Lack of empathy?

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Christ, you have just explained exactly how I feel about this empathy thing, except you have put it in more explainable words that I would. Reading everywhere that Nts are empathetic just throws me, and gets me wondering why so many Nts can't empathise with people like me, well, my close relatives can, and maybe one or two close friends, but otherwise people in general just don't seem to care how I feel. It does seem like people only care when they want to care or when they feel they have to, but otherwise most people are out for number 1. I know a lot of people who think that just because they like something they seem to think everybody else likes it too, even things that not all Nts are necessarily interested in. Not everyone is like that, but I have some Nts who are like it and it seems to just be embedded into their personality.

I think empathy is when I understand and care about how someone feels because I've been through it myself. If I haven't but still care it's sympathy. When I used to live in a home I only remember one staff member who showed kindness and understanding towards me when I woke up in the middle of the night one summer with an awful anxiety attack- chest pain, difficulty breathing, nausea, that horrible feeling of impending doom that no one who hasn't felt it could possibly know bad it really is - because she had experienced it herself. The rest of the staff was pretty much colder than ice, and society sees anxiety sufferers as just another thing to laugh at and ridicule. Does feeling empathy at all mean I might NOT have Asperger's?

no i dont have it at all

As an ICU Nurse I see patients suffering and I see worried family members and I have no problems empathizing. In fact being a new nurse I have a lot more empathy than most of my NT coworkers (It seems cold indifference is a coping mechanism for working with critically ill patients). I think I have no problems empathizing because the circumstances make the patient's and family's emotional states quite obvious.

I believe it all goes back to the inability to read people.

At home is a different story, my wife might say I am a horrible empathizer, because after 10 years of marriage she expects me to just understand what is going on in her head. I am more than willing to "be there", smother her with affection, whatever she needs, if she just tells me, because I will never be able to just pick up on it on my own. Similarly if a co-worker is having a bad day, I might run roughshod over them because I don't pick up on it unless they tell me.

It seems to me that NTs learn to hide their feelings and also learn how to pick up on hidden cues. I learned neither. I told my coworkers when my dog died and that I was having a rough time. I am an open book.

So, no I don't buy that Aspies are unempathetic, we just don't always recognize circumstances that warrant empathy (an more than half the blame there lies with NTs who hide their feelings.)

Empathy is when you imagine what the other person is feeling or going through and understanding him/her. Sometimes I do feel empathy, but only if the situation that the other person is going through has happened similarly to me. Most of the times I find myself not understanding what the next person is feeling. I don't know what to say but I try just so I wouldn't seem cold-hearted.

If a neurotypical comes whining to me that her boyfriend broke up with her, I find it hard to understand her even if I try to put myself in her shoes. I can't even understand the pain of a divorce, but I can understand the death of a person because it's naturally the strongest pain one has to go through in life. But yes, I find it hard relating to other people and understanding their situations, it's like I want them to just get over their situation simply because I don't know what to say, what to do, or how to say things because of the fear of saying the wrong things.

Sometimes I lack it, sometimes I go totally the opposite and am extremely empathetic. It's weird. I also sometimes have empathy for inanimate objects.

Lol have to say that I've just had my NT mate on the phone with the exact same thing 15 min ago, except he's only been married for 8 years. And it's definitely a male/female thing don't know any guy who can do it. Definitely not always a lack of empathy, sometimes its just telling you to pay more attention, she's had a bad day or something else http://www.amazon.com/Mars-Women-Venus- ... 006016848X interesting book, well worth the read (generates more questions than answers but its a start).

I know from experience you have to learn to harden your emotions in nursing/health care professions as it gets to you eventually especially when you've lost someone yourself. The block protects you at work and lets you relax it at home and stops seepage. Even in a short time it can get to you, even when your not handling patients (Used to do lab tests). No one who doesn't care could ever do that job (nursing), I know I could never manage it.

NT's do try to hide there feelings but it does leak out more when under emotional stress or when they particularly want you to feel sorry for them, empathise with them or help them (hard to know which) then they can exaggerate them sometimes.

I don't think it means that you don't have Asperger's, after going through the posts here it seems to me that there's a lot of individual diversity. I think saying people with autism lack empathy might be a little too simple, it seems that we do have some problems with empathy but it might be very specific aspects of empathy.

About what you wrote about your anxiety attack, I find that a lot of NT's only have empathy to the degree in which the other person is similar to them or is experiencing a situation which they have been through as well. Not what I'd call strong empathy. I've experienced many times that people don't understand my feelings and thinking and are only able to consider how they would feel. They don't seem to comprehend that someone else might have very different goals, motives, drives feelings, ... and they simply classify that person as "weird" or "abnormal". So I'd say a lot of NT's aren't exactly a good example of empathy themselves.

Empathy is imagining how someone else feels in a situation. Like, if their grandmother died (I use this example a lot), you could empathize and see how they would feel.

I definitely lack empathy. And since I lack it so, people often think I'm mean or I'm a monster or something for not realizing how someone else feels.

You could definitely still have Asperger's. There are a lot of symptoms I don't have, where I saw them and was like, "People do that?" and then others where I was laughing at how familiar that symptom was. Since Asperger's is so mild on the spectrum, you can have only a few symptoms and still have AS. Hope I helped you

I'm certain that I don't lack empathy. Sometimes I may not pick up on people's feelings, because I miss the facial expressions and whatnot, but I do tend to feel distressed when I see someone suffering badly. Also, I'm a pretty altruistic person. I'm not trying to say that I'm an amazing person- far from it. Too often I get caught up in my own selfish desires and treat my family poorly.

Also, I agree that a lot of NT's show selective empathy. They'll treat people that are part of their 'tribe' well, but if you're different from them, they'll be indifferent at best, cruel at worst. For some reason, it doesn't seem as prominent in Aspies, probably because we rely on logic more than raw emotions.

Empathy is when you're able to detect, without anyone telling you, that you're boring your conversation partner with all that monologue about your coin collection. Most of us aspies don't have empathy - however much compassionate we may be. Many aspies still nowadays confuse empathy and compassion, but there's no connection between the two. Once you are able to detect the other's state of mind, you can use it for compassionate goals or for selfish goals.

Empathy is the ability to detect. Compassion is the desire to help or at least not use the empathy in self-interest. Being sad for another's pain has nothing to do with empathy. If you're sad for their pain because you were told with words that they're in pain, then it's not empathy (although it's compassion, of course). Empathy is an intuitive ability to gather information and nothing else.

Eg: my siblings knew instinctively the state of mind of our parents and used that ability to cheat, steal and humiliate our parents. I was always clueless to my parents' state of mind, but if told it in words, I was always going out of my way to help them. Guess who got to be their caretaker when they were old and sick till they died. My siblings have empathy, I have compassion.

I've been trying to understand what empathy is for a week now...this definition made it "click" in my mind, thanks!

I am able to do this, but I don't think that I do it automatically. I have to *try* to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they're feeling. I'm not sure if I'm imagining correctly, I guess that's going to take some more learning to figure out. But when I try to empathize with people, I find that I feel more connected to them, and I guess more "normal" so to speak. I've been experimenting with my 1 year old son with this lately actually...I've been asking myself "if I were my son, what would make me happy" and than remembering things that had made him happy in the past, and doing those activities with him again. When I see the joy that it brings him, and realize that I brought him that joy by "putting myself in his shoes" I feel closer to him, and I enjoy my time with him more (and vice-versa I would imagine). But, like I said, I have to make a point of doing this, which I do.

I also realized that I never take the time to put myself in my husbands shoes, but I get mad at him for not putting himself in mine. I was so unaware of myself that I had no idea that I wasn't taking any time to imagine what it must be like to be him. Now that I understand that, I'm much less upset about him treating me the same way because I can understand that it probably just didn't dawn on him to think about it.

I don't know if this is considered lack of empathy or not but this is how I am a lot of times.

Say I'm looking around facebook and I see something about someone's loved one has a bad illness. I offer him/her my prayers and such. I don't always " Feel" that sadness and I will have much less important things on my mind, but I sincerely do hope and pray they get better. sometimes I feel like an awful person for not "feeling" anything but, that's how I am I suppose. Sometimes I feel it but more often than not I don't.

I have practically no empathy, as a child of around 9, I even started to suspect myself of being a psychopath due to this quality of mine. I saw grandpa being hurt and bleeding? Our watchdog died? My uncle, whom I knew very well, died? I didn't give a s**t. My mother was very surprised I didn't care for uncle - she thought I'd start to cry or something but nothing like that happened.

People react to death in so many different ways. Some cry; some don't. Some people just feel lonely. Some surround themselves with other people, or engage in lots of activity to take their minds off it. Some people get exhausted and withdraw. Some people just feel lost or confused. For people who aren't emotionally demonstrative, grieving can mean readjusting to your life without that person, because your life has now changed and it's thrown you off balance. It doesn't make sense to make the assumption that if you didn't cry, you didn't care. In reality people react in all sorts of ways and crying is only one of them. Especially in our culture where men have to be tough--heck, even girls sometimes feel like they have to be tough to avoid being seen as weak--and people just get used to not crying.

If someone's grandmother dies, I know they will likely be sad. Because people are usually sad when a loved one dies.

But I can't imagine myself feeling sad in this situation (putting myself in their shoes).

When 911 happened, I understood why my graduate advisor was so upset. I just wasn't feeling the same thing. I felt nothing except a feeling of "So what's gonna happen now?" (I know that's not a real feeling.)

I have two cats that I love very much. If something bad happened to them, I would be crushed. However, the other day a coworker was crying at her desk because her cat had died. I understood why she was sad and I think I said all the right things to comfort her, but I did not feel anything in response. Not sympathy or compassion.

I hate very much that I'm like this, and it is the biggest secret that I keep from everyone who knows me. I would never tell anyone that I don't feel for them, because I know how unsettling that would be.