Empathy and Autism

I know what people mean when they say that autistic people don’t have empathy. I know the whole mind-blind theory. And yes, it’s true that many autistic people struggle to interpret body language and facial expression or to predict what neurotypical people think is obvious to predict. Because we don’t mimic this behavior, we often appear to be “unemotional,” or even inhuman. We look like Spock on Stark Trek perhaps. I’ve often been told that I don’t have any emotions at all, and sometimes I even believed it because I don’t always have emotions that track neurotypical experiences of life. But then I’m also accused of being overly emotional because I cry when people don’t expect it, when I’ve overwhelmed or hurt by something that seems tiny to other people.

Let me just suggest here that the problem works both ways. There’s no reason to make it so that autistic people are the ones who are defective. Neurotypical people have just as much trouble reading autistic people as we do you. It’s just you don’t think we have anything inside there, and we know you do and we can’t figure it out. There is also a smaller subset of autistic people (mostly, but not entirely women) who are over-empathetic. I suspect this is because women are more overtly directed to be empathetic and autistic people tend to take rules to extremes because it’s one of our survival mechanisms.