Empathy and "Theory of Mind"

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I feel a desire to place this here for consideration:

Is it possible that a person on the Spectrum, while apparently born without "Theory of Mind," could develop it (with true empathy) through cognitive awareness and life experience?

I, myself, was not an empathetic person until I acquired "experience with life." Apparently, NT's are born with that ability; it is intrinsic within them. Apparently, without actual experience, they could experience empathy in an visceral, as well as an intellectual, sense.

I was not able to "put myself into another person's shoes" until I filled the shoes myself. I intellectually discerned that I must feel empathy; however, I only felt it viscerally after I actually had personal experience with the subject of the empathy (I am repeating myself, I know LOL). I felt guilty that I could not feel what other people are feeling; I felt as if I was some kind of psychopath. I was told by one girlfriend that there was "something missing" within myself.

One example: I could not understand, in a "real" sense, grief after a person close to one passes away until I experienced that grief for myself. My wife's son died, tragically, of cancer at age 36. At first, I could only intellectually understand the reasoning behind the great grief experienced by my wife. In time, once I grasped it fully in an intellectual sense, (and I began to miss the person myself), I began to feel the empathy in a "real" sense. Since then, I've been able to understand, in a visceral as well as an intellectual sense, why people grieve for their loved ones.

This is been happening all my life. First, I intellectually grasp what I should be empathizing about, then I tap into my experience, then I experience the empathy viscerally.

I apologize for repeating myself copiously.

Yes it's easy to empathize with, easy to understand, what we have lived, what we know.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, Waterfalls. That is why it irritates me when I hear that people on the Spectrum are supposed to lack "Theory of Mind."

I doubt that the vast majority of people have this "Theory of Mind". It doesn't seem like that many people have an advanced, instinctive knowledge of psychology that they regularly apply to their relations with other people. If they had both that, and the levels of empathy that they think they have, the world would undoubtedly be a perfect utopia by now. It seems like a lot of people pride themselves on how "perfect" they are, like some kind of delusional narcissist; while they act apathetic and condescending to deviants like us, and other people who they don't consider to be among their peers. They think that that everything good in the world is the result of people who have the same "perfect" thinking as themselves; and that everything bad in the world must have been the result of people with thinking that's completely foreign to and incompatible with their own minds. How can someone who lacks that much self-awareness and awareness of others even begin to understand the way that other people think? They don't really understand, they just think they do because they don't have an ounce of humility.

We are not deviants; we are a variation on a theme. I hope you were using "deviant" sarcastically.

There are many people who are not empathetic. Obviously, I'm not perfect in that department, either.

Political leanings frequently interfere with empathy about people's plights.

I don't think perfection is what people desire: it's like-mindedness, no matter how imperfect that mind might be. These people know that they don't have "perfect" minds; and they don't really care, either.

Thirded. Empathy is a type of higher level intelligence, which is acquired through experience. Sympathy is a learned political adaptation in a group setting that is similar to, but often confused with empathy.

Having too much theory and too much mind is problematic. Anyway a light bulb just went off. it was not anything in this thread that did it, but this thread triggered the progression of thoughts. Thank you for starting it.

I'm not sure what is meant by "theory of mind" and "empathy" here. Is it the ability to imagine why someone might be doing something, or is it the experience of being "infected with" another person's emotion? In any case, the latter happens to me pretty easily, but the former... I can do it when I have peace and quiet and plenty of time, but often can't do it in "real time" during social interaction. The phrase "having theory of mind" suggests it's something one could know and then be all set, but that seems more like a skill one might or might not be able to use at any given time.