What is your reason for wanting a boyfriend or girlfriend?

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If it's not due to a lack of empathy and instinct/intuition as a consequence of a deviant operation or constitution of the amygdala and the left amygdala in particular, how would you explain the cause of the symptoms described by the DSM-IV criteria? How do you explain the observed differences in the amydgala between people with Asperger's Syndrome and Neurotypical people? How would you describe the consequences of these observed differences?

Also, do you suggest that you as someone with Asperger's can literally "feel" how other people are feeling without first putting their feelings into a logical context and therefore conclude what a suitable feeling would be in this sort of situation? Don't you first need to position yourself in the other person's perspective from a rational point of view to get an idea of how he or she must be feeling?!? If that is not the case, than how exactly would you describe your social inhibitions towards other people?

Will you please stop calling me and a good deal of this forum inhuman monsters?

hmm....but......doesnt everyone require a thought process before they feel bad? the way your making it out, empathy would seem to be a pretty useless sort of emotion.

ok, what about this situation? at my summer camp, we were worshipping (christian camp)...everyone started crying and stuff, i'm not sure what happened, but we all got really emotional in a happy way. i started crying too....it was weird. there was no thoughts involved in my emotions. someone put their hand on me and started praying for me, and i started sobbing too. wow, this seems weird. XD isnt that empathy? i didnt start crying until someone touched me though...
how's my little pony empathetic?
but yeah, i do need to understand how i would feel to understand how they would feel...doesnt every human need to do that?

well, pm me the results when you try the drugs again. i'm curious.

i dont think he's calling us inhuman monsters...i think he believes we can reach the same thing the NTs can. just with a different route.

I've always been taught that people without empathy aren't human... and i keep getting insulted every time i keep hearing "autistics/aspies don't have any empathy"... I have my own feelings, and I know that other people have their own feelings as well. What is inhuman about that?

I want a partner. At this point I really want to be with another aspie. When I attract people into my life they are always on the DSM in the personality disorder category. The last person I attracted was NT to the extreme. I got a sharp reminder in the fact that I am on the spectrum. It was demoralizing. I read an article about 2 aspies and how 'hard' it was for them to be together. I think it would be paradise. I always feel like the NTs I have been with have been secretly disappointed in me. I'm too boring and not enough of a b***h. Not female enough in some catty way or something. But I don't want to give up.

I can understand your point of view, Toad... however, it is important to differentiate between instinctive empathy and analytical empathy, and to remember that being on the spectrum does not equate to being without emotions. When it comes to instinctive sympathy, I recognize that I am fairly deficient; few things come to me immediately or naturally. But I can try into account all the information I have and attempt to build a scenario that I can come to understand a different perspective or reaction, and in that manner I can develop a sense of what someone else may be feeling or experiencing. You're not inhuman, Toad.


M.

I'm with you on the toxic nt relationship I've had a couple of nt girlfriends but I felt like I was missing something they wanted. In fact I've never met another aspie let alone dated one, so I'd love to meet a female and see how it would be different than an nt girl

loneliness

A good trick I've learned from my nt brother/wing man is to hit on all the females around your target female and act like you don't really wanna talk to her. I have no ideal how or why but it does work, sadly it doesn't work on the kind of girl I like, I love the shy well-read maiden

Exactly. You seemed to have got the point.



Nope.



Sometimes is it bothersome because it allows people to be more easily manipulated. However, it makes social interaction with other individuals a lot easier. Exchanging emotions is pretty much a way of talking without words and one emotion can often say a lot more than a thousand words.

Another Neurotypical trait closely related to empathy is having automatic fear and prioritizing responses to objects they perceive with their senses. Rather than having to scan everything they hear or see individually, they already get a pre-processed image available through the operation of the amygdala that tells them which areas to focus on and which to ignore. They tell them which people are to fear and which people are to trust. All this, in a fraction of a second because the processed behind it as subconscious and regulated by emotional impulses. We as Aspies don't have those mechanisms and have to use far more draining conscious brain processes to get results remotely as reliable.



Are you sure you didn't start thinking about sad things (e.g. thinking about someone you loved and lost) the moment that person touched you?



It's hard to say, but it seems like my mind was just all of a sudden filed with all sorts of emotions (mostly happy ones) where I would usually feel quite emotionless. I felt almost like I was again a happily naieve and easily impressed 4-year-old.



No. Empathy is a sub-conscious process that would normally take care of that in neurotypical people.



I'll give you a full report

Then maybe the idea that "people without empathy aren't human" simply isn't correct. Have you imagined that possibility? Maybe the idea that "people without empathy aren't human" is prejudice as silly as claims that "negros aren't human" or "communists are all sub-human scum".



"Analytical empathy" could be considered a form of empathy in the sense that it produces emotions, but since the process that produces these emotions is not a subconscious process as it is with instinctive empathy the question is whether "analytical empathy" can be considered actual empathy.

If you like to distinguish between "instinctive empathy" and "analytical empathy", that's fine by me. It's might help explain why people with Asperger's aren't psychopaths or sociopaths, but to me calling non-empathic analysts of emotions "analytical empathisers" because they can generate emotions seems like the medical equivalent of PC terms like "African-American" or "gay" instead of "black American" and "homosexual".

thanks for the informative answers. i liked reading it.

i didnt start thinking about sad things.....i dont know what happened...it was a very unusual thing for me though. it was literally like emotion came through her hand....it was weird.........
i would say i might feel empathy, it's quite rare though. but im pretty sure i am capable of it!

thank you! i look forward to reading it.


could you explain this again? it didnt sink in. i'm not sure i quite get it. i have Social anxiety disorder...i get scared automatically in social situations. i find some people a bit unnerving. how do they prioritize?

If you have that kind of experience but only very rarely, maybe you are empathic but only with extremely emotional situations, whereas neurotypical people are empathic all the time. I can't say I ever had any experience where I became actually empathic because of intense emotional input rather than rational input, but maybe that's because I don't remember it and not because it never happened. It's hard to say. We don't always remember things exactly the way they happened, anyway.

Maybe it was not empathy at all but yet another subconscious process that triggers you when you as subject to certain emotions you would normally not feel. Maybe it was the ackward feeling of being the only one not to cry that started a subconscious process that made you feel sad yourself. Humans are so complex it is very often not straightforward why we do the things we do.



How does who prioritize?!?

Anyway, the reason you probably get uncomfortable in social situations is because you don't know what's expected from you. The only advice I can give you here, is that you can only learn what's expected from you by trying it dozens, hundreds if not thousands of times. You can only figure out how to behave under which conditions by doing it wrong the first few times and learning from your previous mistakes. Watch how people move their eyebrows, their noses, their mouths, their shoulders and other parts of their bodies as you communicate with them and try to understand which changes are positive and which changes are negative as this information is often much more valuable than the information you get from what people actually say (it's much harder to lie with your body language than with the words you speak). There are many books written on body language, so if you don't see the patterns in people's behavior yourself and you don't have neurotypical friends who are willing to point some of them out to you, you can always try reading a book about it. Although a book will never be able to teach you everything you need to know about body language, it may help you enough to become more confident about yourself.

The best way of overcoming your fears is by confronting them... by doing exactly the thing you're afraid of and doing it enough times succesfully to let your fears decrease as your brain will become conditioned to the fear-inducing element. Eventually you will start getting used to it. Depending on how strong your fears are, how much effort you put into it, how much luck you have and how strong-willed you are, this getting used to it can take anything from days up to decades though.

I would like to have the sex, please.

i dont know. i am....i dont know......but i can feel empathy...i'm pretty sure. it is indeed very rare.

you said the NTs prioritize responses to objects....what did you mean?

so, do NTs know that stuff that confuses me automatically? i get most stuff, but i do observe people a lot more than the average person. are you saying all that processing goes on subconciously for them? and they couldnt really say....point out the features that make someone nervous looking, they'd just know?