I’ve long felt that everyone has difficulty with cognitive empathy and perspective taking when it comes to minds that work differently from their own. A couple of weeks back, I had an interesting experience along these lines.
At the dinner table, I asked my husband Bob the following question:
Do you think I’m odd?
Now, if you’re on the spectrum, you probably realize that I asked the question because I wanted to know what he thought. If you’re not on the spectrum, you might wonder whether the question were a setup, along the lines of Do you think I look fat?
My husband, who is neurotypical, was absolutely stymied. Now, please understand that he is a very empathetic man in every sense, and that he is also very socially adept in conventional ways. He can read most people extremely well. He’s very sensitive. He’s the sort of person who can listen to you and make you feel like you’re the only person in the room. He can also can walk into a large social situation and chat it up with anyone. I’m often in awe of his social graces.
But when I asked him the question, he hesitated. He looked very uncomfortable. In fact, he had a look on his face that I recognized immediately. It’s the one that I’m sure I have on my face in most social situations. It was as though he were thinking about all the possible ways he could respond and couldn’t figure out which one was the right one.
I felt a pang of recognition.
It was very clear to me that he wasn’t able to figure out by my facial expression, my body language, my nonverbal cues, or the look in my eyes where I was coming from. So I decided to help him out in a way that I wish more people would help me out: I told why I’d asked the question.
“Honey,” I said. “I’m asking you a straightforward question to which I want a straightforward answer. I’m interested in how you see me.”
I could see he was still stuck. His neurotypical brain was saying, “I really have to finesse this somehow.” And the part of him that knows that I’m nothing if not direct was thinking, “Okay, I should just be a mensch and answer the question.”
So I helped him out again. “Really,” I said, “you must know me well enough by now to know that I don’t ask a question to which I don’t want the answer.”
He seemed relieved, and he said, “No, I don’t think you’re odd. But I do think you’re different.”
I found that helpful. The thing is, he couldn’t figure out why.
We talked more about it the next morning. He was still curious as to why I’d asked the question. Our ensuing conversation was a crystal clear example of the fact that like minds understand like minds, and that my experience of other people is very different from his experience of other people:
Bob: “Why do you want to know what I think of you?”
Me: “Because I’m interested.”
Bob: “But what does it matter? My opinion is purely subjective. It doesn’t say anything essential about you.”
Me: “Oh, okay. Let me clarify. I wasn’t asking you to tell me something essential about myself. I was asking what you thought.”
Bob: “I don’t understand that. You’re the only one who knows whether you’re odd or not!”
Me: “You’re right. Inside myself, I feel perfectly normal. After all, I’ve always been me. But I’m not always able to read how other people see me, because I don’t think like they do, and your opinion helps me imagine how another person might view me. In other words, I’m information gathering.”
Bob: “Okay. I see. That makes sense.”
Me: “I’m glad you understand now.”
Please note the sheer number of words expended to explain my state of mind and where I was coming from. He could not tell until I verbalized it.
Sound familiar? I thought so.
The way I see it, everyone has difficulty empathizing with experiences and ways of thinking that seem foreign to their own.
It’s not an impairment. It’s just called being human.
This struck such a chord with me — in my case it’s my wife who’s NT and very adept in social situations. I rely on her to give me insight into other people in social situations because I have so much trouble understanding how they think.
My husband has been very helpful to me in that respect as well. I’ve learned a lot from him, and I put it to good use.
Ohhhh, I can just see your husband feeling like he was in the hot seat trying to see where you were going! I am in awe of people like your husband who have an innate ability to talk to others and do it well. I can but its not without effort and it’s such a struggle. Oftentimes say something I shouldn’t.
Thank you for pointing out something that seems obvious but oftentimes is not.
Yes, he definitely felt like he was in the hot seat. That’s why I was so quick to clarify.
Familiar? It is my life with most people… i say something and then spend days explaining what I meant… at 52 I am just now facing the real possibility that I have Asp… so many situations in my past.. memories as a child and teen… all seem to fit the situation… seeing myself as so logical and others as not…. a diagnosis of Asp would explain so much… but, now what… it feels like the mainstream health system has little clue on this issue… sign me off as overwhelmed.
Hi Jason,
I got diagnosed at 50 and I agree, the mainstream health system doesn’t offer us a whole lot. But we can offer a lot to one another. So please check around my blog for posts that interest you, and check out the blogs of other autists on my sidebar. There’s a lot of support that we give one another. I’ve found it invaluable.
Sounds like actual concrete evidence that being autistic really isn’t an impairment (which as a high-fuctioning autistic I firmly believe it’s not). Just another way of thinking as you put it if your husband couldn’t tell why you were asking the question without you explaining why. Maybe I’ll try posing the question of oddness to those who know me.
Yes, I don’t consider our cognitive empathy an impairment in any medical sense, though it can cause a lot of misunderstandings in social settings. I’m very grateful to have the power of words so that I can ask questions of others and clarify where I’m coming from.
This makes me uncomfortable because I ask my husband this question all the time. Seriously. Our conversations are like this:
Me: “Do you think I’m weird?”
Him: “Yes.”
Me: “Well how, exactly?”
Him: “I don’t know, you just are.”
Super helpful, that’s what he is. I sure hope you got some better perspective than I did.
Did you also get the “that’s why no one likes you” line growing up like I did? Most useless ‘help’ ever. (If I could figure out what I was doing wrong, I wouldn’t be doing it!)
I never got that particular line, probably because it would have been a blow to my parents’ egos to imagine that anyone wouldn’t like their daughter! (Yeah, they weren’t real tuned in…)
But I do remember my mother saying to me once: “You’re just like your father. You don’t like yourself. What’s wrong with you?”
Very, very helpful.
I didn’t get it from my parents–I got it from my peers. Thanks, because I wasn’t insecure enough to start with.
Oh, that’s awful. I didn’t get that line from my peers, although they communicated the sentiment in other, less direct ways.
I think the conversation went fairly smoothly because my husband’s response was “I think you’re different.” I know what the word “different” means coming from him in that context. Ever since I began to realize how Asperger’s affects me, my husband and I have shared a number of “Eureka!” moments about the sources of my difference from other people and how it manifests.
Now, if he had said, “Yes, I think you’re odd,” I’d have asked him a slew of clarifying questions.
For a moment, I seriously considered going to ask my NT roommate this same question, “do you think I’m odd?” just to hear the answer. But then, she’s just odd in a different way than I am, so I don’t even know that she’d be able to answer….
But we get along well largely because we both know that when we ask each other something, including “does this make me look fat,” we actually want the answer. It’s such an uncommon thing to encounter in other people that when we moved in together, it took me a while to get used to it.
I know what you mean, chavisory. When I find it in other people, I kind of stand their blinking for a second, trying to convince myself that I’m not dreaming.
This post, and the accompanying comments, are very relatable. In my case, I have gotten better at sussing people out, but I’m like a trained pony who learned how to count. It’s by rote (i.e., I have been made to understand what signs to look for now, what stock responses really mean, etc). It’s not intuitive at all, and will never be.
For me, I’ve learned so much over 53 years that it feels like I can draw on a huge store of information at will. It’s not intuitive, for the most part, and I miss most of the subtleties (or so people tell me), but I do a better job of reading people I know well than people I’ve just met. It’s as though I have a store of information for each individual person, in addition to understanding things I can apply more generally.
I agree with this post. It’s more easy to understand similar people.
With my parents I have to ask and guess things, unfortunately they think I am like them and misunderstand most things.
off topic.: I took the liberty to add your blog to my blog links section.
Hi Alicia,
How good to see you here! I recognize your name from the Autism and Empathy website.
Thank you so much for adding me to your blogroll. I hope you’ll feel at home here.
I have had so many conversations like this, except most people I ask don’t believe me when I say I am asking for information and not reassurance. Always the assumption that I want a specific answer rather than to know what their perceptions are.
I’ve run into something similar with my therapist, in that I have to explicitly lay out a lot of my motivations surrounding things I say as she tends to assume that I am focusing on the negative when I make factual statements, or assumes that I need reassurance when I try to explain a particular difficulty I have.
Hi Lisa,
I have been through many such situations as well, and I feel very fortunate to be married to someone who really listens. I have always felt that Bob gets what I’m about in a way that no one else ever has, and that when he doesn’t get it, he’s open to a conversation.
I am fortunate to still be married after 10 years and 3 kids, and they have been the hardest 10 years. My husband feels like he is hitting his head against the wall when it comes to him expressing how he feels, and me not being able to understand where he is coming from. I am always asking him to clarify. What do you mean by that? Really? You feel that way? Why? I just don’t get it? Why does that bother you? Can you just let it go? I am also very stubborn and have a really hard time saying sorry and admitting that I’m wrong, even when I can see truth in what he is telling me. I think part of me or most of me doesn’t want to feel the emotional pain associated with the truth.
Over the last year, I’ve almost given up. I repeatedly asked my husband to lower his expectations of me, because I guess I had the insight to know that there are things about me I can’t seem to change. He refuses to lower his expectations and I continue to feel the stress of not living up to them.
But now that we’ve been talking about Asperger’s, it is resonating with him, he is seeing that there may be a reason to my “difference”. He cannot understand me most of the time and he thinks I am being difficult or antagonistic when I ask him to clarify his feelings. I am really just looking to understand him.
This was fascinating. I use the same technique to calibrate my perception with reality. Sadly, it is hard to get direct answers. This is the worst part of autism. All my activity is pretty complex, in that I use repetitive behavior to control variables in my life. This conversational calibration helps me to adapt and discovered more appropriate behavior patterns and coping techniques.
Where I have the challenges in this area are two fold – first it is almost impossible for me to dealing with the couching and hedging phrases that occur in conversations with most NT folk. Second, my line of questioning is viewed as a form of personal self conscious paranoia rather than an honest means to personal improvement.
The whole problem is that autism is a neurological issue and society treats it as a behavioral issue. The longer I deal with this the more I see that rather than weeks of intense ABA brainwashing and conformity training of the Twilight Zone style, there would be far more benefit from a life coach of the Tony Robins mindset.
Traduction en français :
http://forum.asperansa.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2337