Jack77 wrote:
When I was younger I was very sensitive to other people's feelings but socially inappropriate at the same time.
Please do not confuse the term "
lack of empathy" often associated with Autism and Asperger Syndrome to mean "lack of
sympathy." We are perfectly capable of sensitivity to others' feelings,
once we know what those feelings are.
Empathy, in the Clinical Psychological sense, is the ability to read nonverbal social signals and interpret or intuit what other people are thinking or feeling on an instinctive level. That is the 'empathy' that High Functioning Autistics lack. For example, we can't always pick up on whether or not someone is upset with us, until they say something openly hostile.
Of course, we can recognize that when someone is weeping, they're sad, and we may feel great
sympathy for them, or if they're seriously frowning, that they're mad - it's the
subtle signals we're likely to miss. The constant sensory overload of having everything turned up to 11 makes it tricky to pick between which sensory data are important and which are irrelevant, so we get easily distracted and sometimes miss, or misinterpret things.
We may notice a speck of glitter on the floor and completely fail to see the raised eyebrow that should tell us somebody is disapproving of something we just said; if we maintain consistent eye contact, the light reflecting off someone's nose may cause us to miss part of their conversation.
It's the confusion over the terms
Empathy and
Sympathy that give a lot of people the false impression that people with High Functioning Autism or Asperger Syndrome are emotionless robots. Nothing could be further from the truth. We may sometimes appear that way, because our social awkwardness may cause us to be hesitant to engage with others socially, but in fact, like our personal obsessive interests, our emotional lives often run to passionate extremes.
27 Dec 2013, 4:01 pm
