Hello, welcome to another episode of Unpacking Neuroqueerness. This is your
host, George Muniz Gund. In this episode, I'm going to talk a little more
about autistic empathy and why it is so misunderstood. Now, early listeners of
this podcast might remember I did do a brief episode on empathy before episode
31, but I've learned a lot since then. And I've learned a lot more. I've learned
this... my therapist brought something to my attention that made a lot of sense, and
it made me rethink my whole understanding of autistic empathy versus how
it's perceived by neurotypicals because it can differ from neurotypical
empathy and the way we're conditioned in society to feel empathy or what the
right, the so-called right way of feeling empathy is. Anyways, just as a quick
refresher on the last episode about empathy, I did way back in December of
2022, if I'm not mistaken. I talked... if I'm not mistaken, I talked in that
episode about difference in between emotional empathy and cognitive empathy.
And I spoke of hyper empathy among autistic people, and I spoke of how, for a
lot of autistic people, including myself, I'm speaking a lot... a lot of this is
coming from my experience, I feel really intense empathy towards... not... I feel like
if someone is upset, it distressed or whatnot, I feel that so intensely, and
sometimes even more intensely than the person, if it's a non-autistic person,
for instance, sometimes they do not even... they're not even aware that they're
experiencing a certain feeling, a certain sadness, a certain frustration, a certain
resentment, whatever it may be, and I'll pick up on that. And I believe studies
have shown that autistic people do have more intense experiences with emotional
empathy and hyper empathy, and I can certainly relate to that, because I feel
that not just with people, but I have felt that, and I have heard about other
autistic people feeling it with objects as well, like a towel. Like if there's a
towel, and it's like under a bunch of other towels, and it's like I'm folding
towels, and I don't... like something happens and another towel gets in front
of that one, like I would not so much anymore, but when I was a kid, I would be
in situations where I would be feeling bad for the towel, or I would like... you
know, I would get like really attached to a certain car, and then that I had, you
know, and I would like... I remember just thinking of like machines and objects as
people, and like having feelings, and then like feeling bad for them, so back to my
my feelings around people. I... and how I feel most autistics are in general from
the support groups I've been a part of, and other autistic people I've interacted
with over the years. It seems like we're really good at perceiving when someone
is feeling something so much so that the person that is feeling that thing
might not even be aware of it in that moment, and they might later come to
realize and tell us, oh, I realized that I noticed I was upset about this or that,
and we're like, oh, yeah, you know, we had a feeling like... so we're really... I feel
like I personally as an autistic person have a very heightened sense of
emotional empathy. Now, where the... now the thing is that can be... that is different
than cognitive empathy, whereas like understanding why the person is upset,
and that this is basically what I talked about in the last episode. Like, I
struggle as an autistic person with understanding why the person is upset,
and sometimes it's because sometimes they know why they're upset, but I still
can't understand. Sometimes they might not even realize that they're upset, and
this is where the... what my therapist told me about recently comes in, is that
it's not just me being hyper aware to them. It can... it can be, but it... sometimes
it's not just me being hyper aware to them being upset or me being triggered by
some kind of previous trauma. Sometimes it's actually because they... I have such a
heightened sensory sensitivity to emotional stuff and feelings, including
from other people, that I might pick up on that before them, and then that might
put me into sensory overload, and I might shut down. Well, and a lot of autistic
people experience this where they shut down. If you're... you have such an amount
of sensory or emotional overload, which is sensory related as well, it's all
connected, that causes you to shut down and then not say anything or do anything
or even move your face sometimes, because you're in just kind of a paralysis mode,
or autistic inertia, as I've heard it referred to before, and I certainly
experienced that. And so then the other person, when they're having this intense
emotional moment, and you're... you shut down because you're actually like so
overwhelmed by it, but they don't see that. And medical professionals, when
they go to assess children, they don't see that either. A lot of times children
don't get the diagnosed, and I've read documents of assessments of that
psychologists have... psychiatrists have written, saying that they were not... that
the child cannot be autistic because they displayed empathy. And it's like, no,
like it's... this is a wrong way of viewing it, because the person... because...
because you're not looking at the internal experience, because this is my big
problem with the medical community not listening to the lived experience of
autistic individuals, because if... if researchers were to ask autistic individuals,
like, what was your experience? Like, what is your experience around empathy? It
would become clear that we would... you know, they would understand that we
experience so much empathy, we actually get overloaded with it, and we shut down,
and that's the part that people don't see. So then people only see the shutdown
part, and then we get told that we don't have it, and then it gets... it gets written
and documented that autistic people don't have empathy. And then we have
stigmas and stereotypes going wild, and tropes and TV shows and movies that show
autistic people... characters played by neurotypical people, written by neurotypical
people that are like cold robots, because that's what a lot of neurotypical
people think autistic people are. And it's really dehumanizing, and it's really
frustrating to continue to see this narrative and this trope propagated
because of the lack of... of the lack of having our voices heard by the medical
community, and just... and that speaking to deeper issues such as systemic
ableism, which there... there's no way to... to just discuss that in... in one episode
as... as regular listeners of this podcast will... will know and... and you know, whoever
is familiar with the neurodiversity paradigm and however... how long we've
been fighting this fight, but anyways... this is one of the worst, most frustrating
pieces of misinformation that... that I still come across out there. So I felt
like it was necessary to make this episode and clear the air kind of a
refresher to my first episode on autistic empathy as well, but with this
new sensory component and the understanding of that embedded in there
as well. So without further ado, thank you for listening to this episode. I hope
you're able to get something out of it and I'll see you next time.