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I don’t remember exactly what you said in which ask, nonny, but:

Honestly I think there are a goodly number of people out there who confuse “I’m not very in touch with my emotions” with “I must not have them” and… 

…this is uncharitable, but having seen how angry this discussion seems to make some folks who think I’m calling them evil (which is a perfectly sensible thing to be angry at, mind you, though it’s not what I think I’m doing)…

…I suspect that at least some of the people in it are having things I’d recognize/label as “intense emotions” but they’re reporting “my emotions are weak and inconsistent.” 

Which either means I’m reading their tone wrong (too much of a positive ping on my detector for “frustrated/insulted” because I’m too NT-like to get it), or that I’m reading them right and they’re not recognizing they do have Large Feels about this at least.

I think part of the reason is alexithymia.

I see a lot of people with alexithymia describe it as “not feeling emotions very strongly”. But the psych research on alexithymia describes it more as “inability to tell what emotions you are feeling”. Case reports describe things like people attempting suicide, showing a ton of behavioural signs of depression, but saying that they don’t understand why they’re doing this stuff because they’re not feeling sad. Or, in less extreme examples, having clear physiological signs suggesting a likely emotion, such as increased heart rate in absence of a physical reason, but not being able to identify an emotion underlying these responses.

I suspect what’s often going on is that people with alexithymia are feeling emotions, and sometimes expressing them in ways others can pick up on (although probably with less accuracy than reading people without alexithymia), meanwhile not being consciously aware of those emotions.

So someone with alexithymia might claim not to feel empathy because they don’t feel *conscious* empathy, while subconsciously feeling empathy and basing decisions off of it, which they then proceed to explain as conscious processes because the conscious mind loves to confabulate things it can’t explain. Similar to how people with left spatial neglect will base decisions on things to their left side despite not consciously perceiving them and then misattribute the reasoning for that decision to a conscious factor.

Oh. Oh gosh.

Oh goodness. Yes, that could explain it. Oh wow.

I can’t tell you how many times in this conversation I’ve read a post where someone is, as I parse it, very upset, yet telling me they have extremely flat or inconsistent affect.

Or how often the same people saying that have an entire blog full of social issue stuff where they don’t just post about someone getting hurt for unjust reasons but sound mad about it to me (anger is an emotion imo) or where they post something about a good ally or wise action and seem happy or hopeful to me (so are those things.)

So a bunch of this discussion seems to me like “but… you… you have emotions all the time? You’re having them DIRECTLY AT ME right now, completely understandably but also so ‘loudly’ it’s impossible for me not to feel emotions back. Which understandably makes you react to me being angry, which… etc.”

Or even situations where someone who tells me “I have low empathy, meaning I don’t feel much for others” do things that seem to me to arise from emotions about others. Which puts me in a bind, because I want to say “you do have empathy, I’ve seen it, and some of it looks affective to me!”

But I don’t want to claim there isn’t a reason someone labeled them that way. So I just go “nnnnnnwhahahshfnf….” and people can tell I’m annoyed but not why.

Which makes me go “hey wait, either I’m much worse at perceiving others’ emotions accurately than I (and several NTs I know) think I am and MY empathy is low rather than high as everyone outside this particular conversation seems to say it is or… you don’t define emotion in a way I understand. Wtf.”

But if I’m perceiving how they feel more directly than they are, and they’re having to think it through, then… that makes way more sense.

Thanks. I feel distinctly less like I’ve gone completely crazy now.

Let me try to put it as clearly as I possibly can.

I don’t lack emotions. They might be inconsistent and inappropriately calibrated, but I have them. I haven’t seen anyone you’ve talked to claiming they lacked emotions entirely, though it’s possible I’ve missed some context. 

What I lack is emotional response to another person’s distress. By drawing on other experiences, both my own and ones I’ve heard about, of what’s distressing them, I can come to the conclusion that their suffering is wrong and I should try to ameliorate it. I don’t (so far as I know) lack cognitive empathy. I’m capable of thinking “it really sucked when I fell down the stairs, so it probably sucks for this person too. Therefore, because I value a world in which fewer people suffer, I should help them.” 

I don’t, however, experience an emotion in response to their emotion. I might, as I mentioned above, experience a memory of a time that I felt similar, but that’s entirely theoretical. I am not someone who can look at a crying person and feel a tug on my heartstrings. It’s just a piece I’m missing. Perhaps, by your standards, that makes me a person in whose presence you feel uncomfortable. That is your right. But I have done my damnedest to construct a moral code in which that absence is not disabling. 

Yeah, I’m a little baffled by the insistence that strong affective empathy is the same thing as like…. having emotions about things. It’s not. It’s not even remotely the same thing, and it’s not even remotely universal even among people who are entirely neurotypical. Like, this whole line of discussion has been crossing my dash over and over again, and it’s frankly the most bizarre thing that I’ve seen on tumblr this week, which, let me tell you, is a high bar.

‘I am angry/frustrated/annoyed by your post and feel compelled to respond to it’ is an emotional response. It has not a goddamn thing to do with empathy, affective or otherwise.

OP seems to be conflating affective empathy, cognitive empathy, compassion, moral reasoning, and emotions in general all together in a really weird way. Those are all different things. Most people have some degree of affective empathy, but it varies widely, and insisting that anyone who’s not an amoral monster must experience strong emotional mirroring (or otherwise be suppressing it, or too ignorant of their own psychology to understand what’s happening in their own heads) is kind of ridiculous.

ETA: Also, people getting annoyed because they feel that you’re deliberately misunderstanding them are not reflecting back your anger; they’re annoyed at your behavior. That’s a different thing. That’s emotion, not empathy.

That’s actually what’s weird to me. People are saying “emotions aren’t necessary for moral action,” and I’m saying “but much of action is fueled by emotion, so much of moral action, as a subset of action, would be too. Most of what I’ve seen suggests ‘empathy’ is a major driver of most altruistic action.”

And people are saying “but you can be moral by reason alone; my emotions are super erratic, so I can’t make them part of why I do things, or at least not morality-things. If I did, I *couldnt* be consistently moral.”

Which is confusing because no one has explained how that works yet. And when I ask them to they say “hey whoa I HAVE EMOTIONS CHILL” and it’s weird because… I’m not the one saying you don’t, you’re the one saying they only show up some of the time?

I guess I still don’t understand where the sticking point is, because to my reading (a) that’s not what people are saying at all and (b) several people in this conversation have explained themselves repeatedly and clearly. This may just be like an extrovert/introvert thing, where the experience of one group is so profoundly alien to how the other group functions that they find it impossible to–if you’ll pardon the term–empathize with.

It’s not ‘my emotions are super erratic’, it’s ‘my direct emotional response to other people’s emotions or distress or pain is inconsistent if it’s there at all and therefore my moral choices for how to respond to a person in distress have to be considered rather than impulsive because the automatic impulse to alleviate their distress isn’t always there’. 

Some people see a person burst into tears and have an immediate, automatic response of ‘OH NO YOU’RE CRYING WHAT’S WRONG HOW CAN I HELP? (often modulated by an adult awareness of appropriate social response, but still present). People with very strong affective empathy will experience this even if they can’t stand the crying person. They find the sight of another person’s distress automatically distressing. That’s emotional mirroring.

Some people don’t experience that, or don’t experience it strongly or consistently. The vast majority of the time, if I see someone burst into tears–even if it’s someone I love–my immediate, automatic emotional response is ‘…huh. You seem upset.’ I come across as very stilted and cold in-person; I’m actually a lot better at responding appropriately online, because I have more space to make a conscious, deliberate choice to respond with compassion instead of blank indifference.

It’s not that there’s no emotion there, but it’s farther back. It isn’t an automatic mirroring. It’s ‘I don’t want to see you in pain because I know that it feels bad to be in pain,’ not ‘I don’t want to see you in pain because your pain is directly painful to me.’ I have to reason it out to get to the correct response.

Aaand I think that’s about all I can say on the subject; if that doesn’t clarify it, I don’t think anything I say will, so I think I’m going to bow out of this one now.

If “morality is a matter of reason alone” is not the claim, there is no disagreement. That is the only thing I take issue with. I do not think not mirroring is an indication of badness.

If “morality is a matter of reason alone” is taken off the table, then the dispute is entirely about whether “lack of empathy” should be used in a less precise way to mean “consistently not caring about others” or whether it should be reserved specifically to speak about failure to mirror.

The reason I’m reluctant to give up the broader usage is because I find it handy as a way to talk about the behavior and seeming motivations of the Administration. Part of what offends me so much about the things they do is that they don’t honestly seem to believe doing bad things is the best way to be helpful or that certain cruelties are actually a necessary evil; they seem invested not just in failing to regard other people but also in inducing others to do the same.

and part of the way they do taht is, I think, by inciting fear so as to breed callousness, which is a particular kind of lack of emotional response (or of turning off one you’d otherwise have thanks to some excuse.)

I think it’s unfortunate that the two uses exist side by side! But I haven’t found a suitable replacement for the second one, and I want to be able to talk specifically about what the fascists are doing rather than just say “people sound callous now” or something.

I don’t think morality is inherently a matter of reason alone. I don’t think it inherently involves emotion, either. I suspect that the meta-disagreement here is that one camp is trying to find a sort of unified theory of morality and the other is content to parse it as many separate-but-clustered impulses. I think human cognition, and therefore motivation, is extraordinarily varied. I believe you when you say that emotion is integral to your own sense of morality, but I don’t believe it’s possible to boil down, not really. 

To me it’s like saying “I experience sexuality in X way; therefore X is integral to human sexuality.” There are certain broad similarities, but I think it’s a fool’s errand to try and unify them into a solid sense of what sex is. If one person, say, experiences sex as overwhelmingly physical and another as overwhelmingly emotional, it’s impossible to say which of them is more sexual than the other. There are a lot of different ways to get to the same place. 

“I suspect that the meta-disagreement here is that one camp is trying to find a sort of unified theory of morality and the other is content to parse it as many separate-but-clustered impulses.”

Yes, this is the thing I’m saying. I’m saying the idea that “morality” is one big unified ball of stuff doesn’t make sense to me and never has. (This is also something that gets me into arguments with people who say morality is purely consequentialist, for similar reasons.) I’m pretty sure what we understand morality to be is a cluster of impulses that make us form communities and care for one another, meaning that it’s origin is evolution, and evolution is a goddamn mess that loves to glom things together imperfectly as long as it works. So being perfectly systemizing about morality seems to me most likely false, though appealing in some ways.

Your metaphor makes a lot of this make more sense to me.

To me, it’s like… you know that picture that explained the autism spectrum as a bunch of ice cream toppings with different traits on them? Like one might be texture sensitivity and one might be selective mutism or whatever?

To me, people are pointing at the sprinkles and going “Moral Motivation!” And I’m pointing at the chocolate sauce and going “Moral Motivation!”

And people are going “I GUESS you can ADD chocolate sauce if you WANT but only sprinkles are RELIABLY DELICIOUS! Also CHOCOLATE IS BAD FOR YOU, so a lot of CHOCOLATE EATERS aren’t as good at Moral Motivation as they think!”

(And there are even a few subthreads where I’m going “how… how is chocolate weird and inferior when your sprinkles… are chocolate… help”)

I think the thing to remember here is that the people screaming “no! It can’t be emotions!” Are having a strong emotional response that you don’t have the context for. They’re mad because emotion and empathy are words that have been used to discredit them by people who don’t understand either. They’ve been told time and again that they didn’t understand emotions or don’t have the appropriate ones, so what they’re hearing when you talk about emotions being connected to morality is “you cannot be moral”. This is a strong response because it is rooted in an injustice. ND people often experience deeply traumatizing interactions that are worded a lot like your argument was.

That’s fair, and I do get that people think I’m saying that. I do wonder whether part of this is a difference between what some researchers mean by low empathy (“this person’s willingness to do terrible things and his consistent lack of/muted response to others’ emotions seem connected in some way”) and what people here mean (“just because I don’t mirror doesn’t mean I’m not nice!”) or if it’s a more substantial disagreement, something like “those studies of responses to emotion words in psychopaths were flawed because x, and actually a lot of people do the exact same thing and you haven’t accounted for y yet.”

That’s what I have been trying to ask, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten an answer. Which yeah, I suspect that why is people having an understandably strong (triggered, even?) reaction to my asking it at all.

That just seemed weird to me because it seemed like the same people who were *too emotional to offer reasoned counter examples* were saying I put too much weight on emotion. So I was just like “dude but you just…”

Which I maybe shouldn’t have done, but it’s like I said in reply to you(??) earlier: I have a lot of triggers/personal berserk buttons around “I’m not doing the thing you say I’m doing,” especially when it sounds to me like “oh, I’m perfectly calm, YOU’RE just ANGRY.”

Which a lot of this discussion was beginning to sound like to me, especially when it got to “emotions are bad moral guides.”

Because I mean, yeah, “you piss me off so much I’m going to kill you” isn’t moral just because it’s feelsy.

But “you’re hurting me, Ms. Therapist, even though you tell me it’s good, and I’m angry!” was the first step to “what you’re doing to me isn’t right,” which was the first step to “That’s immoral,” which is pretty huge in how I understand right and wrong.

The whole reason I am a disability activist now is ableism makes me mad. Yes, I’ve reasoned on many a Lonely night “let’s examine this again, could treating kids that way ever be excusable” and I’m glad my reason comes up with no most of the time.

But I’m not an activist because I reasoned about being good. I’m an activist because what happened to me pisses me off, and if anything hearing about it happening to some other kid pisses me off MORE, not less.

In response to your actual question, then: 

YES. People are triggered, and YES, this is in response to flawed research that has damaged us very very badly. 

As an Autistic person who, when I was more physically able, worked with Autistic children, and as someone who has had a lifelong interest in psychology, it is absolutely my belief that the idea that Autistic people are bad at emotions and empathy are due to flawed research due to a lack of empathy in the researchers. 

OK, I actually believe rather firmly in what comes next, but I’m basing a lot of this on Autistic people who are a lot like me, and hey, sundae bar metaphor and whatnot – this might not carry over for everyone. But I can say that this is a perfect example of how I have struggled around this issue, and I think it holds pretty firm for a lot of people:

WE ARE OVERSTIMULATED. Researchers know this, but somehow completely fail to account for it; I noticed that a lot of things that people are BAFFLED about when it comes to Autism are directly caused by overstimulation, but I guess if you’re not the one experiencing the overstimulation it just looks bizarre and random? I think it comes down to this: Autism means a brain that takes more energy to interpret sensory information. I think maybe NT researchers see “ok, you can do this level of reasoning, therefore you’re at this level of development” without accounting for this very fundamental difference and then put value judgments instead.

Some personal examples:

– I can track someone’s words in a conversation, or I can track their tone and body language, but trying to do both at the same time takes the same amount of energy as watching and understanding two television shows simultaneously, (literally, I find these to be equally doable activities, and the skillset is the same) PLUS trying to connect their meanings to each other. I can do this, and I think probably pass for NT, and be gregarious and lovely all night at a party, but the next day I will be, for the entire day, at that level of exhaustion where you put your glasses in the fridge and the milk on your nightstand and don’t notice till the next day. 

– Related: Looking someone in the eye takes all of my attention. I don’t understand what people get out of it, I really don’t. What am I meant to be interpreting from it? When I’m giving someone eye contact, most of the time it takes all my energy just to pay attention to the emotion and respond on that level, but I have no idea what the actual content of the conversation was, unless I have a ton of energy at my disposal, or it’s someone I know well enough to really understand their emotional situation.

Speaking of energy I think I’m out of it, hahaha. I have more thoughts but I think that might be the extent of what I can get out for now. Hopefully this makes some sense.

I do want to touch on one more thing very briefly: overstimulation means that Autistic children are constantly displaying emotions that NT people don’t understand. They’re being assaulted by an environment that feels normal to other people, and they’re cranky and “OVER EMOTIONAL” about it… which is the beginning of a lot of us learning that emotions are bad. Eventually what we end up seeing is a lot of people behaving irrationally and saying we don’t get it because we don’t get emotions… not true. What we don’t automatically get is the underlying drive to the emotion. But the EMOTIONS BAD! battle cry comes from this trauma, imho, and frankly I think a good chunk of 

alexithymia comes from Autistic people being told repeatedly, by people they trust, from a very young age, that their perception of the world is WRONG and “No, that doesn’t hurt, what’s wrong with you? The light is fine. The sound is fine. The world is fine. The problem is you.”

Ah, okay. I think the thing that confused (actually, confuseS, but I’m much more open to the idea I’m wrong now that you’ve explained this) is that I didn’t see those psychopathy studies and autism as related in any clear way. 

I mean, I know that people say “sociopaths lack empathy” and that some autistic people say “I lack empathy” but I couldn’t figure out why anyone would even use the same word.

Because I was thinking:

Autistic people: I get overstimulated by sensory input, so sometimes I might shut down or withdraw or avoid people being BIG LOUDY. (Fwiw, I relate to this. I see myself as pretty darn cousiny, which is part of why this whole convo feels so strange to me.)

Psychopaths: …Why would anyone find “violent rape” any more disturbing than “doorknob?” NTs are weird, man.

Those… don’t look the same. Or at least they don’t to me. Those don’t even look similar to me in superficial ways.

So I gathered that people were connecting the two somehow, but I had no idea why.

So what I saw in the activist community was what LOOKED LIKE to me what @acemindbreakersblog was talking about, “First we as autistic activists explained, ‘we do have empathy, it’s just not visible in a way you immediately parse.’ But then we decided that we were being uninclusive, and so as not to exclude people with personality disorders, we started saying ‘you’re right, NTs, this isn’t empathy, and that’s fine. Not ND as in happy, neuroqueer as in fuck you!’”

While I sat there watching going “wait, guys, this seems like a bad move. Some traits actually aren’t good, and if you’re jumping into Angry Activist mode without thinking about what that guy over there MEANS when he says ‘yeah, who would be good just because they like other people?’ I worry that some of you might get hurt. I’m not gonna tell you who to hang with but I’m worried for you. And kind of worried for me, too, because the next time someone says ‘I have low empathy’ I have to figure out which thing that is, and I might guess wrong since I’m only a cousin.”

Ok, so here’s a disconnect that might be causing a lot of the confusion, then: 

A lot of Autistic people have internalized the incorrect idea that they don’t have empathy, and aren’t capable of understanding emotions. This happens because of the abusive ways that society interacts with Autism, and it creates a cognitive dissonance that leads to a lot of logical fallacies. In part, what happens is that they end up changing their definitions of empathy – “it has to be this more mystical sounding feeling other people’s emotions kind of thing because my parents/teachers/etc always said I had no empathy, but I’m capable of reasoning through and connecting to emotions, so that can’t be what is meant by empathy.” But that interacts with a lot of other definitions, too. What you end up with is people with a lot of internalized ablism that is a part of their definitions of words, which makes miscommunication inevitable. 

*EDIT: I’m not trying address the whole debate. Just trying to represent why Autistic people often have a complete disconnect with NT people when we start trying to talk about emotions or empathy at all… there’s a whole side of this that I wasn’t actually trying to address and definitely don’t have the spoons to go even ponder right now. 

But like also, now that I’m thinking of it more clearly, we are really bad at recognizing what’s wrong with people. We slap value judgments on things because we don’t understand them. So if low-empathy people are coming out and saying “I’m still living a morally good life”… maybe they’re right? Isn’t that worth considering before condemning people? 

Because my point about the over-stimulation wasn’t “oh, isn’t this cutesy and overwhelming for me.” It was explain why people lash out and do unreasonable things… When you are in pain and you are little, you lash out, and you hurt people. and then you get labeled as “bad” and “manipulative” and low empathy. And cognitive empathy is a skill. Someone could be quite low on a more intuitive level of empathy, but then getting labeled as low-empathy is almost definitely going to impede them in developing the more reasoned empathy. 

At the end of the day, you can’t be certain that you know what qualities make a “bad” person… you can know that sociopaths aren’t too bothered by having committed murder, but it certainly doesn’t stand to reason that all sociopaths are murderers just because of that. 

I don’t think that murdering someone and being overstimulated are the same thing, obviously. But a low natural empathy that gets treated the way that Autistic kids get treated… that sounds pretty traumatic to me too, tbh. Why not just teach cognitive empathy, and frankly, most NT people need that a lot more than they realize, and stop deciding who’s traits are the ones that mean they’re a good person, when there are people saying “hey that’s not true, I know because I’m living it”

So like… I guess that’s how it happens, if that was illuminating at all, lmao.

“In part, what happens is that they end up changing their definitions of empathy – “it has to be this more mystical sounding feeling other people’s emotions kind of thing because my parents/teachers/etc always said I had no empathy, but I’m capable of reasoning through and connecting to emotions, so that can’t be what is meant by empathy.”

This is exactly what I think is going on, actually. Just far better worded than I was.

And… on your second point, I think the reason I’m so resistant to that is that most of the people I’ve met who aren’t good are people who assume they are good and are horribly offended at the idea they might not be (especially if you imply that their disability/illness could be part of why they’re behaving in certain ways. Thinking here of a boss I had that behaved horribly abusively to all of us in the office until she got let go, who had BPD but saw herself as “recovered” and so was terribly resistant to “you might be splitting right now? Joe might not deserve that?” Because “I don’t have BPD any more, I don’t do that.”)

So my mind associates “accept that I’m good because I’m upset that you said I’m not” with “I’m about to be awful.” Where if people say, like, “here’s the thing I don’t understand and I handle it this way” I’d be a lot less uneasy.

I mean, I think I try to be good! I hope other people think I am good! But if people said to me “reason is part of morality though, do you think about what’s right?” I guess I can see reacting angrily initially.but after some thought, I HOPE I’d say “I do, actually. I wasn’t saying that I don’t reason morally, I was saying that emotions are part of my motivation, and some of those emotions in my case do fit ‘you look sad and I find myself wanting to fix it without consciously thinking about that.’ You’re absolutely right that I shouldn’t go with that alone if I’m deciding what to do in a dilemma, but when my buddy texted me? Works okay.”

So what you and some others are saying now, “yes, emotions are part of the moral life for me too, but it’s not always as obvious to me what’s going on in my own head or anyone else’s,” makes sense to me, where “emotions aren’t part of morality at all” (which someone said a round back, no one is saying it now) doesn’t.

Thank you for talking with me, especially when this brings up bad stuff people have said or done to you and other autistic people! I really appreciate it.