So for all the heightened awareness about autism, and despite the fact that most people I meet say “I know someone who has an autistic child/brother/child of co-worker/etc.,” numerous myths about autism persist.
And, ok, I’ll admit it: One can feel a certain amount of satisfaction in debunking one of those, such as the claim that autistic persons lack empathy.
Last Sunday, Jim and Charlie went on one of their long, long, long bike rides. They go here and there and onto certain favorite streets. Charlie often rides ahead. He’s started going really really fast and Jim zooms after to keep up. Charlie’s learned about going left and right, about stopping at stop signs, about watching out for cars, all while riding his bike. (He does have to be careful around the rear view mirrors of parked cars—he crashed against one once and fell off his bike.) (Falling itself being, I guess you could say, part of the whole kid-bike experience.) Sometimes they stop for sodas and snacks and sit where they can see the bikes.
Sunday was warm, autumn colors lining the roads, and Jim told me how broadly Charlie was beaming as they peddled through a park. They were coming out on a path and came upon a father and his son, who was about four years old and on a little bike with training wheels. As Jim recounted to me, the father was saying things like this:
“You’re not doing it right. You don’t remember everything I showed you yesterday. You’re not getting it right.”
Charlie rode by and, just as he did, the other little boy burst out crying.
The glow immediately left Charlie’s face. He was nervous and weepy, Jim told me; he was very agitated for another whole mile.
He’d heard another child crying and he felt bad. He felt with another child, in sympathy, which is from the ancient Greek word sym for “(together) with” and pathos, “feel,” and also a root word in “empathy.”
Which isn’t lacking in our household.
Empathy –noun
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.
It is quite possible, if not likely, that Charlie did NOT have #1. There are other very good explanations, such as disliking the sound, reacting to the angry voice without a thought to the other child, or such. What you are doing is more akin to #2 but more like “projecting” because Charlie is a person.
But that’s OK because the difficulty in empathy cuts both ways. It’s going to be tough for you to understand Charlie’s POV. That isn’t to say you can’t learn it well enough to guess, just as Charlie can learn to guess by having an NT’s reasoning explicitly explained to him. Of course this is an ability that comes with age. Particularly in the range of reaching late teens (there are physiological changes in the brain that occur). So it isn’t particularly easy for any child to have a very deep understanding of another person’s feelings.
Empathy (#1 definition) implies a deep understanding of someone else’s state of mind. The larger the difference in how your mind works from the target the harder it becomes because the more synthetic and simulated the formation of this understanding is.
Those are the REAL myths:
1) That an NT empathizing for someone on the spectrum is naturally accurate.
2) That the apparent lower level of empathy by someone on the spectrum is all about a vast difference in ability within someone on the spectrum than an NT.
[...] Autism myths abound and Kev is collecting, and dissecting, them at this new site. One myth that especailly irks me is the notion that autistic kids are “in their own world” and “withdrawn into themselves” and, generally, “out of it.” [...]