r/aspergers • u/jackaa_fackaa • 21h ago
Lack of empathy towards "family/life" things?
NOTE: Throughout this post i try to be as objective as i can with a serious outlook on it. I'm genuinely just confused as i do *not understand these things. I have tried immensely but i just cannot get behind it. So please, if it reads as very negative, it is not my intention, just to clear that out. Also, this is written in a very weird way, so i apologise. I'm not a native speaker.*
I'm not sure how to get my thoughts into text form but I am unable to empathise with things such as family/life achievements, but strictly connected to family.
A little background, M20 here, I come from a neglectful and abusive family, so family as a concept is very distorted to me as i have no good experiences with it. I'm always surprised if the parents of someone treat their children as normal parents should.
As a child, I was always the "black sheep" and outcasted from all conversations and interactions, always disregarded and considered stupid or "too young". So no surprises why I have some resentment towards the concept as a whole.
Now here's where the "problem" lies. Let's say, my half sister just gave birth. Why am i expected to be happy for her and jump around her as of an outer worldly miracle just happened? I don't feel anything. In my mind, it's just a normal human process of life, just as idk, excretion, I mean, it doesn't take much to become pregnant, just need a man to "nut" in you and there. Not so "special" when you rationalize it.
I'm also the type of person who will not pretend to appease other people for their own ego. Maybe because I despise lying and liars. I'd rather be honest than pretend to be something I'm not.
Back to the giving birth thing. Everyone is so surprised when i just shrug my shoulders when I'm asked information that i couldn't care less for. "Oh how many weeks, this, that?" I don't know??? Why am i supposed to know these things? Why should i be interested just because it's a normalized societal thing? I don't even really have contacts with my half sister as we're way too different in age and everything, really. I just couldn't care less what people do in their life. I just subconsciously seem to pick apart things that are "interesting" and "boring" and store them in my memory. Then again, my memory is filled with so much stuff that the average person might find useless if they're not centered in such field of interest. (Art, history, biology, etc.) I try not to be eccentric (I'm an artist) but it still comes out that way. I just wish to be normal at times.
I'm really confused. I always have to tread on eggshell whenever i have to speak just so i don't say something wrong or in a wrong tone or with a wrong facial expression/gesture. It's tiring.
I genuinely feel like a robot with "learned" emotions but heavily lacking empathy in certain areas. I tend to rationalize things more than "feel". Maybe that's why i suck so much at it.
Does anyone else experience this? High empathy in one area and little to no empathy in the other? How do you cope/work with this?
I'm happily open to any discussions on such topics.
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u/DavidBehave01 16h ago
I do get the family thing. Just because someone is related doesn't give them a special pass. I never fitted in with my family and as I got older (I'm now 57), I lost touch with them and don't regret it at all.
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u/abc123doraemi 20h ago
The whole idea (which I think in general people with Aspergers have difficulty grasping and also lack self-awareness to know that they are not grasping it) is that you’re happy because she’s happy. It’s just that simple. You’re interested because she’s interested. That doesn’t mean that that interest becomes your new hyper focus. Or that you need to obsess over asking the right questions. It’s simply…you feel happiness because she feels happiness and that sparks curiosity (not hyper fixation) to attend to this thing that is bringing her happiness. That curiosity might be in the form of asking some questions or getting to know the thing (not in the autistic “know” but familiarize yourself with the thing and be curious about why it brings her happiness). It’s very simple…you feel joy because she feels joy and that informs where you place your attention (i.e. on the thing that is triggering her joy). And I think your inability to do that and grasp that is a deficit in empathy. You mention high empathy in certain areas and low empathy in others. I don’t know if you described any high empathy situations. But hyperfocus and empathy are separate things.
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u/jackaa_fackaa 20h ago
Now that i think about it, i probably have absolutely no clue what i actually feel or what empathy even is or if it's just pattern recognition with a "desired" outcome. The more I try to understand it and myself the more I'm left with even more questions.
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u/abc123doraemi 20h ago
I think you’re dealing with a lot. Asperger’s plus a challenging childhood with parents who were abusive or not attuned to your needs is really hard to sort through. It makes sense that you’re struggling with understanding empathy. Do you have any interest in finding a therapist who supports people with autism? If so, aane.org might be a good place to start. Good luck 🍀
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u/jackaa_fackaa 19h ago
Thank you for your concern. I already have a general therapist but due to having health insurance issues i had to put it off for 4 months now. So I'll have to wait for a few weeks till the holidays are over so i can get back on track.
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u/Great_Hamster 17h ago
This sounds familiar.
I keep an internal list of what reactions will make people happy when they tell me things I don't intrinsically care about, and then I can choose to react that way if I want to.
I normally want to, because some of these people I love, more I like, and yet more I want to have good experiences in this life because I believe that is what people generally deserve.
But the choice is mine.
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u/Cyberfaust11 20h ago
I totally feel and agree with everything you said.
I think I have more empathy than 'they' do (neurotypicals and family-type people celebrating boring things like you described), but I just have my emotions and happiness for more amazing things.
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u/KikiYuyu 14h ago
You can't just say you have empathy and then shit all over things that matter to other people my dude
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u/jackaa_fackaa 13h ago
Nobody is shitting on anything, i have no idea where you've gotten that from. Just because you consider something "boring"/uninteresting doesn't mean you "shit" on it?
People can find my in-depth knowledge and rambling about a war issued drug or something along my special interests really fucking boring but do i resent them for feeling that way? No. Is it "shitting" on my interest? No. Does it mean they don't have empathy at all? Also no.
It's fine to have empathy for one thing and have no empathy for the other thing. Also, "you can't say you have empathy then do xyz" by that logic, you just completely negated empathy as a whole because of some weird personal biases you have going on? Just because you "don't care" about things that matter to people doesn't mean you have no empathy at all. Some people empathise with animals, people with shared experiences (good/bad) fiction etc.
In my case, i just can't empathize with my family and their lives at all. I have no interest in them. Because i also don't understand. There's also a difference between not being able to understand something and blatantly not caring.
I could go ramble all night but it's getting late.
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u/KikiYuyu 13h ago
No offence but you clearly have problems with empathy. I'm not gonna take a lecture on that subject from you.
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u/jackaa_fackaa 13h ago
Yes, that's why i made this post in the first place. Doesn't mean that i can be completely disregarded for that or my stances on it.
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u/KikiYuyu 13h ago
You seem happy to disregard the feelings of others daily. You only have a problem with me because it has to do with you.
This is what your energy feels like to other people. This is what it feels like to be on the other hand of someone who is dismissive. This is what it feels like to be shrugged at when sharing something you're excited about.
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u/jackaa_fackaa 12h ago
Where are you pulling these statements from? Out of your ass? "Happy to disregard the feelings of others daily?" My energy? Lady, I'm autistic, not an evil moustache twirling villain you seem to try and paint me as such. At this point this discussion is going truly nowhere without some weird bitter undertones. /gen
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u/KikiYuyu 11h ago
Well you responded to my first comment by saying I was "parroting" something and "yadda yadda". I was trying to be earnest in my effort to help, and you just right away say I'm mindlessly repeating something boring you don't want to hear.
Autism isn't an excuse. I have it too. When people tell me I've hurt them, I don't just rant about how stupid and irrational they all are. I don't ask for help and then say "yadda yadda" when I don't love what I hear.
You're missing the hypocrisy here. You think I shouldn't disregard your input, but you're openly disregarding me and your entire family. You don't have to understand someone super well to not be an abrasive jerk.
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u/jackaa_fackaa 3h ago
Sure, that might've come off as mean but i was also taking in mind some other comments on this post that were basically the same and constantly fixated on the birth thing. It's not just about the birth thing, it's about family in general. Maybe i wasn't clear enough as i do suck explaining things through text. And no, I'm not using autism as an excuse. I'm only so fixated on this situation because it's related to family. I don't have a problem with friends or other people. Just family is the main one. So yes, I am biased against that.
And you have to take into account that my family is quite abusive/complicated to the point where i was almost taken away twice so of course I'd rather not spend time with them and I'll try to cut them out when I'll be able to live on my own. Because why should I pour my energy into something that keeps dragging me down for over 20 years? Yet I have to stay complicit and keep revolving around their lives because they're too insecure to be alone for one second.
My point still lies, why should I pretend to appease them when I'm only there for their own commodity? /gen
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u/KikiYuyu 14h ago
You are mistaking "looking at things objectively" for being extremely reductive and dismissive. Reducing everything to its most basic elements does not = objective or accurate.
People have feelings. Ignoring them and not factoring them will give you an incorrect conclusion.
If you look at a birth as just the result of sex, of course it's no big deal. But think about what that means to a person.
A new life is coming, someone they will raise, someone they will watch grow, someone they will know for the rest of their lives. A child is not just any old human, but someone you have a unique relationship with you don't have with anyone else.
But before the child even gets here, there are 9 months of pregnancy to go through. Can you even imagine what it must be like to go through that? Worrying that everything is going right, wondering what it will be like when you actually have to push the baby out, worrying about you or the baby having health problems or even dying.
No matter what, life won't be the same. And even though infant and mother mortality rates are way down from our past, it's not off the table. THAT is why birth is celebrated. Not because it's rare, or defies expectations. But it's a celebration that hey, in this shitty life, something went really right.
So again, you are not really being as objective about this as you think. You don't understand the feelings of others, so you are looking at things as if those feelings are not even a factor. It's like you are trying to solve an equation with half of the necessary information.
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u/jackaa_fackaa 13h ago
You can parrot this over and over about how important and feelings of the other person yadda yadda yadda but my point still stands. I'm unable to understand. I've tried a million times but it's like trying to describe colours to a man who was totally blind since birth. And it'll never go through my head.
This is not just about the birth thing but about the whole "knowing what goes in everyone's lives in the family" thing. That I am expected to show interest in things that i couldn't possibly care about or don't really involve me. I just live and let live. I'm not getting involved in anyone's lives so who am i actually bothering? Nobody, but people who seek validation through me to feed their ego. (I know my sibling and yes, she is like that, also vouched by my mother.)
So what if we're siblings, doesn't mean that we have a good relationship with eachother, if any relationship at all.
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u/KikiYuyu 13h ago
Oh you made it sound like you wanted to understand something. But if you're so happy with your current attitude and outlook, why are you complaining.
It just seems like you don't even want to try to understand, but you want people to understand you. Not how it works.
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u/friedonionscent 1h ago
If you don't feel any closeness/bond towards your family, then your half sister announcing her pregnancy probably feels no different to a random stranger announcing her pregnancy.
Yeah, pregnancy itself is nothing new but to that person - it's a big deal. It's their first time bringing a human into the world and if that's not important...what is? The inner workings of a toaster? We're excited for them, not necessarily for ourselves. But again, being happy for someone usually involves caring for that person in some way and if you don't, then you don't.
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u/bishtap 19h ago edited 19h ago
If you had a wife that gave birth to your child then you probably would see significance of it.
Or how amazing it is that a human produces a human
It's more incredible biologically than urinating. It's very life changing. It's Bringing a person into the world. The concept that a little person grows inside somebody. It happens all the time but that doesn't mean it's not an incredible thing in nature. And for the person whose body changes for it.
Being distant from the pregnant person or relative is something else.
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u/jackaa_fackaa 19h ago
I'm antinatalist so i do not sadly see this as an inherintly positive thing. If not, I'd be filled with a sense of dread. Being the reason of another person's existence is more of a tragedy to me as I'm riddled with genetic predispositions to mental disorders and other health conditions that have been passed on for 4 generations.
And no, the concept of growing life does not have an "incredible" appeal to me. A disease can also be life-changing yet it's not celebrated. (Unless you have enemies you want dead) What i find incredible is people doing things that are out of their "biological" ability, not in line with "nature", simply put.
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16h ago
[deleted]
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u/jackaa_fackaa 16h ago
I never brought up the fact that i bring up my stance on antinatalism in a conversation. I just don't know how to respond to questions from other people who assume that i somehow know/am interested in my half sister's life story. I always get "but she's your sister!" So what? Am i not allowed to perhaps distance myself from prople that i was never close to begin with? It doesn't make sense to me.
And i do not go into my feelings. I simply reply with "I don't know" because i truly don't know nor care about the info they ask me for.
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u/saikron 18h ago
I have a pet theory that the stereotype of lack of empathy and lack of emotion in autistic people is actually just a superficial side effect of
problemsdifferences in focus and attention.A lot of us have one or two things we're focused on, and everything else is at best boring or at worst an infuriating annoyance. Some of us struggle to spare attention on even our own bodily functions or hygiene, let alone our own emotions, let alone the emotions of others.
Probably in my late teens I had a realization, "Y'know how shitty it feels when you're excitedly explaining an obscure video game to somebody and they say, 'I don't care'? That must be what it feels like when somebody is sharing something they're excited about with me, and I can't even be bothered to be excited that they're excited." I just decided I would try not to be as shitty to others as some people have been to me. I don't always succeed, but I try.
It doesn't help though that many of us are also not super interested in going through the motions and performing the social rituals that most other people do instinctively. I imagine that for a normal person, the fact that they're copying the same motions and phrases and emotions they have seen others do in the same social situations (like hearing a family member has a baby), is just beneath their level of perception. They're not aware of it enough for it to bother them at all.
From my point of view, the issue is that I am aware of the fact that these behaviors are a ritual or an act, not that it's an act for me and nobody else. But I think some rituals are worth the effort.