We think, they feel

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I maybe exagerated in my previous posts and did not quite hit the points,
but ...

I see this lack of empathy and compassion as a consequence not as a cause:

Isn't it just that we perceive the world differently?
Plus that we cannot use the common way to understand feelings of NTs.

And that could mean we cannot learn the feelings from them in a normal way
from which follows that we may have different feelings as well,
maybe even every one has developed his/her own feelings?

Feeling, generally, I see as the optimal case, because it reduces thinking and brain workload. i believe that is, what its purpose is.
Also, I think NTs just look at someones face and that automatically triggers feelings in them. Must be amazing

But what if you either cannot recognize feelings of others
or if you don't understand the feelings? Then you have to switch back and use thinking which is more difficult


This would be a consequence of that you are not able to get them right, why doing useless or extremely difficult things?
I use to think and feel on my own but not so much in communication.


I think that NTs also have to think if they communicate with us,
because they don't understand us completely, either.
But of course they can still interpret better our facial expressions (are they maybe different, too?)

That's why I asked how it goes if Aspie communicates with Aspie.
I have not so much experience, though.
But I have heard that it is much easier communication
(Like "I know what you mean" without too many words == feeling?)

Thus my question would be:
How to learn and understand NT's feelings without being able to use their communication style?


I liked also that one which is somewhat closely related (Feelings involve many assumptions or are brain hard-wired)
Assumptions makes live easier, something that we are not very good at, I guess.

For me, it started quite late to be interested in other people. I never saw anything evil in other people, even if the obviously stole my things.
They could not get me mad by bullying me. I just didn't care. By that I never had any severe difficulties in my lower school time.
And it most probably also saved me from severe psychological problems.

I don't remember when I started actively thinking about what others wanted. Must have been when I was 15 or so.
And then I started to see also what kind of problems I am in.

off topic

But, largely throughout my life I have always conceived me as different and that I had the right to be so, first without any understanding why people wanted to bully me or do something bad to me. It didn't make any sense to me, it didn't even hurt me, I just ignored it.

The revenge for that is maybe coming up now,
because I never felt I have to be perfect according to any rules, which I don't accept as being useful
which is probably wrong

Last edited by onks on 29 Jul 2012, 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

To onks:

The first quote was not mine, it was gs0 who wrote that. So i will let him or her to reply.

I dont think i found feeling difficult. Feelings just do not occur to me as i generally dont "feel" strong emotions. My first 12 years were essentially never really looking at others. So i never really noticed people's feelings. I was always cognitive about everything. Before i began working for me there was something that my insides calm, somethings that made me want to jump around and squish my mom, something that made me loose me and somethings that made me withdraw. I never really thought about these states. I just tried to stay in the calm state as much as possible as i knew it was something that i like and far away from the state that made me loose me. If you ask me now like you i also used to think and feel on my own but i dont know about getting feelings right or wrong for myself as i never tried to label them. I see no use for it. Are you perhaps talking about not being able to get them right on others?



Does not happen with me. Aside from my dad and my brother, no one gets my emotions from my face. Most people dont even care.



i worked with kids and young adults. I dont know if they feel that way too, but for me it was not like watching from outside in, which is the way for me when i see other clients. I have worked with parents who are undiagnosed and it is literally like "i get them" doesnt mean that i like them but still i am not outside. Same with me interacting with adults on the spectrum. I joined in a group almost 4 years back. At that time i did not suspect that i had traits. I just knew that i liked the kids on the spectrum and had fun playing with them. But talking to the adults has possibly been the only place that i feel that i belong.

No here I meant only the process about understanding feelings of NTs. I admit this was a little bit unclear.
I meant that, if our feelings are different, we don´t know NT feelings and thus we cannot understand them.
And because it is extremely difficult to come behind it, it is useless to try to understand them during a conversation.

It seems, that it is so, that we have our own feelings, that we have developed for ourselves. But they are not meant to be communicated to others originally, then.

Maybe that is really a point. Why stressing on feelings of others during conversation, if we don¨t ourselves communicate them.
Focussing on thinking about the words and their meaning is enough to get the feelings behind them, as well.
These, I can, to a certain extend, understand from the context, but not from anything else. Back to the problem to intuitive recognition of feelings of others (whatever that is for NTs).


Maybe everybody breaks out that at some time. For me a bit earlier, 10 or so. (Or for my parents and brother or sister). Basic feelings that I have like everybody else, I guess, I recognised already earlier. But I am not sure.




Are your brother and your father also Aspies. My mum (and my sister) are, I guess.


This probably means there is some intuitive understanding which can be only feelings.
Client relationships are anyway always different, there is more distance like parents children.

I guess my conclusion from this, is really, that we have feelings, but different ones, which do not suit NTs ones.
Because of that, we might not be able to understand their feelings, that are different from ours, on top of that body-language etc problem.
This whole thing makes, that we are not able to communicate feelings on an intuitive way.
(with NTs and they vice versa) and some of the feelings cannot be communicated at all.

Aspie Aspie seems to be different. Because playing with Aspie-kids (I hope you meant so)... I just imagine me playing with somebody in kindergarden. That didn't happen really. So if they let you play with them that's already a thing???
And also the undiagnosed parents.
With those it seems we are able to share things intuitively. Perhaps much more than with NTs. Yeah, I guess that's fun.
Even normal children are easier to me.

It seems really, as said before, that thinking is a strategy to cope with the lack of intuitive communication.
And it can suck but also be an extremely nice tool when being not in a conversation(writing a.s.o.).

Again off topic

This not being really interested about others probably saved me a lot from bullying or other mean things I think. Because, why should you bully somebody that is not even reacting and just feeling slightly weird. Did you ever have that problem?

If you are interested then you are prone to mean things by others. But you can much better learn about social things. But possibly also develop some other mental problems, because then you care to be not too different than others. Hmm.

Yeah. I know what you mean over here. I actually did not understand feelings as in emotions in others, other than anger and happy till i was in early teens. After than sad was added, but i still did not get what i was supposed to do. I also pick them up more from tone of sound and body movement, both which are instinctive for these 3 emotions because they are more survival techniques. If i did not have them it meant not being prepared when my mom lost it. Actually till then i only picked it up in my mom, no one else. Now i can pick these up in everybody if i focus. Since i started working, it is easier to pick up anxiety as i have it myself. But it is not a default system like it is for NT's . I think although i agree with you, what i am trying to say is that using thought because feeling dont come instinctively is not possible as i have never know instinctively feeling. When i compare with my colleagues who are NT, they pick feelings up from face, while i donot look at it at all. Also they instinctively talk about feelings, while i instinctively talk about thoughts. Do you see the difference that i am trying to make? It is just which end you look at it from theirs or ours. But this is me liking to discuss. I hope you dont mind. I enjoy this.



i dont know what my dad was as he died when i was 12, my brother is what i would call at the edge. Social life comes instinctively to him, his expressive emotions are in place, but i dont think he gets much about what people might feel. He is kind of on the edge.



I thought i said work with aspie kids. If i confused you, sorry. I used to work in preschool and later as a therapist. I was considered good as i could play with the kids which others had a tough time doing. So no, people did not let me just play. Like you, i always got along with kids, even typical ones, but before i became a therapist, parents used to prevent their kids from playing with me in the fear that they would become like me. Even now, my extended family keep their kids away from me.



I did not get bullied in school due to the fact that i was least interested. Infact i was heavily protected as i was looked upon as someone who did not really "get it". I was also poor at games and stuff, so that exaggerated it. But within my cousins the situation was opposite. I was forced to be with them, as my mom said so and we were spending time with each other. There i got bullied really badly. Especially by my cousin sisters. They could just not take me be different and used to encourage the boys to pick on me. I used to try to escape whenever possible but it was not easy.



Totally agree with you. I think this is my story since i started wanting to socialize, initially because my mom insisted, later because i felt i wanted companionship. Lead to me develop issues with trust which i have even now. But i learned a bit of what kind of people not to be with, but i agree with this completely.

I think you are totally right. My husband once told me he could not "enjoy" hanging out because we were doing nothing, and that he could not enjoy that state of doing nothing, not when he had so other interesting things he could be doing. And the whole point of hanging out IS doing nothing. Just sitting, drinking, relaxing. And you enjoy the doing nothing. But he doesnt. What he does now is he carries his laptop or his iPad and he takes part in the conversation WHILE he is doing something in his computer. That way he can "enjoy" (I think tolerate is more appropriate) hanging out.

To Ilka:

But isnt working on laptop when with people being rude to others? Atleast that is what my mom says, so i never do it. Infact when i read what your husband does, i remembered the hanging out that happens in my kitchen (i live in halls of residence with a bunch of other girsl). It is possibly the easiest of "being with people". I like it when they are talking and i can cook and i pitch in when i feel the need. But i dont know if i could do it in a social gathering. What do you think?

Sad but true. Both ways are not easy. If you sociallise you are threatened by all kinds of things, and might develop some psychological problems.
if you don't you are lonely.
But I think there is no way out, because everybody (except very few aspies) does not want to be alone.
The question is only how to come through this as early as possible without getting mentally destroyed.

I am at that stage where I have to probably have to be more conformal rules and try to understand more about other peoples' feelings.
I am quite a border case according to the tests I have done.
I would like to get to know more aspies and others from "spectrum class" to see how they are and how it is to interact with them

But even as I am I guess quite many aspies even might conceive me as rude,
and maybe I don't even understand their problems fully, because I never had really bad problems except some occasional depression

'What I wondered is what is the role of parents in this development.
My mother is aspie I think so she is maybe more tolerant.
But she also organised for me in the beginning some friends, which I remember, I didn't quite understand why she did that.

If parents are really annoyed then i guess the children suffer and get kicked earlier into real life, upon which they might loose their "natural protection" ?
But right now I would be thankful being more normal, with less ignorant aspie properties and more feelings of NTs I could cope with.

Because this makes it easier to have friends and partners, which I could really need now.
Quite recently my world has been breaking down quite a bit.
(New job, end of a 9 year relationship, which wasn't the ideal case,
moving out find a new flat and such, searching for a new partner
which is very frustrating having just one friend, lot of pressure in the new job)

But to come back to the points I would like to discuss also more the "ASSUMPTIONS", which are somewhat similar than feelings.
I guess aspies are quite persistent, or that's what I conceive of me and like to go into details.

Is this a property of thinking or is this something different?

Something somewhat of topic again

Sometimes I also felt like I have still my childhood curiosity which is trained away when being NT youngster.
And that they try to force with all means to force their kids to loose their "nature".
I don't like this that NTs are so predictable in that sense and unable to look behind some stereotypes or rules.

The world would be soo different if there would be also some smart guy politicians
or smart society rules including people demanding the truth instead of head fakes, that look nice and shiny and just serve societal rules.
NTs follow all the time some stupid categorized behavior, of which quite many things are non-logical bullcrap to me.

I can easily indentify them as stupid by thinking and I now that even some NT are annoyed by some of that,
but most of the people accept something just right it is and stamp it as societally important
and then it goes through. (No you can't do it like this ...)

I do not know if working when with people is rude. We do not have many friends, only about 5 friends, and all of them are old friends, so they already know him very well. They know he is ALWAYS working, and they do not mind. They do not see it as rude; it is normal for them. Actually one of our friends calls my husband "Appleman" because he is always working on his Mac laptop. He works and talks at the same time. It seems very easy for him to do both things at the same time. Sometimes he stops working on his computer to do eye contact (he is a weird Aspie, because he REQUIRES eye contact).

I think that will depend on the gathering. We usually meet other people just to hang out, which means we go to their house or they come to ours, and stay there just eating and talking, so it is very easy for him to work at the same time, because there is the space and the setting for it. He does not do that if we go to a restaurant, for example.

That is indeed very special. I could never manage that would be totally lost in my computer stuff. How does he manage to follow without loosing focus to his work?
Or is it just very superficial what he is talking about?
Otherwise he must have a brain like an elephant )

Or not interested in his work. Or just doing something easy because otherwise it gets boring???

Strikes me! I am really surprised

In a self-therapy for social anxiety, which I've been going through, I came across focusing. People with social anxiety tend to focus internally in their own (anxious) feelings which only strenghtens the anxiety. Instead, they should focus externally on what they are doing, or on the person they are talking to. If they aren't doing something, they should, at least in order to get their minds off their anxious mind.

Now, the Aspie mind tends to always think and analyze, which makes it prone to anxiety-producing self-analyzing instead of external focus, not to mention the difficulties in everyday life which, over time, tend to turn their thoughts automatically negative in many cases. Even when I woke up at night, I found my brain in full thinking and analyzing mode before I was even properly awake. Sometimes, (these days more) I have managed to focus externally in a conversation, and it really helped.

As for empathy, I'm not sure to what extent it can be developed. The lack of empathy is caused by a multitude of factors, one if which is the fact that the amount of the empathy hormone, oxytocin, is lower in the autistic brain in comparison to the neurotypicals.

It's funny because NTs have that whole line about thinking before you speak

I've often been accused of not thinking about others feelings or how my words might affect others before I speak. Perhaps they are not refering to thinking at all but instead to something else. Or perhaps they are thinking when they speak - just in a different way.

Haha, it took me years to figure out that they actually don't do this. Or rather-that what they call "thinking" is a state of perfect thoughtlessness for me. They never think about anything as deeply and as throughly as me, they never consider all the factors carefully, they never form sentences in their mind before speaking them out etc etc

Well, when he is programming he certainly does not speak and cannot be interrupted, not even talked to, because he is concentrated on what he is doing. But if we are in a gathering he is not programming, he usually is reading, doing updates, playing chess, checking some new program he wants to review, checking his email (he is always late on email because he HATES it), or something like that, that he does not need to be focus on, but the thing is he needs to be doing something in the computer so he can handle the get together, because just being sitting there and talking is not enough for him. He gets bored.

That might be really a tool to cope with the anxiety. The anxiety is I guess a result of bad experience, especially those that could not be clarified by thinking.
(Bullying is one of them, because there is no logical reason why others should do that
At least if they think that it is positive for them then they are on a totally wrong way. Not understandable from logical and moral perspective, even NT's).

Then I think also the ASSUMPTION thing here is important which is more or less leaving out unnecessary thinking, of which one is thinking about oneself during conversation.

But, I merely think the problem is more the aftermath thinking.
What hurts for me is to understand not to understand or to later realize to have wrongly understood.
This is more important to handle. During conversation you can prepare this stage of thinking, by
asking the right things and avoid "destroying kind of thinking" by that.

Well and constantly thinking (possibly about oneself as well) without finally asking or taking part in a conversation is also really bad for self-esteem.

You are right there is a lot you can handle in a much smarter way, probably with a few tricks or arrangements

That (processing emotions slower) sounds like me. I know I have compassion:: I'm very disturbed by the suffering of people and animals (and even by what seems as if it would cause suffering to plants, though I know better!). I've gone to great lengths to help a stranger in need because I was upset by the thought of his or her problems. To feel compassion, though, first I have to know what the other person is experiencing and that tends to be a bit delayed or not to work at all if the feeling isn't expressed in an obvious way. In a conversation I don't tend to mirror the other person's emotion until half a minute later if at all, when they have already either changed topics or decided I'm heartless. Because of this I'm definitely thinking about the appropriate response long before I have any emotion that could guide me, and even if I think I know intellectually what that response would be I'm rarely capable of giving it in a smooth, natural way, because I'm no great actress.

I've also had the feeling that alcohol helps a bit, by at least making me less self-conscious about responding at all. Sometimes it seems better to simply respond, and keep a confident attitude, almost regardless of the words you say. If I'm less inhibited I seem to respond quicker emotionally as well. Self-medicating with alcohol = alcoholism, though, so I don't allow myself to drink very often or much. Besides, it's not like I could drink at work, and socializing with coworkers is one of my biggest problems.

To onks:

I think a lot of our issues are similar to what others too face. Even the so called NT's. E.g. Like you mentioned earlier that if you arent really crazy behind fitting in with people then bullying would be less. If i compare myself to my brother, i always used to feel that he had it easy as things came easy to him while they did not for me. Now as i look back at my past, i realise it is not true. I was allowed to do a lot of things as my mother knew that i was not walking the "norm" line. She tried to get me to be like others but it did not work. So she had to let me do things that worked for me. It may come across as it was easy for her, but it was not. My mom is fairly NT. She thrives on people and society. It is a huge loss to her that her daughter is not like others. It is only now when i am 33 and she can see that although my life is completely different than others, it is also a fine life, that she is kind of settled. But then my brother never had that excuse. He had to conform as he wanted to be with people. He does things that i know he does not like, just to keep people around. Same with my mom and my sister in law. So what i am trying to say is that, one of the misunderstandings we people make is thinking there is a "right way". The truth is there is no right way. What works for you, may not work for others.

So getting back to '"assumptions". Yup if you can avoid unnecessary thinking, do that. With me, i get migraines by trying to stop myself. But if i let myself, i can work it out and put it to rest. It is contrast to anything, any of my therapists have told me. But for me it makes sense. Because in my head an incomplete picture is more frustrating and painful than people's behavior. Sometimes when i cant solve it. i found rules that explained it. Once that is in place, i tell myself it is a rule which makes no sense to me but it is there. That means i need to leave it. So right now, i am trying to do what my dad told me ages back and what my brother tells me frequently. "just do your best and dont bother about others".

To Ilka:

Thanks for explaining. I guess that makes sense.