my ability to feel empathy for other people is limited. I feel empathy when someone is going through something I've been through. I don't feel empathy per se when someone goes through a tough divorce (allthough I feel a lot of sympathy), but I can feel empathy when someone is with an emotionally abusive spouse, fails an exam or is in a situation I've been in.

Empathy feels a lot like having a bad conscience, in my opinion.

I agree with redrobin on your use of the word empathy, but at the same time I can see what you mean with this thread.

My answer is that I am always quite critical of myself. I used to raise the bar really high for myself, so high that I failed to live up to my own expectations (there are some funny stories there I don't care to share right now).

My love for myself goes up and down, honestly. I am aware of the darker sides of my own personality. I can be cynical, I can be cruel, I can come across as very uncaring, and I sometimes look at myself and those traits, and find them very ugly. I try to be self-critical, but I tend to downplay my positive sides and accentuate my negative sides. I compare myself to others, and often think those others are better at this or that, and that can get me down.
People have said that I'm too harsh for myself.

On the other hand, I do love myself enough to always protect my own individual freedom, especially freedom of thought.

I don't think my love for myself has contributed to any empathic ability for others. I've done a lot of navelgazing, but I rarely moved outside of my own perspective.

To have empathy for one's own self would seem the same as recognizing if you're happy or sad. Sorry for being so aspie-literal but I think everyone would know if they were happy or sad or experiencing whatever emotions they have at the time, no? Can someone, for instance, not know if they're upset, befuddled, angry, ecstatic, scared or down in the dumps?

I have read, among other places here on WP, that there are people who can -in their mind- take 'distance' from themselves, and look at themselves as if they're another person on the outside.
Almost like those near-death experiences where people imagine that they're hovering above their own body, looking down on it.
The gist of it is that one views themselves on the MOST abstract of levels, divorced from both the physical body AND the physical mind, to the point where even emotions, which are an expression of chemical processes within that physical mind, are so concrete that one's mind can detach itself from them.

Some here on WP have described this distance as their physical body being a 'vehicle' that is driven by their mind, or even a 'pet on a leash' being led and fed by the abstract mind.

Am I making sense? I've had a lot of Dr. Pepper.

Nope, I'm not kind to myself. I'm pretty ruthless, uncaring and consistently "cracking the whip." I know I'd have no success in my life without it, so time marches on. I feel those who don't do this end up being pretty lazy and I cannot relate.

I guess I kind of do....... but at times I am hard on myself.

That's a hard question for me to answer...in the past, whenever I felt like I needed to be "punished," I would bite my hands, arms, rake my fingernails across my legs, face, and arms, hit my head against a wall/hard surface or pound my head with my fists. Sometimes I would even throw my entire body against a wall. The reason for this was, I thought I was a bad person and deserved to be punished. The more I punished myself, the less "bad" I would become, and the more "normal" I would become.

I still sometimes feel the urge to "punish" myself in these ways, and have to distract myself until they go away. I still fantasize about cutting all the fat off my arms, belly, and legs somehow so I won't be fat anymore.

I'm currently in therapy trying to get out of that mindset of hating myself, but I'm not completely "there" yet. I'm still very critical of and hard on myself.

I cant, i just feel something, but i dont know what feeling is related, i just usally relate the feeling into something good or bad, so i will just say.

"I feel bad" or "I feel good", i sometimes think i know how is the scared feeling, but not completely sure.

And, i have a big problem differentiating emotions like.

Upset,Angry,irritate,etc.
Happy,Enthusiastic,please,glad,etc

If you know what i mean, is that i dont really know if i have empathy for others and for myself, im going to make you an example, right now the only thing i can say i feel, to my parents, is respect.
I havent got to the bottom of why i am like this, i usually thought, i was a sociopath, but right now im suspecting about alexithymia a comorbid condition of asperger.

Last edited by rixxar12 on 22 Oct 2012, 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't really know how I feel at all.

I say I'm always happy because I don't seem to be sad (not crying after all), but that's far too simple an explanation.

I guess that's the alexithymia or whatever it's called (80% or so of those with an ASD have it).

I tend to be afraid of being seen as selfish, so I almost always put my own needs last. This has gotten better lately though as I had to grow over the past two years to learn to deal with a friend with borderline personality/alcoholism that was living with me. If I didn't look after my own interests, he would continually walk all over me, so I had to start being oppositional instead of always acquiescing. In some ways, it has made me much more guarded regarding other people and I feel like a part of me has died because of it. I don't want to be selfish as I was always accused of being so as a child and I hated it.

Last edited by outofplace on 22 Oct 2012, 11:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Dysthymia!

Thank you everyone for your contributions so far.

I am aware that many psychologists and mindfulness practitioners these days talk of empathy for oneself and I rather like the use of the word with respect to people in the spectrum, as so often we hear how lacking we are with respect to empathy.

I have many friends who like myself are in the spectrum and have an abundapathy for others and yet because of their awkwardness in communicating their feeling for another, they are often seen as having a problem with being human and feeling rather than what is often the case, that feeling is in abundance, but the conveying of it to another is complex and often is not communicated well.

My interest here is trying to establish if this ability to have empathy but struggle in the expressing of it, is carried into our relationship with ourselves?

Q