I would like to apologize for my joke, to you whether you were offended or not, and to anybody else who might have been offended. I was thinking of the punchline to a joke, and I didn’t consider that I might have been offensive in my setup.
I saw your reply yesterday and wanted to marinate on it before responding.
My basic conclusion is that I was thinking of people who are psychopaths, not autistic people, but that even then, I should not be this offensive to people who are psychopaths. I am told that there are perfectly decent people out there who suffer from psychopathy, but they make it work.
I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect that I am on the autism spectrum. (Maybe just dipping my toe in at this point, maybe a little more, maybe a lot more.) And probably as a result of that, I generally avoid autism knowledge like a plague. I hate the feeling like I could learn something and second-guess myself or feel like I’m powerless to resist.
So, maybe you can confirm what I’m about to say, but I don’t think autistic people basically lack empathy, so much as they have a hard time identifying with a neurotypical person. I certainly don’t lack empathy. If anything, I think I feel more empathy than most other people. But, I suspect that an autistic person might feel more empathy for animals than humans, for example, but they don’t feel zero empathy unless they are also psychopaths. Is this an incorrect understanding?
Either way, I think I will try to avoid being offensive to psychopaths in the future.
I think that autistic people are bad at implicit learning, but good at explicit learning.
There are two kinds of empathy: affective empathy for feelings, and cognitive empathy for thoughts. Affective empathy is pretty easy to learn. But cognitive empathy is really hard to learn, and they don’t offer lessons in it at school. They just kinda expect kids to pick it up over time.
Autistic kids don’t just pick up knowledge over time. You have to teach them. So we figure out the affective stuff fine, but we often hit a roadblock with the cognitive stuff. We can’t figure out how other people think. It doesn’t happen until we put years of effort into it, often as an adult.
People with narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder often struggle with affective empathy. These disorders are linked with Adverse Childhood Experiences - childhood trauma. They correlate with having been abused. Some adults will abuse children, either intentionally or accidentally, using empathy. They will dump their big adult feelings and big adult problems onto their kids. Or they will use feelings to manipulate kids into doing what they want. Like this: “Mummy had a really big day at work and is feeling really stressed, and mummy’s gonna cry if you don’t get that bottle of wine out of the fridge.” That’s child abuse. And if you put a child in that position, a lot of the more strong-willing children are going to figure out how to turn off their affective empathy. They’re going to learn that turning off their affective empathy is the correct way to survive.
I have NPD, and I had a biological mother who did some pretty fucked up stuff I can’t even remember, and heard about second hand. And I can turn My empathy on or off at will. And neurotypicals, with their magical gifts for automatic cognitive empathy, can tell I have that ability. It scares them. I can mask it, I can stick to small talk and keep things shallow. But if I open up, people can tell I have this skill I used to survive childhood. And they’re scared I’ll use it on them. It’s like a prey response, they tense up and act hostile towards Me. I creep them the fuck out.
And it’s made Me easier to abuse as an adult. There’s this technique, DARVO, that abusers use, where they accuse the victim of being the abuser, you can look it up. DARVO is super effective against people like Me. What protected Me as a child becomes dangerous to even have access to as an adult. I have an ex who accused Me of abuse and told all our mutual friends. And I asked about a dozen people “How do they say I abused them?” Nobody could say. My ex has a current partner who’s a private investigator as a hobby, and didn’t believe the rumours. Tried to track down what the narrative was and understand what’s going on. There was no narrative. My ex didn’t say a single thing about what I supposedly did, other than the word “abuse”. People were willing to believe one word and outcast Me over it. It fucked Me up pretty bad for several years.
So thanks for taking the time to think about this stuff. I used the autism as a starting point because people have an easier time understanding autism. And it is true, the NPD stuff didn’t start causing stigma until adulthood, as a kid it was all about the autism. But since you were taking Me seriously and thinking about it on your own, I decided to give you the full story. I’m studying psychology because I want to help other people like Me, so I know a lot about these disorders now, and I want to use that knowledge to help others. My teachers are afraid of the clinical NPD population, but I’m not. I’ve known people with NPD who did fit the stereotype, who were openly abusive, and they didn’t scare Me. I could see they were just acting out a trauma pattern, they weren’t happy being what they were. If I can help those people, it will also help their victims. And there’s a lot of non-abusers with NPD out there who can’t find a psychologist specialised in treating the problems we have, because psychologists are too afraid to get that training. Those people deserve My help, because I’m one of the few who can help them.
That is fascinating. Thank you for the response. Interestingly, your description of autism and implicit learning does not resonate with me, at all. In fact, I strangely feel like I have a subconscious side of my brain that is far smarter than the conscious side of my brain, if that makes sense. And as a result, I have a very strong intuition about what other people are thinking, for example.
If anything from your description, I felt more resonance with your description of NPD, but that’s probably only because I’m relatively narcissistic in the normal sense. I don’t think there is likely to be any disorder from that or any trauma that could cause it. Maybe it’s because I can flip a switch where I become much more manipulative. Or maybe I’m just empathizing with you. I did have an ex who broke up with me after she purposely wound me up and then said that she thought I was going to hurt her. So maybe that’s it.
I have basically zero academic understanding of psychology, so I can’t really participate in this analysis. But I appreciate you have spoken about it in a way that I could understand, and I’m pleased that you’ve decided to use your experience to help people. I wish you the best of luck.
![Growing up can be scary [Feral Mills]](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/218f453e-22eb-4003-ade2-569f9a34743c.webp){kind=link}
If you have no empathy, you’ll never really be a human, and the best you can ever hope for is to become a historically unpopular world leader.
I’ll take shit I heard because I grew up autistic for 200, Alex
I would like to apologize for my joke, to you whether you were offended or not, and to anybody else who might have been offended. I was thinking of the punchline to a joke, and I didn’t consider that I might have been offensive in my setup.
I saw your reply yesterday and wanted to marinate on it before responding.
My basic conclusion is that I was thinking of people who are psychopaths, not autistic people, but that even then, I should not be this offensive to people who are psychopaths. I am told that there are perfectly decent people out there who suffer from psychopathy, but they make it work.
I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect that I am on the autism spectrum. (Maybe just dipping my toe in at this point, maybe a little more, maybe a lot more.) And probably as a result of that, I generally avoid autism knowledge like a plague. I hate the feeling like I could learn something and second-guess myself or feel like I’m powerless to resist.
So, maybe you can confirm what I’m about to say, but I don’t think autistic people basically lack empathy, so much as they have a hard time identifying with a neurotypical person. I certainly don’t lack empathy. If anything, I think I feel more empathy than most other people. But, I suspect that an autistic person might feel more empathy for animals than humans, for example, but they don’t feel zero empathy unless they are also psychopaths. Is this an incorrect understanding?
Either way, I think I will try to avoid being offensive to psychopaths in the future.
I think that autistic people are bad at implicit learning, but good at explicit learning.
There are two kinds of empathy: affective empathy for feelings, and cognitive empathy for thoughts. Affective empathy is pretty easy to learn. But cognitive empathy is really hard to learn, and they don’t offer lessons in it at school. They just kinda expect kids to pick it up over time.
Autistic kids don’t just pick up knowledge over time. You have to teach them. So we figure out the affective stuff fine, but we often hit a roadblock with the cognitive stuff. We can’t figure out how other people think. It doesn’t happen until we put years of effort into it, often as an adult.
People with narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder often struggle with affective empathy. These disorders are linked with Adverse Childhood Experiences - childhood trauma. They correlate with having been abused. Some adults will abuse children, either intentionally or accidentally, using empathy. They will dump their big adult feelings and big adult problems onto their kids. Or they will use feelings to manipulate kids into doing what they want. Like this: “Mummy had a really big day at work and is feeling really stressed, and mummy’s gonna cry if you don’t get that bottle of wine out of the fridge.” That’s child abuse. And if you put a child in that position, a lot of the more strong-willing children are going to figure out how to turn off their affective empathy. They’re going to learn that turning off their affective empathy is the correct way to survive.
I have NPD, and I had a biological mother who did some pretty fucked up stuff I can’t even remember, and heard about second hand. And I can turn My empathy on or off at will. And neurotypicals, with their magical gifts for automatic cognitive empathy, can tell I have that ability. It scares them. I can mask it, I can stick to small talk and keep things shallow. But if I open up, people can tell I have this skill I used to survive childhood. And they’re scared I’ll use it on them. It’s like a prey response, they tense up and act hostile towards Me. I creep them the fuck out.
And it’s made Me easier to abuse as an adult. There’s this technique, DARVO, that abusers use, where they accuse the victim of being the abuser, you can look it up. DARVO is super effective against people like Me. What protected Me as a child becomes dangerous to even have access to as an adult. I have an ex who accused Me of abuse and told all our mutual friends. And I asked about a dozen people “How do they say I abused them?” Nobody could say. My ex has a current partner who’s a private investigator as a hobby, and didn’t believe the rumours. Tried to track down what the narrative was and understand what’s going on. There was no narrative. My ex didn’t say a single thing about what I supposedly did, other than the word “abuse”. People were willing to believe one word and outcast Me over it. It fucked Me up pretty bad for several years.
So thanks for taking the time to think about this stuff. I used the autism as a starting point because people have an easier time understanding autism. And it is true, the NPD stuff didn’t start causing stigma until adulthood, as a kid it was all about the autism. But since you were taking Me seriously and thinking about it on your own, I decided to give you the full story. I’m studying psychology because I want to help other people like Me, so I know a lot about these disorders now, and I want to use that knowledge to help others. My teachers are afraid of the clinical NPD population, but I’m not. I’ve known people with NPD who did fit the stereotype, who were openly abusive, and they didn’t scare Me. I could see they were just acting out a trauma pattern, they weren’t happy being what they were. If I can help those people, it will also help their victims. And there’s a lot of non-abusers with NPD out there who can’t find a psychologist specialised in treating the problems we have, because psychologists are too afraid to get that training. Those people deserve My help, because I’m one of the few who can help them.
That is fascinating. Thank you for the response. Interestingly, your description of autism and implicit learning does not resonate with me, at all. In fact, I strangely feel like I have a subconscious side of my brain that is far smarter than the conscious side of my brain, if that makes sense. And as a result, I have a very strong intuition about what other people are thinking, for example.
If anything from your description, I felt more resonance with your description of NPD, but that’s probably only because I’m relatively narcissistic in the normal sense. I don’t think there is likely to be any disorder from that or any trauma that could cause it. Maybe it’s because I can flip a switch where I become much more manipulative. Or maybe I’m just empathizing with you. I did have an ex who broke up with me after she purposely wound me up and then said that she thought I was going to hurt her. So maybe that’s it.
I have basically zero academic understanding of psychology, so I can’t really participate in this analysis. But I appreciate you have spoken about it in a way that I could understand, and I’m pleased that you’ve decided to use your experience to help people. I wish you the best of luck.
Or if you’re born into wealth, CEO is also an option!