#ITS A WORD. TO DESCRIBE. AUTISTIC HYPEREMPATHY

[sirompp]

every time i see people misusing/making fun of the word empath i lose a year off my life

[painted-crow]

Secondary Toast Revolving Door, Part 1

I guess I should start with a little about me, since that’s easier than making you pick through previous asks for information and some of you guys are new here. This one’s going to be heavily personal, so you can skip it if you want.

I’m a double Bird. My Bird primary system is heavily Badger influenced, and I also use Lion to support it by telling me when I should investigate something more closely. If we can dip into primary territory for a moment, I guess you can say I understand the world through systems that model things around me. But not all of those systems are things I’ve consciously examined, or fully investigated.

My understanding of how historical people dressed is pretty limited, for example, because I haven’t studied it in depth to get all the information—but I consciously understand what I do know about it. You could say this system piece is tiny but clear; I could expand it if I chose to find out more.

My understanding of how someone I’m not close to thinks might have more data to work with, but I haven’t consciously processed it; that’s the kind of thing where my Lion primary model will tell me to look closer if that person starts acting weird. This system piece might be described as huge but fuzzy; I could clarify it if I sat down and thought about it. I probably have more of these than I realize, but Lion basically takes care of monitoring those. I don’t have to investigate everything.

But some of my systems are both large and fairly clear, because I’ve taken the time both to gather data on them and to examine it. My understanding of myself is… well, I won’t say it’s terribly clear, because I’m in my early twenties and I’m still constantly getting new information, plus someone keeps changing the environment and mucking with my data (that would be me). But I have to examine it, because my brain is like a notoriously buggy piece of software and I’m the poor schmuck saddled with tech support duties.

Basically, the reason I’m good at playing therapist with other people is that I’m constantly doing exactly that thing with myself. (This probably makes me a very annoying patient for actual therapists.)

About that buggy brain, then.

I have major depression. That was professionally diagnosed when I was a teenager and it’s probably genetic. I take medication for it, when I remember to. It especially flares up in the winter or when I’m under stress. I probably have some kind of anxiety disorder too.

I’m almost certainly autistic, which I’ve never brought up with a professional—the first person to figure it out was the system I’m now best friends with, because they’re autistic and they knew I was within two weeks of talking to me. It took me two years to catch up with them and figure it out myself.

In my defense, I thought executive dysfunction, sensory overwhelm, dissociation, and hyperempathy were like… secret menu items for depression, because those only really bug me during depressive episodes. My current theory is that they’re related to autistic burnout instead.

I mask a lot, subconsciously—it’s actually really hard to turn that off normally—and I just can’t do that as much when depressed. If I do, my tolerance for everything else goes way down and I’ll go into overwhelm and start having shutdowns and dissociating. I recover pretty quickly (hours, not days), but if you’ve never spent 15 minutes standing in a Walmart aisle trying to decide whether you want a jar of peanut butter, but you can’t make decisions because you can’t access your emotions and you don’t really feel like you’re “here” but you kind of just want to go home… well, be glad I guess.

Of course, I have other autistic traits that show up when I’m not under stress, but they’re seldom associated with autism because most people don’t know what autis are like when we’re actually happy. Like, hyperlexia? That’s not even an “official” word, the auti community just uses it because “official” literature hasn’t caught up. I taught myself to read at age three (according to my mom; she says I was reading news headlines and stuff, not just books I’d memorized) and wrote a 35k word novella when I was ten, with no external prompting. My audio processing used to be terrible, but I routinely tested at college age reading levels as a kid.

I also might have ADHD? If so, it’s also mostly just noticeable if I’m under stress, and then it’s hard to tell if that’s the issue or if it’s just autism/depression again.

You might be getting a clearer picture of how my secondary and its model end up burnt so often!

(Resisting a very strong urge to cut stuff from this post.)

In short, I was a Gifted Kid. I spent a lot of my teen years biting off more than I could chew, honestly. I felt that I should be able to do more, and I wanted to be taken seriously, but I had basically no idea how to take care of myself because my needs are different from everyone else’s. I’m still figuring those out.

I’m kind of like an orchid plant: incredibly picky about conditions, wants a different “soil” and watering schedule, gets stressed if stuff changes too quickly, but when everything is just right and it does bloom, it goes all out.

I’m not kidding when I say that I have odd needs. One of them is the need for creative work, which seems to be hardwired into me. When I say that art or writing keeps me sane, I often hear back “oh yeah! I’ve heard that can be very therapeutic,” which is an innocuous reply, but it’s always bugged me, and I think I’ve figured out why.

First, because that’s not the reason I make things… I just… have to. Second, I can’t “make up” not doing creative work with some other kind of therapy. Third and most importantly, I’d much rather think of “artist” as my ground state, and depression as a condition that happens when my needs aren’t being met, rather than thinking of depression as the default that I’m just using art to escape from. That seems to me a healthier way of thinking, and probably a more accurate one, but I’m probably the only one who can see that distinction.

If life gets in the way and I can’t make space for creative work, it will actively make my depression worse. I know this because, multiple times, I’ve been unable to pinpoint why I’m feeling shitty, and then I go back to my easel or my writing or (ukulele, cooking, even just taking care of houseplants) and realize I haven’t done anything creative in like a month and thaaaat’s the problem.

I crack open a bottle of gesso to prep some canvases and it smells like… well, I don’t think you can get high off gesso? But it’s not like when you’re out of it on painkillers or cold medicine or whatever. It’s incredibly grounding, like the world snaps back into focus but it’s also oddly euphoric. Or I write ten thousand words in a couple days and it just… I don’t know what that does. I’ve never run across a word for it.

The writer of Smile at Strangers (a really good memoir centered around women, anxiety, and karate) describes a similar feeling in relation to her martial arts practice.

It’s also a bit like when all the snow melts after winter and you step outside and there’s the smell of wet soil under sunlight and I’m not sure if this fully translates for people who don’t have seasonal depression. Sorry.

Dammit, I want to paint… I haven’t had space to set up for like eight months. I’ve been nose-deep in writing projects since last summer for a reason, but right now my friggin Ravenclaw secondary is off angsting about something because of Life Stress Bullshit, and I don’t have the focus to work on any of my writing projects. Apart from this one. But it’s not really what I want in terms of creative work.

*velociraptor screech*

Oh, yeah. I guess I could mention this is why my nickname is Paint. Not sure if that was obvious before. The header image (which is more visible in the app for some reason) is one of my paintings. It’s a tiny one and it’s not one of my favorites, but I had the photo on my phone and the colors work well enough for what I needed.

(restrains self from negging my own painting ability)

This is starting to get into spoiler territory for what burned Ravenclaw secondary looks like, huh? It’s peaced out for a couple weeks at this point. I’m trying to write about what made it take off, but my ability to think of words and form a coherent sentence kinda flew out the window when I approached it directly.

Let’s just say that around the start of the month, someone I was talking to online (if you’re reading this, it’s definitely not you) kindaaaa hit a nasty depression trigger of mine. Not their fault—it’s very specific to me, and I struggle to explain why I can’t really talk about it. Basically, I spent years studying programming and web design, and due to several different but related issues during that experience, it’s now a trigger for me. I very much want it not to be, but trying to train that out of myself has induced more than one panic attack and I’m stuck between giving up on it or figuring out a way to go back to it that doesn’t totally shut my brain down.

That paragraph took forever to write, by the way.

I think I have to end this here. I… am going to go take out the trash, and water my plants, and make my bed, and file some paperwork, and maybe I’ll even mix up some bread dough or do some laundry. Spoiler alert for what it looks like when my Hufflepuff model takes over, I guess.

Oh. And I should maybe probably eat something. I almost forgot about that... again.

[aromantic-eight]

I wrote this as a reply to a post ages ago but I think it warrants being its own post so that convo doesn't get dragged back up just to reblog this. For people who are unsure about definitions when I talk about empathy and morality:

1) Empathy: an instinctive emotional response to another person* who is in pain. Basically “when a person is hurt, I feel bad.” Can also work positively (”when a person is happy, I feel good.”). Sometimes equated or associated with theory of mind**. Often used synonymously and as the basis for compassion and morality (i.e. “the morality of x action is determined entirely by whether or not I feel bad when I do it”), probably because many people use it as their primary motivation for caring about other people (most people don’t want to feel bad, so they take steps to avoid that feeling). 

* Note that the definition of ‘person’ here is based entirely on what your lizard-brain decides is a person. For many neurotypical people this means “human beings who look/act like me, or people I identify with,”. For people with hyperempathy, it can also include things like stuffed animals, food, insects, other items around the house they’re fond of. 

**  There’s a whole Discussion about ‘emotional empathy’ vs ‘cognitive empathy’ that’s often used to argue that autistic people aren’t like Those Other, Nasty Low-Empathy people, nevermind that a significant percentage of autistic people are bad at both.

2) Respect for human life / Compassion: the recognition that other people are human beings who deserve to be treated with respect and who do not deserve to be hurt. The conscious decision to avoid needlessly harming others/ to try and help others when you can.

The former is generally an inborn trait or otherwise developed in childhood. It is, importantly, an automatic response that is for the most part out of our control. The latter is a skill that can and should be learned, and (importantly) can be learned and applied regardless of what emotional reactions you do or do not have, and can be learned and applied regardless of whether or not you personally are capable of feeling guilt.

The tension comes up because, as mentioned earlier, many people consider these two things as synonymous and, even more, consider empathy a prerequisite to compassion. It’s very very common to see people extolling empathy as the cornerstone of compassion (all morality needs is for people to have Basic Human Empathy / those people did bad things because they’re lacking in empathy). Most people who are low-empathy (i.e. they don’t experience this emotional reaction either at all or very little) are told their whole life that this makes them inherently incapable of being good people. They were just Born Bad, and and are told they will inevitably live a life where they do nothing but hurt everyone around them because they just Aren’t Able To Care, Like Real People Do. Most redemption arcs involving villains who Don’t Care revolve around said person acquiring empathy or otherwise Finally Feeling Guilty About What They Did, which only reinforces the message that unless you were born with a brain capable of experiencing these specific emotional reactions you cannot ever be a good person or a hero.

Even if you're not making a statement like "that person is evil because they lack empathy" it's very important to take a step back and look at which words you’re using to describe morality and compassion. The centering of empathy is common, and it’s everywhere, and it’s very very easy for an empathetic person to just go along with the flow instead of keeping focused on the skills that help everyone better their relationships. Someone can recognize that other people don’t deserve to be hurt without personally feeling distressed by their pain. Someone can recognize an action was morally wrong without personally experiencing guilt. Those are the things that can be taught and learned.

tl;dr: empathy is an automatic emotional response that cannot be learned. Compassion is a decision and a skill and can be learned, and there is no useful reason to conflate the two. We should be focusing on encouraging people to develop skills to relate to the people around them in healthy ways that minimize harm, instead of focusing on trying to rewire people to feel emotions that are, by their nature as emotions, not something that can be controlled.