Aspergers, intense empathy, intuition

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Can someone be diagnosed with AS...and have a very high sensitivity to emotions (i.e. not being able to block out emotions of others to the point where their emotions become yours and effect your daily life?). Put simply, does every person diagnosed with AS have a difficult time relating to others....or are there, in fact, people diagnosed with AS who relate very well to people, and have sort of an intuitive gift for helping people?

interesting questions. I think altruism and a willingness and real dedication to take care of others have been described as consistent with the spectrum (if I recall correctly). But not intuition, that I'm aware of. I think for me when I'm in some sort of social exchange I sometimes end up perceiving what I believe are empathic clues for those I'm interacting with. It can be intense. But I believe that I also approach all of these interactions differently from NTs, and so I wonder if the "lens" I view the world through is accurate (in that I'm empathic and intuitive) or if I'm misreading that too. What do you experience if you don't mind me asking?

The "Intense World Theory Of Autism" is becoming popular
What If People With Autism Are Actually Hyperfunctional?

With me, there's certainly a case to be made for my having some kind of excessive empathy, though I don't expect I'd do particularly well as an empath, I think it's very piecemeal, sometimes I pick up on feelings that nobody else seems to have noticed, other times I think I could still seriously get the wrong end of the stick. Like with many other social aspects of ASD, give me enough time and I might well turn out a fine job, but if I have to react very quickly to a situation I could screw up. I've had a few compliments in my time about making people feel better emotionally, boosting people's confidence etc., and I guess some of them must have been sincere. I certainly like easing people's suffering and helping them to grow, but how and when I do it is rather a mystery to me, it's all very nebulous and weird.

What makes it difficult to quantify is that there seems to be no reliable way of verifying a person's feelings - even if you ask them point blank, they might not know, and they might lie. The other thing that confounds the subject for me is that I don't feel qualified to diagnose others, so I don't know if I'm comparing my own empathy with that of NTs or the neurodiverse, or what. As there's some evidence that I gravitate strongly towards unusual people and avoid the mainstream, I never know quite who I'm dealing with, and even if they show me their diagnostic reports, I've seen enough incorrect and suspicious diagnoses to feel wary of trusting that way of knowing their minds.

I've noticed in the past that some disturbed people will make me feel disturbed too, so that I can't bear to be around them, I seem to soak up certain emotions and feel them myself.

I think I've quite often had intuitive ideas about people, that have turned out to be pretty accurate, and I've been advised to trust my instincts more, but the whole intuition thing often feels so precarious that I tend to be very careful and tentative, and lacking faith in my intuitive power could well mean that I'm ignoring a lot of valuable insights.