Being Human – an Autistic’s Guide to Being Kind
TL/DR: People on the spectrum might have difficulty with empathy, but we know what it’s like to have people be unkind.
Last month I focused on people on the spectrum and aspects of what made us unique. And one area that I kept mentioning was how some people saw our differences as more negative. Another thing I talked about is Theory of Mind and how individuals on the spectrum have difficulty just naturally understanding what others are thinking and feeling. Both these have caused difficulties for those on the spectrum and how neurotypicals deal with them.
First, let’s start with Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is the theory that humans have a natural ability to understand others and their thoughts and beliefs. However, people on the spectrum have, due to their neurological differences, cannot do this naturally. So, many of us tend to project our own thoughts onto others and behave as if those others know and agree with us. Yet, as we grow up, some people on the spectrum learn that others have their own thoughts and knowledge, and that we need to keep that in mind when working with others. This development of our own abilities to logically determine what others know and might be thinking helps us in some social situations, but our logic can only go so far. When emotions play into these social situations, our ability to hold our own drops dramatically.
Due to this natural difficulty to understand the minds of others, there are often misunderstandings between neurotypical and neurodiverse individuals. Here’s an example: when Princess Diana died in that accident and the news had gotten out, I was with my fiancée (now wife) and we were getting ready to go out for dinner. When she heard the news, she became distraught. I tried to console her, but I was unable to. Part of the problem was that in my life, the princess had played no role except as the center of news stories. However, my fiancée had naturally put herself in the shoes of the young princes who suddenly had no mother. She was in the minds of those people who were helped by Diana’s philanthropy who knew that the person who had brought them out of their darkest times would not be there to help others in the same way. My limited theory of mind prevented me from emotionally placing me in the minds of those others, yet my fiancée was. I was unable to console her since I could not understand either how she felt or why she was reacting the way she was.
This also leads to the idea that people on the spectrum lack empathy. In a way, we do – we cannot put ourselves in the minds of others and feel what they are feeling, or at least not knowing why we feel the way we do. But the other part is that those who are not on the spectrum are often shocked at our reactions to events that they react emotionally to. In the example above, if my fiancée hadn’t been so emotionally distraught, and I hadn’t been trying to make her feel better, I truly believe that she would have been shocked at my reaction. In another example from after we had been married for a number of years, there was something that she was upset about (I don’t remember what), and I was trying to figure out how to remedy the problem so that it wouldn’t turn into something worse. However, at the time, she was dealing with undiagnosed anxiety and had gotten into a catastrophic thinking spiral. In my inability to feel that dread that was weighing down on her, I was using my logical brain to try and come up with a solution.
“Why don’t you ever take these things seriously?!” she screamed. “This could ruin our lives! I hate how you just don’t care!”
Now, I have been able to develop a calm demeanor when I was in stressful situations and had been trying to come up with a solution to the problem, but my wife couldn’t understand why I was still so calm in the face of what her brain was telling her was a catastrophe. Needless to say, my stress level rose dramatically and, as a mentor of mine once said, the extra stress made me lose 40 IQ points, and I just blew up at her. It was a while before either of us calmed down and could go about figuring a way to resolve our problems.
This is where kindness and understanding could have played a role. I knew that she had something going on and had difficulty dealing with stressful situations. However, when she got upset with me for not seeing how bad things could be, I lost that knowledge, and reacted to her criticism of my apparent lack of understanding what she understood. Over the past 4 years, I have worked hard to be able to not automatically react to things like this. I have worked on being mindful, and thinking about what other people are thinking about and how their stress level might affect their emotional reactions. I still have difficulty when doing this with a loved one, because my feelings about them sometimes stop me from being able to process things properly, but I do try.
In our current society, most people have been forced to go into survival mode. That causes an inability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and understand where they are coming from. If we are to bring kindness back to the world, we need to stop thinking about how we will survive and start looking at how society will be better off. We need to try and understand where others are coming from, and not just think about where we want to be. Kindness in today’s world is important. There is so much division, selfishness and hate in today’s world. However, we can be that light that the world so desperately needs. If I can learn to put myself in someone else’s shoes, despite my difficulties with social skills from being on the spectrum, then think of how easy it can be for someone who isn’t on the spectrum. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of others. We also need to realize that although others are in the same storm as we are, we don’t all experience it as everyone else does. We are all unique individuals and have our own unique needs, as well as our own individual strengths that we can use to help lift each other up. And we each have our own light to shine into the world to light the way for others.
So, I want to thank you for reading this, and hope you are a little wiser and more accepting for doing so. And I want to let you know that I will keep my writing free for everyone and anyone who might benefit from reading it. If you are getting something out of what I write, please feel free to share it with others. I would love for my experiences to help others navigate their own paths, and the more people you share it with, the more people that can benefit from it. Or, if you are not subscribed and want to get notified when I post, just hit that “Subscribe now” button above. Anyone can get a free subscription, and I will never put it behind a paywall. However, if you really like my writing, or get important information and are learning from it, you can always get a paid subscription. It’s always nice to be able to stop while I’m out for a coffee, and if you become a paid subscriber, I might even start a donut habit in your honor.
But, no matter if you’re a paid or free subscriber, or just passing through, I want to say this to you:
I hope for you to be happy, be kind, and know how much I appreciate you. - Dave
I am glad that you are my brother. One thing I’ve learned is that, just because you don’t have empathy, it doesn’t mean that you don’t care. You do care *a lot*. You try to do better once you’re aware. (And also, when my ex-husband showed that it wasn’t just a lack of empathy but a lack of care, it meant our marriage was not only over, but we never really had a partnership to begin with. Thank you for the real example when I was being gaslit into insanity)
Once again as I read this piece I gain insights into behaviors of loved ones and coworkers I’ve known and worked with. This is invaluable and I need to thank you once again for these lessons.