On a number of occasions, I’ve come across the view that autistic people lack empathy. This is a popular view in mainstream therapeutic circles and the media and one that many families seem to abso…
As an autistic adult, I’ve had an interesting journey with empathy. I share it here in the hope that my experiences might in some way help you to better understand your autistic child. As a child, my feelings leaked out of me. They felt uncontrollable and scary. Hurt people or animals brought me to a stand still; their pain became my pain. In the company of others, their feelings, spoken or unspoken, felt as though they were being directly fed to me, like a stream of data that I was unable to deflect. Not much of this would have been observable from the outside as my strategy for coping was to develop an internal world where only I existed.
As a young adult who didn’t yet understand the way my neurology worked, I lived in emotional chaos. I suffered depression and anxiety as my empathy for the horrors in the world and the difficulties of those I loved incapacitated me. Like many autistic women, I gravitated towards a helping career in an effort to do something about the pain I saw and felt in the world. Only I found that sitting in front of someone in the midst of emotional turmoil was too much. I felt what they felt. I continued to feel it at 3am. I had no safe boundaries.
