Yes another empathy thread

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Could be a man spade or a woman spade? (Is there a sex for a spade?)

Yes. I understand and I do not know where I stand. I do have and have had similar situations where though no one knew or did not know if I am or am jot on the spectrum as I do mot know either though I know I probably am or at least half way in between... So no one who accused me could say "It is because he is on the spectrum" as an excuse... But I have found many times throughout my life that I and someone else can be doing something different from a main group, and the group do not accept it if I have done it, but if another person who fits in with the group will be not just accepted, but rhat person will have hero status because he or she did it... When what I did was the exact same thing! (Or even if they don't have a hero status, what they did will be ignored, but what I did I would be told off for).

It REALLY winds me up when the one criticizing me does the exact same thing themselves and when I tell them they get really annoyed with me! Why shout at me? Shout at yourself you silly man!

It also gets to me when I can get a task to do where I have worked in rhe past, and the person in charge who has the official athority over me has left me do that task... Then someone else comes along and says "Don't do rhat. I want you to do this..." so I say "No. I have this to do". But the person gets annoyed at me if I don't do their job as well as mine, and when I report back to the one in charge of me, I get told off for the one who tried to divert my task, and then I get told off from the one who is trying to get me to do their work as well. And I was getting lots of flack when I said to the one trying to divert my task "You go and speak to the one who told me to do this. If your taskis urgent, speak to him and get him to get me to change what I am doing. Do not blame me! It is your task after all!"
But then I get bullied by the one who I didn't work for and yet this person did not once go and speak to the onein athority over me about it!

I have had this situation time and time again in various jobs I have worked at and it is why I kept ending up in shutdowns and being burned out as I ended up doing many times more work then other staff seemed to be doing and having to do "Free overtime" without pay after work, before work and regularly working through my lunch breaks.
And the extra work done went into the bonuses of the bullies!

Due to years of this, even though the last three temporary jobs I did where I burned out towards the end of each one... I was treated very wellmin the last three jobs in the same place... But even though I was treated well, the pyscological effects from the past were coming back to me every time I had to work and I was ending up with so much anxiety and stress and had strings of partial shutdowns, and shutdowns... And whilw some were caused by the spray oils etc as smells can trigger them, a great deal of it was my brain memorizing the past and "Clicking in" the stress of the past situations... And it was not just me. Another worker who worked there had to leave due to anxiety and stress and he was told he would never work again, and another worker had several months off with the same issues, all working on the department I worked at. The one causing the issues did not even work in the same department!
Though this was not the only place I worked where this happened. I had a terrible situation between the boss and his son where I first worked ad it is why I got soo stressed and eventually left. I liked them both as people, but it was a case that the boss would set me tasks, but then put his son in charge, but his sone then said "Leave that. I'm in charge. Do this and this and this..." So each time the boss would come back he would be upset as nothing he wanted would be done and did not appreciate the work I had done for his son.

I have always had issues when jobs were being piled up because I could see no mental end to the work. But also I had big issues with partial and full shutdowns when I had worked out what I needed to do and every time I settled someone in athority would come in and say "Leave that. I want you to do this first"... and then another customer would come in and it was "Leave that...." and despite me saying "What about this customer?" And when the customer came back I would be told off for not having finished their bike in front of the customer so the one who was dealing with the customer did not look bad.

But why is it that people can be like this? I was always told I needed to work as a team and not on my own... Yet I was not the one who was not working as a team. It was the ones who kept saying I was not working as a team were ofen the very ones who were the problem.

When I hit my first burnout, it was because an accumilation of many things, and one of these things were people continually takeing advantage of my gullability so they could change shifts with me (Or they would see the one in charge and he was changing the shifts without me being asked) so I was continually ending up working the longer harder shifts and also loosing out on some rest days etc. And also the rostering in the main depot were continually begging me to work overtime on my rest days, and when I was over tired, because of rhe many begging phonecalls during rhe hours I should have been asleep (Railways went right through 24 hours) I would eventually give in and say yes and the cycle repeated itself until I became burnt out, and then I quit after nine years. A complete record for me to have stayed in any job. Usually two years was all I could manage before I quit and had to move on. (Trains are a special interest and due to the ever changing shifts one rarely stayed working with the same staff for long so I was able to keep the masking up for far longer then a place where I had to work with the same staff daily if that makes sense?)

But anyway.... I kept being taken advantage of which eventually cumilated in the state I am in now where I can't even think about working in the future without getting stress with the thought of it.

(Does the mind heal from past experiences?)

Could you post a link to the article that the quote is from?

I have seen it on a thread here on WP.

OK let's just forget about the quote, I just want to know people's thoughts on my OP and if I have explained myself well.

I think what's happening is that everything autistic people do is being interpreted through the lens of autism, so the kind of selective empathy that's normal in NTs is considered evidence of a lack of empathy when autistic people do it. I think we agree?

I have read about Aspies (or Ass Pies) lack of empathy.
I think that the term lacking in empathy (as Hans Asperger defined) was misconstrued (although i imagine people who lacked compassion could be very useful to a nazi empire).

Lacking in empathy, doesn't mean we do not experience love, feelings or compassion for others.
However, it means that we lack the innate ability to instinctively put ourselves in other people's shoes,
or perhaps (as many NT likely do) put ourselves in the positions of others and pretend we care.

For a number of Aspergers, this lack of innate ability to consider how life is from their own perspective instinctively
is what we lack, although this does not mean we can not use our intellect to analyse other people's perspectives and work out using our intellect how the other people must feel, along with gaining real deep emotional responses as to how we feel about their experiences.

Empathy may not be instant or intuitive however, we still may gain an understanding from contemplation and our own capacity for compassion.

On a positive note, I would say that some Aspies would take to a spiritual path such as found in Buddhism, because we so love routine, we keep the rules rigidly, we often logical are naturally good and straight forward due to black and white thinking. Such attributes that equal to great progress if following a spiritual path such as buddhism.

As far as I observed, the double standards lies within the fine line between 'social' and 'emotional'.

In a sense the 'social' part is more about 'expressing'/replying appropriately.
In a sense the 'emotional' part is about 'receiving'/interpreting correctly.


It's complicated.
Within the usual aspies' POV, the intent is there, the emotions are there, and they received it well.

Yet the subtle expressions isn't.
The expressions consists of what had or how it is said, behaviors and body language, and all those subtle stuff.
In socialized sense, it's not familiar enough to be comfortable nor positively attracting to deem as 'valid' no matter the intent or the action's outcome.

So do involving implicit or explicit associations surrounded the label.
As I said already then, awareness is like a double edged sword.

In any attempt to make someone feel better, but creepy is still 'creepy' no matter how harmless or innocent.
And pretty much anything that doesn't belong to the script of whatever dynamics of socializations wants anyone to take part and play.

That's how being a jerkass and being nasty or even worse is 'acceptable'. In other cases, encouraged.
Said NTs are following something subtle; passable as acceptable; along with it's associations concerning outside the labels.

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There was this empathy test, where unlike npd, autistic children experienced internal agitation and distress when thinking something bad was happening to someone.

But autistic people oftentimes can't externalize it and show it, express it.

Anyhow, why are we Aspy, ass pies and not Aspernators? or astrophies?

Standing ovation.

I do feel like I've got some sort of higher standard to reach than NTs. I have to work really hard to be normal enough to be acceptable. Some days I avoid people because I just don't have the energy.

NTs, unless they are anxious, don't have that. They can just be themselves.

I remember things my Mum said to me when I was a teenager about not being normal enough. I still feel like she doesn't really like me.

Here's a weird thing. I have an aspie acquaintance. I've noticed that his parents are more involved with him now he's hitting regular people milestones in his life. That makes me sad. But I know what that's like. I've given up pretending to be normal.

I kinda relate.

People can call me out for odd behavior.

But I can NEVER call out others for odd behavior. No... "everyone is a little bit weird, so you have to tolerate it".

That was the gist of a recent conversation I had.

I think what freaks me out the most about it is that many people associate lack of empathy with crime and other bad things that people do. So when lack of empathy gets tied to autism people just automatically think "oh that means autistics are bad people capable of doing bad things".

One time there was a headline on the news about a man with a knife intending to rob a bank. The newsreader added "this man clearly lacked empathy..." And that wasn't the only time that was quoted on these news headlines reporting crimes.
So that's just what the public associates lack of empathy with. So having to live with a label that still has "lack of empathy" listed as a symptom can be a bit disturbing.

Aspies usually define empathy as "being aware of how you're making someone feel whether it's good or bad", but NTs usually define empathy as "good, kind, caring, thoughtful, understanding".

It's just hard to imagine that bullying isn't lacking empathy. There are several different sorts of bullying, ranging from teasing to constantly destroying a person. I think most people tease others at times and can still have empathy, but some of the bullying some Aspies on WP have suffered in their lifetimes is just diabolical. Surely if you had even a bit of empathy you would automatically feel bad or guilty for making another person's life hell by beating them up every day and saying hurtful stuff like "you should die". It is pretty serious and extreme stuff and I don't think some of these bullies even know how serious that is. I don't know how those types of bullies can even live with themselves. And even if they are doing such nasty things to make themselves feel better, I find that extremely selfish indeed.

I think that if bullies like that actually spent a day in their victim's shoes they'll realise that their bullying was doing more damage than they imagined from their POV. That's the way I see it. And usually bullies bully people because they don't understand them, instead of trying to understand. The way I see it, bullying is a result of being unable to put oneself in someone else's (the victim's) shoes. So empathy being all about understanding and the ability of putting oneself into another person's shoes just sounds so skewed.

An aspergers book the doc gave me differentiates between "empathy", and "sympathy".

That author used the word empathy to mean something akin to theory of mind: sensing what folks feel. Or maybe "theory of heart" would be more accurate.

Sympathy is identifying with other, and caring for them, etc.

The author said aspies can have "sympathy in spades". What they lack is figuring out how others feel. Well meaning but obtuse. So that condition is the "lack of empathy".

So: an aspie has sympathy, but no empathy. In contrast a sociopath (or psychopath) would be the opposite, and has "empathy, but no sympathy" (they would know how you feel but not have pity, and would use your emotions to exploit you).

And thats apparently where the confusion arises. Folks conflate empathy and sympathy. And then leap to the wrong conclusion that "aspies lack empathy so they must be the same as criminal sociopaths".

Other authorities break it down as "cognitive empathy"(what my book calls just "empathy"), and "affective empathy" (basically what my book calls 'sympathy').

There's a pattern to it, as to how a human perceives a context.
How a group of people or a person's perception of reality is warped, based on their experiences.

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So how did it come to the ranging definitions?
Anyone can examine different words and see how it got there, but since it is being specific to autism and empathy...



While there are alterations between cultures, there's this sort of common pattern across the human crowd continuum.

That pattern does not equate to logical thinking.
But in terms of associations, how many paid attention and accept it as that.

Even the double standards.
"Trendings" and how it was taken into context, it's reactions and accepted definitions.

And so the majority of people does not consists of people breaking down definitions nor debating with semantics; most of these are them as individuals who likely can talk the talk, and rationalize.
Many individuals do not think nor operate do this way in real life, let alone collectively.

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Personally, one can be autistic and an empath, and identify as that.
But the question is; is the empath competent?

It'll be a confusing if one had degrees of alexithymia.
Worse with EF issues that pulled so many psychiatric issues that came with it.

So how did an innocent and sensitive autistic end up believing they're psychopathic criminals ticking bombs, who may end up doing heinous when it goes off?

I cannot answer that myself.

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