I often hear it said that autistic people have little or no ability to feel empathy for others. I find this misconception to be one of the most painful ones I face as an autistic person.
I have always known that I am very empathetic, and it is one of the qualities I value most in myself and in other people. To me, empathy is at the root of compassion and profound goodness. It is empathy that motivates us to allay the suffering of others, and to heal the world of war, injustice, poverty, and disease.
Every time I hear someone say that autistic people lack empathy, or have impaired empathy, I have to admit, I panic. I feel as though the core of my humanity is in question. “What must people think of me?” I wonder.
Part of the problem derives from the fact that the word empathy, like most other words, can have more than one meaning. In discussions about autism, the meaning is generally unclear. In working my way through this problem, I have found that the experience of empathy can be broadly defined in two ways.
From a cognitive perspective
When applied to autism in a clinical sense, the word empathy denotes an ability to read nonverbal cues in order to assess the feelings and state of mind of another person.
Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary (2002) reflects this use of the word empathy by defining it as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. (Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc)
To one degree or another, people on the spectrum lack the ability to read nonverbal cues, and therefore cannot understand other people’s feelings, thoughts, and experiences unless they take an “objectively explicit” form. For example, if a person is physically injured, or crying openly, most people on the spectrum will know that the person is in pain. If a person verbalizes his or her feelings, most people on the spectrum will have little difficulty understanding how the person feels. But if the person is communicating his or her feelings, thoughts, and experiences mainly through subtle nonverbal cues (such as body language and facial expressions), most autistic people cannot decode those cues with any consistency. Even if we learn to decode them to some degree, our ability to do so is delayed, because the process is not intuitive. Therefore, our response to the person’s needs is likely to be delayed as well.
Neuro-typical people often misinterpret the autistic person’s delayed response, or lack of response, as an inability to care for others. In truth, the deficit is cognitive, not emotional.
From an emotional perspective
The word empathy, as it is most widely used and understood, denotes the ability to identify with, and have compassion for, the feelings of another person.
Dictionary.com defines empathy as “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. (Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006)
Most people on the spectrum are fully capable of this form of empathy. I grew up during the Viet Nam war, and saw war footage every night on the network news stations. Even though I had never been in a war, I understood the fear, the suffering, the grief, and the hatred that war engenders. I could intellectually identify with how people must have felt, because I was able to imagine how I would feel were I in similar circumstances.
But my understanding goes beyond intellectually identifying with the victims of war and injustice. Even as a child, I vicariously experienced the suffering of others. In Hebrew school, we watched Nazi footage of what had happened in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. I saw films in which Jewish people were lined up at the edge of a ditch and shot. The empathy I felt for the people was immediate. I felt myself experiencing what they were experiencing, as though it were happening to me at that very moment. I felt the despair they felt as they watched, knowing they had no way out. I felt the terror of standing at the edge of the ditch, waiting to die. I felt the pain of the bullets entering their bodies. I can remember these feelings now, even as I write.
As an Aspie, I have a difficult time decoding nonverbal cues. In fact, before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I had no idea in the world that nonverbal cues even existed. To learn that they constitute an average of 90% of the ways people express themselves was a revelation to me. I couldn’t believe how much I’d been missing!
But my compassion remains intact. As Isabel Dziobek and Kim Rogers write in Who cares? Or: The Truth about Empathy in Individuals of the Autism Spectrum, the ability to empathize with others is as present in people with autism as it is in people with more typical neurological systems:
“Our data shows that people with Asperger’s syndrome have a reduced ability to read other peoples’ social cues (such as facial expressions or body language) but once aware of another’s circumstances or feelings, they will have the same degree of compassion as anyone else.”
I hope that this essential truth will eventually make its way into the general discourse about autism and autistic people. We will all be the better for it.
© 2008 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Glad to see another blogger on the block. It’s always refreshing (as well as informative) to know more about a person outside the discussion forums.
I look forward to seeing more crafts and knitting!!!
Hey Miles, thanks for the kudos. I just finished a cable-knit scarf for my husband made from homespun yarn from one of our sheep. My husband spins using a drop spindle. This was the first time I’d knit using homespun and I love it. I’ve got more projects planned for the winter…
Hi and well done on starting the blog. Your writing style is great, easily readable and interesting. I’m adding you to my RSS feeds.
I found what you had to say on empathy very interesting. As an aspie, I’m well aware of the stigma and the lack of truth to it. I struggle to find out exactly how it can be accurate and indeed, I’ve met some autistic people who claim to have no empathy.
I think that one of the main problems is in defining sympathy separately from empathy. Sympathy is when you feel sorry for someone, empathy involves feeling from their point of view.
I’m full of empathy when watching films, reading books, telling stories to my children etc. I have considerably less empathy for the everyday things in life, such as when I get home from work and my wife is annoyed because I’m late. I’m sure that there are non-verbal clues all around me but unless she specifically tells me that she’s annoyed because our children have driven her mad for thirty minutes longer than she expected, I often won’t realize. Even then, while I sympathize, I still find it difficult to feel this problem from her point of view.
Hi Gavin, good to see you here. You make some interesting points.
I’m not sure that I enter into a feeling of sympathy very much, mainly because I don’t like feeling sorry for anyone. The feeling stymies me, and I don’t know what to do. If I can empathize (imagine myself in the other persons’s shoes), then I can start to think about what may help them. I am very practical and solution-oriented.
For instance, I met a homeless woman a few days ago, and we talked for awhile about her situation. She and her husband lost their place in a fire, and he just became unemployed. I imagined the situation from her point of view, and realized what she needed: some encouraging words, and some cash. The words I gave her really seemed to work; she actually gave me a hug! That is a nonverbal cue I have no problem reading.
It is easy for me to empathize with someone close to me, or with someone who feels like an outsider, because that is so much of how I have always felt. People more toward the center of any group are more of a problem for me, because it’s harder for me to imagine their experience. But I think this is true for any human being; we tend to be able to empathize best with the people whose experiences we can relate to in some way.
When I first heard Aspergers mentioned in connection with my daughter, I thought “it can’t be- she has empathy- she cried when she watched Wall E (at the part where he seems to have lost his memory.)
Yet, there was one odd thing that I had noticed about her, she didn’t say goodbye to children from school who unexpectedly called out “Bye Dorothy.” I told her that I found it strange that she didn’t react. To an observer it seemed as if she was arrogantly ignoring. One time though, when someone spotted her from a distance and called out “hello” in passing, she called out a be-lated “hello” and I realised that there was a delay in her being able to react. She wanted to be friendly- but found it difficult to process the information- the verbal message and the non-verbal cues, simultaneously and quickly, before responding.
I was diagnosed at 57…about two years ago. My thoughts about empathy have been that there is too much… Since very young, other people’s emotions have been my problem- as if there was no boundary. I have had more concern for what others wanted than my own needs- to the point of not knowing what my needs were.
The overload means two things. One is a learned tendency to shut down or avoid emotions entirely. The other is a delayed response while I internally try to assess whether the situation, even a simple social situation, is one that I can handle. I especially relate to coming across as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unresponsive’, while clearly never wanting to be.
About crafts- I had sheep for years and made yarn with a drop spindle- and a spinning wheel. I love how it feels to guide the fibers through my fingers.
Thanks so much for your site, I have just begun to explore it. Phoebe.
Hi Phoebe,
Just last night, I finished writing an article about sensory overload. I’ll be posting it soon! Thanks so much for your comments.
You nailed my experiences with empathy on the head. Thanks for writing this!
I have always responded emotionally to movies, books, and animals (esp. cats). At first, I only really reacted to people I was close to, because they were the only ones I understood. As I grew, my range of empathy was “normal-” we are not sociopaths, but you can’t empathize with someone you can’t read.
I find the more time I spend on this planet, the more I understand its inhabitants. I am compotent enough at reading social clues now, most of the time, but wasn’t always. And I still don’t get super-subtle clues.
Your article on empathy is spot on.
Growing up I always felt that I was in some ways far more empathic than those around me. There were many movies and TV shows that I simply couldn’t watch, or more often, certain episodes of favorite shows that I couldn’t watch because I became too involved in the feelings of the characters. Even cartoons, I would find myself crying over what others saw as “silly”, because I could feel the pain that I knew I would be going through in those same situations.
However, when it came to reacting to family members, I always seemed to have either the wrong response or not nearly a strong enough response, or my response was so delayed that people didn’t believe it was “genuine”.
In movies or shows, I could see the events that wree causing the issues and upsets, however with family members I often had to judge their reactions and emotional states without having witnessed the cause, so unless things were spelled out for me I had no idea what was going on, and oftedn didn’t even know that anything was wrong at all.
These days, I can usually read my wife pretty well (though even after 10 years of marriage, it can still take me a while to “get” some things) but I still frequently have “inappropriate” responses to co-workers moods or feelings, (laughing at the wrong times, or getting angry at happy news, or just completely missing sarcasm altogether).
Craig, it’s true what you say about movies and shows: we see the whole picture, and so we can empathize right away. The rest of the time, we just can’t see everything, and our responses are delayed. That’s a great point. Thanks!
The standard belief that autistics lack empathy has made me doubt my own autism many times. Now, instead of doubting my autism, I doubt the belief. I have more empathy than I can handle sometimes. If people are in emotional pain, I can feel it, and it functions much like any other type of energy: the closer I am in physical proximity, the stronger I feel it. There are so many homeless people in my city and I walk by them everyday. I can’t help all of them, but I want to. It hurts to know that they have nowhere to go, and maybe nothing to eat. I bring nuts and seeds with me whenever I go out so I can feed birds and squirrels when I see them, because it hurts me to know that they have to work so hard to find their food. I can’t even bear to read about animal rescues regardless of how happy the ending is, because the content prior to the ending will make me ache so much I practically shut down.
I think that this kind of empathy is extremely common among autistics, and accounts for much of the reason that we withdraw from the presence of other people. It’s not for lack of interest, that’s for sure.
I’ve been thinking that I should write a book about autism and empathy. I’ve got two other books I’m working on, so it would have to wait a bit, but it’s something to consider.
All of your comments are VERY interesting to me as a music therapist that works with autistic children. You’re right in that the subject of “empathy,” or rather lack of an indication of such, is stigmatic. In fact, I’ve read special needs evaluations that almost seemed to imply selfishness or incapacity to care about others. Because displays of affection and separation anxiety are not uncommon observations, I knew this interpretation was ludicrous! So much time is spent trying to teach empathy empirically through labeling emotions by what their physical manifestations looks like, what might cause them, etc. Obviously, not enough time is spent teaching to cope with the emotional overload that might, in actuality, be occurring because empathy IS there but misinterpreted by others. I truly thank you for your perspective.