Autistic people's feelings mostly misread – empathy works both ways, research reveals
Autistic people's feelings mostly misread – empathy works both ways, research reveals
Autistic person here:
I often ask people how they are feeling. Even though 90% of the time I can correctly tell by changes in a person's behavior, language, facial expressions, intonation, etc, I am aware that I can't literally read minds and the most obvious solution to this is just ask.
The 90% correct guessing figure comes from asking people and validating or invalidating my guess.
However, in at least my personal experience, neurotypicals almost never read my emotions correctly, will tell me how I am feeling, and essentially never ask. If they do ask, they will often get frustrated by how complex my emotions are, to the point that they vastly oversimplify to the point of caricature.
Then they go on to do or say things based on how they think I feel or felt and functionally spread lies about me constantly, which I am constantly bewildered by.
I would say that I am far more empathetic than most neurotypicals I meet or know, far more likely to spend my time and energy being emotionally available for them than they do for me, far less likely to assume my initial impression is correct, far more likely to truly engage.
As to the increased suicidality of Autistic people yeah that tracks with my lived experience.
Not in that I've personally considered suicide, but I am in constant tension of wanting to communicate with people vs essentially always being misinterpreted.
So I've just grown to be more and more content with mostly being alone.
Basically everyone I ever once thought I loved or trusted has been so utterly incapable of giving me 10% of the emotional support or availability that I feel I give them that I've learned that most people will exploit me and then scream at or assault me or have some kind of total emotional breakdown which they then blame me for whenever I am able to tell them how I feel.
Its beyond exhausting.
As an example that happens frequently to me: I also have a form of neuropathy, which often causes me to be in extreme amounts of pain for no obviously visible reason. I will tell people, I am not angry with you, I am in extreme pain, I have neuropathy, and they will just say no you aren't, no you don't you're just angry for (insert projection of their own insecurity here).
I am sorry to hear this. Please try to find more spectrum friends. It’s astonishing how nice it is to be friends with someone that can just be like. No worries I get it. And that’s it. Cause we both are empathetic of others and not just for show like most typicals. Typicals aren’t listening most of the time they are just waiting for their turn to speak. When I’m doing that it’s so I don’t forget my thought. Otherwise. Full focus on who I’m engaged with. It’s just so different and I think divergent to divergent is the more rational version of communication as we don’t run on MASSIVE assumptions like you are pointing out the typical in your life do.
As an allistic person who also puts lots of effort into being understanding and prefers to be conscious of and verify/disprove my assumptions, I agree that most people are maddening when it comes to this crap. I can have a full, detailed breakdown of my internal state ready to go and they'll just project onto me if they're riled up enough to not really be listening.
I've found the best trick you can pull when somebody does that is to find what you agree with them about and talk about that for a while. Once their head cools off a bit more and the conversation cools back down to normal emotional temperature, you can calmly tell them how you were really feeling and how it hurts to be misunderstood like that. Usually that elicits an embarrassed apology, from adults. If it doesn't, they probably don't want to be your friend, they wanted to be your abuser, and you their punching bag.
All just in my experience, of course.
The absolute worst, in my experience, is people who believe they are 'empaths', people who are hugely into superstitious nonsense like astrology or literal witchcraft, people who think they can 'manifest' things.
Those kinds of people have whole worldviews built around themselves being special, enlightened basically having superpowers.
They have no problem telling you how you feel or what you are thinking or why you did something, but if you even attempt to correct them, god forbid tell them they're literally delusional, they'll freak out and have a huge breakdown and cause as much drama as possible with everyone they know.
I have had waaaay too many of those kinds of people in my life.
I agree with you that most normal people would be embarrassed to learn they misread someone, but I seem to just have very bad luck of being surrounded by people who are just incapable of basic human decency.
The article is based on a study in Autism for which it doesn’t give a link, title, date, or authors. After searching that journal, I believe the source study is this: Non-autistic observers both detect and demonstrate the double empathy problem when evaluating interactions between autistic and non-autistic adults (Jones, D. R., Botha, M., Ackerman, R. A., King, K., & Sasson, N. J., Dec 2023).
It could also be this: Cheang, R. T., Skjevling, M., Blakemore, A. I., Kumari, V., & Puzzo, I. (2024). Do you feel me? Autism, empathic accuracy and the double empathy problem. Autism, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241252320
That fits too, and the article does quote two of that paper’s coauthors... although it doesn’t identify them as coauthors of the study in question, and it’s common for science journalism to get opinions on a study from scientists who have done similar work.
This has been pretty widely discussed under the name "the double empathy problem", although as always it's good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other's communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they're speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.
I wasn't sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I'm crazy indicates it's pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.
The idea is older than Milton. In 1988, Jim Sinclair wrote "Some Thoughts About Empathy":
https://web.archive.org/web/20090321213935/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/empathy.htm
Man, that's super useful information, directly so, and it explains a lot of issues I've had communicating with the autism support group that uses the same space as my chronic pain support group.
Now, I'd never thought they didn't have empathy, because plenty of them expressed it verbally, once something was verbally communicated to them. But it could be difficult to discuss things when emotions were high, and that's pretty common when timing means they're coming in as we're going out, and we've got members visibly upset, but only to people that can read emotion visually.
Makes so much sense out of things.
Legit, even if this information only helps this one situation to bridge the gap between a single neurotypical/neurodivergent interaction case, that's amazing.
Most of my human interaction is in a complete state of confusion on how the other person is emotionally feeling. At some point I decided I’m a good enough soul I can just let my ADHD/tism flow. But man some typicals don’t understand when you tell them. “Sorry I am divergent so I miss things.” No I don’t remember the first three things you said during your complaint at me. I was trying to figure out why your face looked angry when I haven’t interacted with you and it’s directed at me. Seems too illogical for me so I’m stunned rather than able to focus. And now you are annoyed cause I just seem aloof and your very direct complaint was ignored. Lmao. Communication is a mess sometimes and it sucks when you aren’t even aware of why and the other party is.
I wish I could say I "got it" immediately and never got grumpy with people, but I'd be lying.
But I've noticed that what you said about trusting your goodness and letting it flow is fairly common. It's pretty rare to run into someone that's divergent that's being mean or has ill intent by default. The more open folks are, the more direct, I find that they're also more likely to be good as their intent. Which I think is pretty damn cool
So the ovious question is: how good are autistic people at reading the feelings of other autistic people?
Actually, excellent. In groups, they cooperate in a better way than neurotypicals.
late diagnosed millenials are like the spiderman meme. finding out most of their close social circle was neurodivergent. not hard to predict self sorting like that. who wants to exhaust themselves trying to maintian connections with people who wont understand them and often get upset at being asked to try?
don't know about that specifically, but what i have read in general is that austistic people as good or better at communicating with each other than allistic people are with each other.
CW: self-harm
Between 11 and 66% of autistic adults think about suicide during their lifetime, [...] according to figures from 2020.
There's a big difference between 11% and 66%, that statistic is not useful without more information