Lack of empathy?

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I think another question to ask is, if you are ignoring a friend, how good of a friend are they? And if they aren't that good of a friend, do you really care how they feel if you ignore them?

I tend to be pretty low empathy. If I hear about a natural disaster or something bad on the news I think "Oh thats a shame." But I don't feel anything. However, I have learned that if an NT asks me if I feel about something like a natural disaster I should just lie and say yes because otherwise I usually get told that 1) I am cold 2) I should care about such things 3) its horrible I don't feel bad about it (of course this always amuses me a bit. Why do think I feel bad if I am told my reaction is horrible if I don't feel initially and this is what is causing them to give me the horrible speach?) 4) social values blah blah blah.

I also find that some people want some sort of show of feeling I just don't give or think to give or know how to give. I've been asked before "Well how do I know you care?" And my answer (if I do care) is "I told you I care." Because I tend to say what I mean and mean what I say I think this should be simple, but apparently it isn't.

It is possible for your friend feel that you are a good friend, but you see them as a transient temporary friend (what the other person feel that is important). In such a situation, some Aspies (and I have done it too in the past) can treat people they have know for months or a year, as if they never met them because there are no feeling of connection or friendship.

Prof. Fitzgerald (who’s writings I greatly respect) talks of autistic aggression. I understand this to mean that while most people gain a sense of connectedness and togetherness with others, but many on the spectrum fail to feel the “us/we feeling.” As a result some on the spectrum, especially if not they are not aware thy have AS/HFA, they can treat supposed loved ones as strangers. When angered they can treat people they have know for ages with as great cruelty, as if they were being cruel to a stranger they just met.

I met several people in my Aspie social club that were abandoned physically by their parents, one guy had a father that literally sailed off to New Zealand leaving him and his mother behind in Ireland (his boat was more important then his wife and child!).

I’m not going to claim that I’m innocent, I have probable pissed a number of people off in the past, I did ignore a guy once myself (but I also semi-deliberately pissed him off to make him go away). If I got on about this too much it is because I was greatly hurt over being abandoned by my ex-friend, there is no animosity or hate, more a logical understanding and a concern that she could cause herself and others trouble without knowing.

What is interesting is that you are empathicizing with the person who has been ignored. If the question were posed to me "what would happen if you ignored a friend" that certainly wouldn't be my first instinct. My fist instictict is to think of myself. Why am I doing this, how would [/i]I feel, what would I[i] be thinking, etc. Now of course if I were delibertly choosing to ignore someone (and I wasn't just being forgetful or putting things off because I was busy and I wasn't being obvlious to certain social gestures or clues and so forth) then I probably had a reason for ignoring that person. And that makes me think that from my perspective they weren't much of a friend of mine. If I am ignoring someone I probably don't want to interact with them. Two of my friends and myself all lived together once. And another girl moved in. She was awful. She lied and stole from us, etc. Now, if any of us happens to see her we don't just ignore her we actually hide from her because we want to avoid all things assosciated with her that much. There have been other people in the past whom I haven't ignored quite so vigorously but I have ignored or avoided because I wanted to not be around those people. So that meant the friendship wasn't working out for me. And normally I would tell people if apropriate but sometimes one just cannot do that and even if one does it doesn't always take. So in those scenarios I really don't care what that person felt.

Now if the question was "what would happen if a friend ignored you" I would say I wouldn't likely be their friend very long unless they stopped ignoring me and apologised and at least gave me some sort of excuse when I said "Hey, why are you ignoring me." And if I thought that person was my friend, then yes I imagine I would feel hurt. I would wonder why. But I wouldn't dwell on it. If I really wanted to know I would ask. If that didn't work I would assume it was them and then move on. Sometimes people with abdonment issues are people who have boundary issues they need to work on or self esteem and stuff.

I don’t care about it now and I’m over it long ago.

There were several reasons I felt that way, but mostly I was abandoned suddenly and there was no explanation. She just wrote me an email one day in May 1999 saying good bye to me and wishing me a happy life. She was my only friend. If I wrote about it in detail, it would fill a book. I felt like I was emotionally raped.

I was later told she was fleeing her mother who she hated and only was temporarily interested in me to marry her so she could flee. During the summer of 1999, she found an America to marry her and thus I was not needed and I was abandoned. She abandoned many other people, her ex-friend told me she was not a good first friend and she was sorry that I had me her.

She was an Aspie. She was obsessed with Mathematics and Star Trek Deep Space 9. Her social skills were poor e.g. she once pointed at my teeth and asked me why my teeth were crooked. She said she was schizoid, a “loner” and bulimic. She had spent several months as a novice Nun, she told me that if she became a full Nun the Nuns would own her, not her mother.

I now feel sorry for her. I worry that she will alienate other people and she will end up alone and hurting. I want to tell her about AS and tell her how much she hurt me, explain what happened, not in revenge but to help her and make her a better person. She is a good person, she cares about animals and would not hurt people deliberately, she just didn’t know my emotions, as I didn’t know hers.

It took me a long time to trust people again, for years after if I offended people I would immediately apologise over the littlest things. Or if someone stopped talking or emailing me, again I would get very worried and apologise, they perhaps were sick with the Flu or on holiday, they were never ignoring me. I developed PTSD.

If you ask me, the majority of NTs lack empathy more so than aspies or auties. Not only are they constantly picking on us because it's "funny" to watch someone get angry, they are always hurting each other as well (eg. abuse, beating each other up on the street, slavery ect.) And they also treat animals like objects instead of living creatures (factory farms, testing cosmetics, the circus ect.) Well you get the picture.

Big difference between lacking empathy and just behaving badly.

Some people make themselves feel better by making others miserable. This would take an understanding of empathy in my opinion. You'd have to know the wanted outcome to go out of your way to do this.

My daughter has trouble showing empathy, and when she does it scares her. Her emotions frighten her. She has a great deal of trouble realizing other people have thoughts and feelings, but I don't see that as lack of empathy. It's something else, some call it theory of mind, but I'm not sure that's correct either.

yikes.
I do not currently have anything articulate to contribute to this discussion (too much going on in head), but I relate to it very very much.

Ever since I was a kid I guess it is like my "empathometer" has had a short in it which causes it to not work or then go haywire at different times.

Um...like not outwardly grieving when my grandmother died..but going nuts when we had to give the kitttens away..that's one example I can think of.

I see the empathy issue as having multiple parts. One is inability to grasp how other people may feel in a given situation, but I think there's another which is at least as common, and isn't so simple.

The less-than-social side of being an aspie can lead to a perception that one is cold, distant, aloof. I find this particularly common among aspies that are unusually bright. Where does this perception come from?

One is only going to make an automatic emotional/intellectual connection with a very small percentage of the population. A lot of people will seem too different, or it may be too hard to see through all of their social stuff -- to get beyond their thinking the way they were trained to, and acting as they were told. They probably have a lot of unique individuality hiding somewhere, but you can't find it. To an aspie, those people will always come across as extras in the movie of life. And when it's a challenge to have regular conversations with most of the stars, connection with those extras is simply not going to happen.

So this second side of things isn't really a general lack of empathy, it's the inability to easily make an emotional connection with people who you feel different from and/or don't really understand. And that may well apply to the vast majority of people you will ever meet.

I think thats very true. Not that we would want to make an emotional connection to all those "extras" even if we could. It seems like would take up a lot of emotional space and since I don't have a ton, I like to guard mine a bit. Some people have empathy at the push of a button like empathy machines. Since I'm not like that I have to save up the bits I do have and other emotional energies for people I suppose for when it really counts... Not that I always know that.

I've lng thought that empathy is the most useless word of all. Its a horribly large catch phrase used to cover a multitude of meanings.

i am a teen and when one of my bst frends told my abut his granddad was in the hospital i told him "god for him" because his granddad was sick so i did't think like him i did't know what too say soo i thinked it was good for his granddad too get help