There is a myth that autistic people are not empathetic. It is a common belief within the psychiatric community, such that some people seeking their diagnosis are told they can't be autistic because they display empathy.
It's a dangerous assumption to say that autistic people are not empathetic. For some people it would lump us in with psychopathy or sociopathy which can occur along with autism but is not a feature of autism or a comorbidity. And, it can give autistic people an even more negative view of themselves than we already tend to have.
We are empathetic. Many of us have to avoid watching the news, because we so deeply feel the problems of the world that it can send us into a meltdown or shut down. For many of us, the issue is that we feel too much. We feel it all, and it overwhelms us. We are considerably more sensitive to the feelings of others as well as our own emotions. It is common for an autistic person to cope with this from an early age by avoiding and locking away this part of themselves as much as possible. We bury those feelings so deep that we sometimes don't even know what we're feeling, we just know we feel bad.
We feel it truly and deeply when someone is hurting, or struggling. Much of the time we can sense it before we're even told - as we tend to be able to see the truth of other people even when it is hidden. We're excellent at spotting liars for that reason. (but we give everyone the benefit of the doubt anyway) We genuinely want to help. What we don't do however, is display sympathy. We often feel extremely awkward in these situations because any type of social interaction is difficult for us and we each have a history of experiencing rebuttal and rejection for our lack of social skills and it leads us to overthink and question ourselves, especially in more difficult, emotional charged situations. We end to freeze up and not know what to do, we fear doing or saying the wrong thing because we have done it so many times before.
So while we seem to be sitting there silently, saying nothing about the fact that your loved one just died our that you've fallen ill, we are radiating love and care your way. We just don't say it aloud. We don't know how.
Those of us who mask, may have better abilities with this because we have been studying what other people do in these situations for so long. Yet, when we say the words we know we are supposed to say, it feels hollow and empty. It doesn't feel like enough. There's a novel worth of words in our hearts, so much we want to say but we have learned that kind of gushing outpour of emotion is rarely welcome. Even if we were to say it, we'd then question if it was too much, not enough, if it is pale in comparison to the emotions, if it sounded patronizing. And that stops us again, from saying it, because we've worked out all the possibilities and we know that if we say the wrong thing we can cause an already hurting person to feel even worse - and because of how empathetic we truly are - that is the absolute last thing we'd ever want to cause. We absolutely detest the notion of causing or adding to pain. We know pain. We feel ours intensely. We feel yours. We want to see less of it in the world and its a large part of the reason we struggle to lie or be deceitful, except where we've learned to do it as part of masking. It's just not true to our hearts.
Now for the irony of all of this - when we see an allistic person expressing sympathy to others, we can tell when it isn't sincere. When they're going through the motions because they're supposed to, because that's what you do. On the surface, to everyone else, that person may seem sympathetic or empathetic but we know that they're just saying it...they don't truly feel it. And that's not in every case, but it is common and I think many people know this about themselves even if they don't admit to it. It's not to say that a person who sometimes expresses false sympathy is never empathetic, just that it does happen in many people, pretty often. We autistics struggle to do anything that is "just going through the motions". It is one of those things that our brains simply cannot fathom. If we know we don't actually feel that way then it feels like a lie. And we truly do not like to lie.
Many autistic people are brimming with empathy, but it seems when allistic people say we don't have empathy what they mean is that we don't display sympathy. It is a conundrum, when we so easily read a lack of empathy in allistic people. It's just another way we are misunderstood.
No comments:
Post a Comment