EP36: Autistic Empathy and the Double Empathy Problem

Many think that autistic people lack empathy, but do they? Even if you think you know the answer, you'll find new content about empathy and relating to others in this episode.

Join me as I explore empathy in the context of autism research and the origins of the autistic empathy deficit idea. In this episode, I cover the double empathy problem with help from a friend. How does the double empathy problem explain misunderstandings and communication breakdowns between autistic individuals and neurotypicals?

I also talk about how I personally think of empathy (and how my notions of empathy are surprisingly close to the very first usage of the word!).

Watch this episode on YouTube.

If you'd like to know more about topics discussed in this episode, check out:

"A Reflective Guide on the Meaning of Empathy in Autism Research" by Caroline Bollen

"Autism and Empathy: What Are the Real Links?" By Sue Fletcher-Watson and Geoffrey Bird

"Autism in an Age of Empathy: A Cautionary Critique" by Patrick McDonagh (chapter in Worlds of Autism edited by Joyce Davidson and Michael Orsini)

"On the Ontological Status of Autism: The 'Double Empathy Problem'" by Damian Milton

"The 'Double Empathy Problem': Ten Years On" by Damian Milton et al.

"Object Personification in Autism: This Paper Will Be Very Sad if You Don't Read it" by Rebekah White and Anna Remington

"A Dual Route Model of Empathy: A Neurobiological Perspective" by Chi-Lin Yu and Tai-Li Chou

Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement

Host: Clint McNear and Tyler Owen discussing topics, issues, and stories within the...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Theme music: "Everything Feels New" by Evgeny Bardyuzha.

All episodes written and produced by Kristen Hovet.

Send in your questions or thoughts via audio or video recording for a chance to be featured on the show! Email your audio or video clips to otherautism@gmail.com through WeTransfer.

Become a patron on Patreon!

Buy me a coffee!

The views, opinions, and experiences shared by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or production team. The content is intended for informational purposes only and should not be taken as medical or professional advice. Please consult with a qualified healthcare provider before making any decisions related to your health, fitness, or wellness.

Chapters

• 9:59 [Ad] Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement
• 10:34 (Cont.) EP36: Autistic Empathy and the Double Empathy Problem

Transcript

Kristen Hovet
Today I'm talking about empathy and the double empathy problem in the context of autism. I'm also going to get into the problem of defining empathy and I'll discuss how the myth of autistic empathy deficits came about. But before I do that, some announcements and this is a podcast. So if you're not used to announcements, it's a normal thing. It's not just me doing it. I've seen some people comment about it

And it's like, you know, this is, this is part of the administrative aspect of doing podcasts. If you're a long time watcher of this podcast specifically on YouTube, which is relatively recent, I only have a handful of episodes on YouTube, you'll notice that my background is different and my hair is different. So I moved last month or in June, depending on when I publish this.

Everything is going great. I love it here. I've set up some new things. I got a new camera. What else? My hair's growing out. So blonde and it's lots of silver now. So I'm going to look a bit stripey for a while and just, I hope you're okay with that. You might see Toby, he's sleeping over there. That's kind of his tail area. He might get up and it's going to be his dinner time soon.

Also, I would like to thank Kerry for buying me three coffees and AWS Productions for buying me five coffees through the buy me a coffee link. Thank you so much Kerry and AWS Productions. Because of you two, I have fully offset my podcast hosting fees for the month of August. If you would like to buy me a coffee, please check out the link in the show notes that says buy me a coffee.

I'd also like to thank the patrons over on Patreon who sponsor the show and in return get some bonus content and behind the scenes content. They are the ones who truly make this show possible. I really appreciate their ongoing support and interest in the show. If you're also curious to see what's going on over there, head on over to patreon.com forward slash the other autism.

All one word, the other autism. For a few dollars a day or any custom amount that you set, you can also become a patron of the other autism podcast. So why is empathy important to discuss in the context of autism? Well, autism has become associated with an inability or reduced ability to empathize. In this episode, I plan to talk a bit about how this idea came to be

and how it became popularized. It could actually be one of the biggest misunderstandings and misrepresentations that's still actively being promoted in autism research and in autism clinical circles. I'll also cover some of the ways that this concept has been challenged and how recent research actually supports autistics' accounts

of their own experiences, surprise, surprise, of empathy, or even of hyper -empathy. Emerging qualitative and quantitative research actually indicates that some autistic people possibly experience more intense empathy than non -autistic people, generally speaking. I'll finish the episode by defining the double empathy problem, and a long -time listener and also previous guest on the show will help me do that.

I'm going to start by discussing the ways that empathy has a big definition problem. I'd prefer to just state how the experts define empathy and get on with things, but I could not find a clear definition. In fact, the more I looked for one, the less clear all of it became. Defining empathy is a task that the experts have not done well. In my opinion, but as well as in the opinion

of some of the researchers whose work I read in preparation for this episode. In fact, Caroline Bollen conducted a review where she looked at academic articles focused on empathy in the context of autism research. In 111 separate academic papers, Bollen found 31 conceptually different understandings or definitions of empathy.

Some definitions focused on the shared feelings or shared mentalizing or some combination of these that occurred during empathizing when one person feels or enacts empathy for another or for another's experiences. Some referred to empathy as inherently good or inherently biased. Most definitions or understandings painted empathy as connected to morality in some way,

but not always in the same way. Bollen calls this conceptual confusion and states that the exact interpretation of a concept, quote, drastically changes the meaning of a hypothesis, a claim, research results, and the validity of chosen methods, end quote. And further, Bollen states that lack of caution with the concept of empathy in the context of autism can, quote,

harm the progress in understanding empathy as it makes the field prone to miscommunication, misinterpretation, or even unintentional scientific malpractice, end quote. Bollen's deep dive into scholarly works on empathy and autism found that the 31 conceptually different understandings of empathy diverged along 12 dimensions. I won't go into detail on the subject of these 12 dimensions,

but you can check it out if you'd like. I've left a link to the article in the show notes. But to give some examples of these 12 dimensions, some conceptualizations of empathy focus on the one being empathized with, such as their emotional and or cognitive states and whether these states enable or inspire empathy in the empathizer.

Others focus on the empathizer's ability to display or enact emotional and or cognitive empathy. Many apparently do not agree on whether empathy is an emotion, a cognitive act or occurrence, or some confusing combination of these. Even those who agree on distinguishing between emotional and cognitive empathy

do not define or use these terms or concepts in the same ways. Also, some academics view cognitive empathy as a product of emotional empathy, while others view emotional empathy as a product of cognitive empathy. It shocks me that so -called autism experts can confidently assert that autistic people lack empathy when they can't even agree on what it is.

The other aspect of empathy that is very unclear according to Bollen's work is the function or purpose of empathy. Most seem to view empathy as a kind of pathway toward having an appropriate emotional response in the empathizer, in response to the emotional state of the one being empathized with. Some focus on the additional function of empathy as facilitating relationships and community building.

This would be social bonding. Some focus on empathy as a facilitator of interpersonal identification with another person's inner life as being different from one's own. This seemingly helps develop a clear sense of self versus other or self versus not self, which as you'll see is a very different way of looking at empathy than its original definition.

For some, the function of empathy is mostly about the one being empathized with and how empathy impacts them. And for others, the focus is on the one doing the empathizing. To add to this muddled conceptual nightmare, Bollen found 52 different methods used to actually measure empathy in autism research. Half of the articles she examined used self -report questionnaires.

many of which were completed by parents or caregivers, not the autistic participants themselves. This means they assessed empathy or a lack thereof as something that is apparently observable to the research participants' parents or guardians. I don't know about you, but I think of empathy as something experiential and personal that doesn't always have external

correlates or signs. I mean, I can be completely steeped in like an empathic, empathetic state, whatever you call it, feeling deeply what someone else is feeling and not have anything observable happening beyond maybe like a blank or neutral expression on my face, at least until I've finished processing. And the blank or neutral face is not from having

no empathy or no response or no impact to the other person's feelings, but it's quite the opposite. It's from actually feeling too much, from feeling overwhelmed by an empathic response and also from trying to process cognitive and emotional and sensory overwhelm all at once. I mean, on a regular day, even at our default mode or base level without anything else going on

Autistic people process more information and we process it more deeply, generally speaking. The other point I want to really make clear here is that an empathetic response can occur alone. For example, when you're listening to or reading a story about another person or animal's experience. Empathy doesn't necessarily take two. Is it empathy though, if no one else is around to see it?

I mean, my answer is clearly a resounding yes, but not everyone thinks so. Other researchers seeking to measure empathy in autistic people utilized observations or reflections of the researchers themselves, which again seems super inaccurate and far removed from what empathy is. Some focused on quite indirect measures of empathy, such as acts of kindness or tolerance or respect.

This focus seems to hone in on something called trait empathy, as opposed to state empathy. Trait empathy focuses on empathy as a personality trait with corresponding external or measurable behaviors. Some other researchers use tests that measure theory of mind as a measure of empathy in general, which according to the way I understand the academic literature on this, would really only measure cognitive empathy,

but not emotional empathy. I'm not gonna get into the distinction too much here between these two because I think it largely represents a conceptual leap that researchers have made that has really confused things a lot more than they need to be. Briefly, emotional empathy seems to be referring to this like very fast, unconscious kind of uncontrollable emotional response that one has

when they're in this empathetic state or episode, while cognitive empathy refers to a slower, rational, cerebral understanding or concept -based response that one has during an empathetic state or episode. Some have theorized that autistic people have very high emotional empathy, but normal or lower cognitive empathy.

when compared to non -autistic people. I feel like this could very well be, but the basic definition of empathy needs work first, in my opinion. And why not stick with a simpler distinction, like just say empathy and theory of mind? Why have all these different forms of empathy that just confuse everyone, including the experts themselves?

Other methods Bollen found in autism research included the use of neurological and physiological changes to measure empathy. For example, you can map certain changes in the brain that are thought to be related to empathy, and you can measure physiological changes like heart rate and skin conductance in response to certain emotional stimuli and call that empathy, too. All of this shows, according to Bollen,

that autism researchers cannot seem to agree or settle on whether empathy is primarily behavioral, experiential, body -based, or brain -based. I would actually argue that the distinction between body and brain doesn't really make sense because the brain is part of the body, last time I checked, but I see what she's getting at. To try to bring some clarity to all of this, and I'm not sure how much clarity I can bring, but I'll try,

I'd like to go back and trace some of the history of the issue of autism and empathy with the help of a chapter from the amazing book, Worlds of Autism edited by Joyce Davidson and Michael Orsini. The chapter itself was written by Patrick McDonagh and is titled Autism in an Age of Empathy: A Cautionary Critique. According to this piece, the autism researcher — the, in autism

circles, well known Simon Baron Cohen, the cousin, I believe of the actor Sacha Baron Cohen — wrote in 2003 that autism is an empathy disorder, categorically an empathy disorder. Although he wasn't the first person to connect a lack of empathy with autism, or I will say an apparent lack of empathy with autism, it's likely he's largely responsible for

popularizing this notion. At this time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, autism was increasingly being painted as a condition that, along with other mostly negative undesirable attributes, presented as an inability to empathize with others. At the same time, the concept of empathy was itself, as McDonagh states, becoming more important on the global stage and was quote, growing its cultural capital,

end quote. By the early 2000s, being able to enact empathy was nearly synonymous with being human, while being autistic or aligning with other neurodivergent identities was synonymous with somehow lacking in true humanness. All of this, according to McDonagh, positions autistic people as quote, something less than fully human who occupy a space outside the empathic society where their presence assures the majority

of their capacity for empathy, end quote. I think that's worth repeating. So according to McDonagh, all of this background I've currently kind of glossed over positions autistic people as, quote, something less than fully human who occupy a space outside the empathic society where their presence assures the majority of their capacity for empathy, end quote

So autistics become sort of this contrast group for neurotypicals is what McDonagh is saying. Now to go back a bit again, lack of empathy was not in the observations of autism by Leo Kanner in the 1930s and 40s, at least not in his initial observations. Kanner really focused on emotional problems or differences that he apparently noticed.

Hans Asperger, however, did include a seeming lack of empathy in his description of four young autistic boys, though by many accounts Asperger himself was likely autistic. Uta Frith's 1989 publication entitled Autism mentions empathy very, very briefly, though Lorna Wing's 1981 article talks about those with Asperger syndrome, which is now referred to as level 1 autism,

having lack of empathy, having single -mindedness, communication differences, social isolation, and various sensory sensitivities. McDonagh asserts that Wing was the first to present lack of empathy as a defining feature or quality of autistic people. Then in 1991, Christopher Gilberg gave a lecture that refers to autism as a disorder of empathy.

While I think Gilberg referenced papers by Baron Cohen, particularly regarding theory of mind deficits in autistic children, it was really Baron Cohen who ran with the empathy deficit idea. Last time I checked, he's, he still seems to be talking about it in some way, shape, or form. He's the most prominent researcher to set lack of empathy as a presumed defining autistic characteristic.

According to McDonagh, Baron Cohen's theories about autism and empathy, quote, seem to be driving not only research into this area, but also the connection of the two in popular culture, end quote. Baron Cohen's extreme male brain theory of autism seemed to support this lack of empathy idea, where again, citing McDonagh, quote, empathy plays a prominent role as an essential difference between what he identifies as systematizing male

and empathizing female brains, end quote. This model is often utilized by autism researchers still to this day and in the popular media to bolster and fill out the concept of autism as a neurological difference or disorder characterized by a lack of empathy. Quoting Baron Cohen, McDonagh states that, quote, according to this model, autistic people are neurologically incapable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes,

imagining the world through someone else's eyes, and responding appropriately to someone else's feelings, end quote. Again, that is McDonagh quoting Baron Cohen. Before I get into how autistic people feel about empathy, I'd like to briefly trace the emergence of the actual term empathy, as I think it helps orient us to the concept a bit more. Again, much of what I'm referencing in this section comes from McDonagh's work

Both the terms autism and empathy emerged in the early 20th century. Robert Vischer, a German philosopher and art historian, began using the term Einfühlung, a term that was being used at the time in literary criticism to refer to a kind of emotional projection of the self onto an object of art or aesthetic beauty. Eventually, this term Einfühlung began being used by psychologists as well.

According to McDonagh, Theodor Lipps in particular, quote, developed Einfühlung to identify the psychological process at play when a viewer contemplates and fuses with an art object, end quote. When in a state of Einfühlung, according to Lipps's work in 1903 to 1905, the distinction between the self and the object disappears. The two in a way become one.

Lipps expanded this idea to apply to how we truly know other people as well. Two people in a state of Einfühlung meld together and have a bit of a brain bonding sesh. That's my summation anyway. Then in 1909, American psychologist Edward Titchener translated Einfühlung as empathy by borrowing from the Greek empatheia

which literally means in suffering or in passion. Titchener's empathy focused on the way one's mind muscle responds to attributes of an object or situation being observed. For him, empathy was an internal experience, one that isn't about being witnessed or made obvious to an onlooker, but one that is felt. While there can be externally obvious signs of empathy,

or of a person being in a state of empathy or empathizing, these are secondary to empathy itself. In 1915, Titchener stated, quote, we are told of a shocking accident and we gasp and shrink and feel nauseated as we imagine it. We are told of some new delightful fruit and our mouth waters as if we were about to taste it. This tendency to feel oneself into a situation is called empathy,

on the analogy with sympathy, which is feeling together with another, end quote. Gradually, since the early 1900s, the concept of empathy has come to reference a certain collection of desirable social skills and emotional traits, while one is engaged in an empathy -worthy scenario. I'd add, based on everything I've read for this episode, that the focus has changed from an internal experience of empathy

to the enactment or external show of empathy. Empathy has become much more about what we do, the actions we take, the words we say, and less about what it means to feel or experience empathy or be in a whole body state of empathy. This weird development, in my opinion, is really what has led to a lot of pain and confusion for a lot of people.

Can you imagine being recognized or diagnosed as autistic as a toddler or very young child and growing up being told, you don't actually feel empathy, you lack empathy, you have an empathy deficit. no, that's not, that's not empathy. You don't know what it is. I'm sure this is actually a very common experience for many autistic people and they've basically internalized this idea until it really does define them in some ways. I mean,

if that's what you're told, this is empathy, this is not, and you see that you are different from those around you, you're going to believe that. This is not to discount some autistic individuals who insist that they absolutely don't have empathy, but I'd wonder if they didn't also have other diagnoses in addition to autism or maybe trauma histories to at least partially explain their lack of empathy. I've also met autistic people who have

personality disorders, and I know some personality disorders can definitely impact one's experience of empathy. I also wonder about alexithymia, where a person has difficulty with identifying and expressing emotions. And sometimes they even have difficulty experiencing emotions or emotional states. They can feel sometimes a bit numb. Certainly not all autistics experience alexithymia, but many of us do,

either almost all the time or to varying degrees depending on our cognitive, emotional, and sensory loads at any given time. Alexithymia can theoretically make it very challenging to identify when you're feeling empathy. Sometimes it can delay feelings of empathy, which means that like an empathetic response might not hit you until when you're actually feeling regulated,

and you're feeling safe to have an emotional response. To get back to our shared cultural understanding of empathy, we still locate empathy in the brain, or we still see it as a psychological phenomenon, just as Titchener did in the early 1900s. Experts still talk about the neurological attributes or roots of empathy, yet now we tend to, again,

as I said before, primarily look for empathy in observable actions and behaviors. For example, one person might say, I'm feeling really major empathy right now. But another person looks at them and says, no, you don't look like you're feeling empathy. Who is correct? What if some people don't wear their empathy on their sleeves, so to speak? What if they keep their

empathetic responses mostly to themselves. Maybe they're afraid of being vulnerable or maybe they're just so under the spell of sensory overwhelm where they literally can't make their bodies do much of anything until they've finished processing everything. Or maybe they have intense fatigue or they're fearful of showing strong emotions in unsafe or uncomfortable or uncontrolled settings,

because of past experiences. Maybe they've been bullied or ridiculed or mocked, and the best they can do is sit there and look and watch and take more in. While some autistic people do indeed claim to lack empathy or to have some empathy deficits, most others talk about having anywhere from normal levels to abnormally and even debilitatingly high levels of empathy.

In some of the academic literature on autism and empathy, these super empathy feelers are said to be capable of having hyper empathic experiences. I've had listeners of the show write in to let me know that they're so deeply empathic or empathetic that they actually have a hard time being around other people because they're unable to filter out others' emotional states. They're almost like sponges soaking up whatever the other person's feeling, which can be

deeply distressing, and even traumatizing, and frankly, very physically and emotionally draining, especially when this is a common occurrence. In a paper for Autism, which is a peer -reviewed international journal, Sue Fletcher Watson and Geoffrey Bird say that the idea of an empathy deficit in autism is a total

They say this myth is so well ingrained that autistic people may often report having empathy deficits when they actually experience deep empathic feelings. In effect, many autistic people have internalized incorrect or imprecise views of autism and autistic traits. The researchers also discuss how sensory differences may be part of the longstanding misunderstandings between autistic people and non -autistic people when it comes to empathy.

Autistic people with certain sensory differences and heightened senses may actually pick up more information in any given setting and may as a result feel more. This may result in socially unexpected or unacceptable facial expressions or statements or lack thereof, which may be very different from what neurotypicals expect. They typically expect a quite effusive but

too effusive show of empathy from my experience anyway. The effusiveness has to be just right. They want to see and hear a lot about how you feel as a result of their sharing or retelling of some experience or something that happened to them or to another person they know. If you don't enact or showcase your empathy in these expected ways, you risk being described as cold, unfeeling, or unempathetic.

You might even be called a robot or an alien. Rebekah White and Anna Remington in a paper they adorably titled, Object Personification in Autism: This Paper Will Be Very Sad if You Don't Read It, talk about the fact that many autistic people report experiencing object personification. Object personification involves attributing human characteristics to non -human objects.

The researchers' work suggests that autistic empathy may be more intense and all-encompassing or expansive than neurotypical empathy. We don't just feel empathy for other humans and for our pets and every animal we see or hear about, but we may also feel empathy for plants or stuffed animals or books or photographs or keepsakes or other objects that mean a lot to us. Then there are many, many accounts by autistic writers

detailing their own experiences of empathy for beings and non -beings great and small. Donna Williams talks about her intense and uncontrollable empathy. Temple Grandin and Dawn Prince Hughes detail their deep empathic responses to individuals of other species, not at the exclusion of empathy for other humans, mind you. There are many more autistic writers and speakers who have talked about their strong experiences of empathy.

Are they all lying? Are they just all fooling themselves? If so, that would be a lot of people who are all totally delusional about their capacity for empathy. Clearly, I think something else is going on. Now, to add one final dimension to this discussion of empathy in the context of autism, I want to discuss the double empathy problem. While I personally think of empathy as something that can be both expressed interpersonally between two people,

or experienced privately, like while reading or hearing about another individual's experiences when no one else is around, Damian Milton, a British sociologist and psychologist, concentrates on the social interactions between autistic people and non -autistic people. He also concentrates on the society that gives rise to their interactions and the consequences of their interactions.

Milton first academically described the double empathy problem in 2012, when he set out to reframe the idea of autistics' supposed empathy and social deficits as instead issues of reciprocity and mutuality. In the hypotheses he laid out, neurotypicals and autistics essentially occupy different cultures, complete with our separate rules of engagement and social expectations. We really live in different worlds,

neurologically and socially speaking. I wanna quickly add that even though we have these different cultures, a neurotypical culture and a neurodivergent one, we can get along very well across these cultural divides. It absolutely is possible with a lot of open communication and understanding, just like it's possible to get along well with someone from other ethnically or geographically different cultures, for example.

Autistic people make friends and even have relationships with neurotypical people and vice versa. The double empathy problem was defined in Milton's paper titled, On the Ontological Status of Autism: The Double Empathy Problem, as quote, a disjuncture in reciprocity between two differently disposed social actors, which becomes more marked the wider the disjuncture in dispositional perception of the life world,

perceived as a breach in the natural attitude of what constitutes social reality for neurotypical people and yet an everyday and often traumatic experience for autistic people, end quote. That's a lot of words. To break it down into a bit simpler language, the double empathy problem is a disconnect between people who are neurologically very different. The more different they are neurologically speaking,

the more of a potential disconnect there will be between them when they're trying to understand each other and their motives and intentions. Now I'm gonna let Heath Wilder, one of the very first fans of The Other Autism, who was also a guest on the show back in March 2023, share their insight on the double empathy problem. From Australia, here's Heath. 

Heath Wilder
Hey, Kristen, Heath Wilder here from Sydney, Australia. I hope you're doing really well. Just wanted to unpack a little bit of my thoughts with regards to Damian Milton's double empathy problem. Damian said that when two people's experience of the world differs greatly, they will struggle to empathize with each other. And that's very true of a lot of my experiences with neurodiversity in society, especially in the workplace, and some of the problems that kind of arises. Now, on the surface,

the double empathy problem seems very egalitarian. We'll both misunderstand one another and have problems both unpacking what the other one has said and then repacking that to understand. However, in a system where there is a power imbalance, like there is, I think, with us as neurodivergent individuals in a very neurotypically led society, what that means is that we'll end up doing both parts of that

double empathy bridge. if you have a scenario where some information is being shared between two people, they're trying to communicate and understand each other. For example, hello, how are you? It might be said by a neurotypical individual, it'll come to us as neurodivergent individuals, we need to unpack that. What is hello, how are you? Is that meant as a genuine asking of how you are, or is that just a ritualized greeting?

You'll unpack that, you'll make sense of it. You'll think about how you want to respond to them in order to communicate in the way that's intended, repack that, and then send that back to them again. So you're doing both sides of that. Now, that is I think the case with most parties that are minorities in a system that is imbalanced in its power levels,

but it's also, of course, very true for us. And I think that's something that really we need to kind of consider when we're having a look at where we are, what we need to do in order to be in society and make things a little bit easier for us. And where we want to get to as well, how we want to kind of level out those kind of power and balances so that we both understand each other and we're able to have those conversations in a way that doesn't overload us all the time.

Thank you, and can't wait to see the show. 

Kristen Hovet
Thank you so much, Heath, for your insight on the double empathy problem and for going into the ways that autistics end up doing most of the work during and after many of our interactions with neuro -typical folks. If you haven't listened to Heath's episode yet, please go check it out. It's called Heath Wilder, Autigender, and Autistic Empathy. In that episode, we actually discuss empathy. I mean, it's in the title,

in addition to many other topics. To get back to Damian Milton, interestingly, he discusses the ways that empathic responses from neurotypicals can sometimes be felt by autistic people as quote, invasive, imposing, and threatening, end quote. There's a real mismatch between what I'm sure the neurotypical's intending and what the autistic person actually feels from that interaction. We're usually accustomed to

hearing about how we lack empathy, so I think it's good to talk about autistic people's experiences of customary neurotypical behaviors. The other interesting point Milton makes is that just because we autistic people share a culture doesn't mean we'll automatically be able to understand and connect with each other, just as the same is true for neurotypicals. I mean, just because two people are neurotypical doesn't mean they're going to be best friends just because they're neurotypical.

Well, the same is true of autistic people. We do have a much greater chance of understanding and connecting with each other, however, quote, at least in how being autistic or not shapes experiences of the social world, end quote. And to add to what Heath was saying, the breach or disconnect between the neurotypical and the autistic person is experienced as much more annoying or bothersome to the non -autistic person

because they immediately interpret us or our behavior as weird or strange or a little bit off. But for the autistic person, it's like welcome to everyday interactions with neurotypicals. We're so accustomed to these disconnects and with neurotypicals being annoyed or exasperated with us or even hurt or outraged by us. The reason the neurotypicals interpret the autistic person's behavior as so odd, annoying, or off-putting

is because they perceive themselves, their own neurotypical selves, as normal, correct, and respectable. This sense that they have aligns with the widely held belief that autistics and other neurodivergent folks are pathological and even immoral, or lacking in the very qualities that make someone truly human. After all, if they can't even act properly in basic one -on -one interactions, there must be something very wrong with them,

or so their neurotypical thinking goes. And this in turn feeds the autism industry, the need to treat autistic people and provide them with interventions to make them more like neurotypicals. Just behave and emote just like us. Just act right. Mask, mask, mask, hide, hide, hide. I'd like to end this episode with thought -provoking words from Damian Milton. Quote,

It is true that autistic people often lack insight into neurotypical perceptions and culture, yet it is equally the case that neurotypical people lack insight into the minds and culture of autistic people, end quote. However, autistic people have, quote, gained a greater level of insight into neurotypical society and mores than vice versa, perhaps due to the need to survive and potentially thrive in a neurotypical culture.

Conversely, the neurotypical person has no pertinent personal requirement to understand the mind of the autistic person unless closely related socially in some way, end quote. To sum that last part up, autistic people have a major need to understand neurotypical culture. We need to survive, we need to thrive. So we try to, we work really, really hard to understand it. Whereas the neurotypical person

has really no need to understand our culture. Why should they? And to sum up this entire section by Milton, neurological differences are very likely the root of differences in how we socialize and what we expect in social interactions. But the idea that autistics have a set of social deficits is a total social construct and nothing more. This also means that our apparent lack of empathy is a social construct, ready and waiting to be torn down.

Well, that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time, bye.