Radical Acts Of Autistic Empathy
“Forget resolutions; let’s focus on being good people and helping others,” says Musings from a Tangled Mind. “Random acts of kindness, like holding the door open for someone or letting someone merge in traffic […] or being an ally where needed are the real currency of the soul.”
I’ve long since established that I believe the universe is meaningless, and that our lives within it therefore have only the meaning we give to them. I’ve also described an aspect of how I confront that inherent meaninglessness.
I’ve long argued that “cynicism is frustrated optimism, resulting only from first believing that people are capable of better and then too often being proved wrong”, and that “this is why the small, every day courtesies matter”.
What if we with deliberation and care did right by each other in all the tiny ways: holding the door for the person behind us, giving up our seat for someone who needs it more, using headphones on our devices when in cafes and bars, remembering our “pleases” and “thank yous”. What if paying attention to all of these small moments left us no longer too exhausted and too world-weary even to think about the larger and more inexplicable challenges of the larger life and lives around us, let alone to act on them?
My therapist sometimes is taken aback when I’m relating some obstacle and happen to mention taking into account how my obstacle or how I need to deal with it might be impacting other people. My go-to example being how I’ve learned over the years that when needing to deal with customer service or technical support, I should pause fairly early on in order to tell the person to whom I’m talking that the tone of frustration they’re likely hearing is not directed at them.
In the end, we’re talking here about exercises in empathy, which according to the Theory of Mind Deficit view of autism is a mental and emotional capability we autistic people aren’t supposed to possess. Not for nothing, the terrific new podcast NeuroDiving’s first set of episodes completely demolishes the Theory of Mind Deficit view of autism as being, at least at this point, little more than pseudoscience.
(I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, where we learn that Simon Baron Cohen doesn’t exist and in fact is just a long-running confidence game run by his better-known cousin Sacha.)
Someone online yesterday mentioned a recent piece in The New York Times that I can’t access but that mentions a thing called empathic distress, the cited reference for which often appears to be this paper by Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki.
According to this line of psychological research, an empathic response to suffering can result in two kinds of reactions: empathic distress, which is also referred to as personal distress; and compassion, which is also referred to as empathic concern or sympathy. For simplicity, we will refer to empathic distress and compassion when speaking about these two different families of emotions. While empathy refers to our general capacity to resonate with others’ emotional states irrespective of their valence — positive or negative — empathic distress refers to a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings. Compassion, on the other hand, is conceived as a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help. By consequence, it is associated with approach and prosocial motivation.
I’m not stepping out of line here if I suggest that empathic distress likely looks mightily familiar to many autistic people, who often describe their own lived experience not as having too little empathy but as having too much, or at least too intense of a certain kind, that it’s effectively paralyzing. (Ask a bunch of autistics how often they apologize to their coffee table or the wall when they bump into them. Many of us have so much empathy it extends to the inanimate.) Which then indeed can prompt our actions and behaviors to focus on protecting ourselves rather than on being of aid or comfort to the person or persons for whom we feel that empathy.
This autistic empathy distress, I’d wager, is correlated in some fashion to my belief thar the underlying autistic condition is one of sensorium dysphoria (or stimulus overwhelm): our nervous systems take in too much, and so the adaptive monotropic tendency steps in to protect us.
At any rate, none of this is a digression, because my point is this: “the small, every day courtesies matter” not just in and of themselves because they help smooth over what otherwise would be the tiny bumps in the road that, to mix metaphors, can yield a daily death by a thousand cuts (certainly for autistics but of course also for others), but because by helping each other in the small ways, we free up resources for the larger obstacles we all must face. This is the quiet, low-key building of solidarity and capacity.
Musings’ “random acts of kindness” in fact are acts of radical empathy and compassion, and collectively they become larger than they appear.
Addenda
- Coming back to add that I’d written before about whether social and performance presssures can make us seem unfeeling, I discovered that I’d also previously written specifically about empathy and distress and aversive states, based upon another paper.