Myth Debunked: Autistic Partners DO Know How You Feel

A particularly popular (and pernicious) belief floating around in our cultural conversation about autistic people is that they are incapable of feeling empathy. This belief takes many forms ranging from a well meaning explanation for some of the differences in social behavior often seen in autistic people to the dehumanizing rationale for why autistic people should be treated as subhuman or prevented from accessing community resources and support.

In the couples therapy office, this belief most often gets expressed by frustrated partners explaining to me that their autistic partner(s) just don’t seem to care or “get them”. This complaint is often supported by a multitude of stories about the autistic partner(s) seeming to miss unspoken social expectations or act as though the way that they want to do something is the only possible way to do it. Many of the autistic partners I work with have accepted these stories as further evidence that they are selfish, childish, or even unfit for a relationship.

To better understand why this belief is so readily accepted, it can be helpful to look briefly at the progression of research relating to Autism in the field of psychology. As a distinct diagnosis, what we now call Autism Spectrum Disorder (and simplify to ASD or Autism) can be traced back to the work of Hans Asperger, for whom the first version of Autism– Asperger’s Syndrome– was named. Hans Asperger noticed that some children appeared to struggle in some areas of their life but not in others. This didn’t match the medical knowledge of the time which tended to measure functioning as either “high” meaning the child was normally developing or “low” meaning they were not normally developing and therefore unwell and in need of treatment.

While a middle presentation where a child could be “high” in some things and “low” in others was an important finding which has led to more accurate and helpful understanding, the context in which Asperger worked is significant. The majority of Asperger’s work was undertaken as a part of Nazi medical research into intellectual and genetic purity. In short, Asperger’s focus at the time of his theorizing was on classifying different types of children in order to determine which ones were of a high enough genetic quality to be part of society and pass their genetic material onward. While some historians argue that Asperger’s work saved many children who would have otherwise been killed by emphasizing the positive aspects of their condition (like extreme intelligence) the legacy of this conceptualization of Autism and mental health can still be felt today.

Later theorists like Uta Frith and Simon Baron-Cohen, have set forth revisions to Asperger’s original findings in an attempt to better clarify what factors contribute to Autism and how best it might be treated. Unfortunately, the perspective that Autism represents a fundamental deficit that ought to be cured by any means possible so that the person with Autism gets to live a “normal”, happy life has persisted. One of the major contributions of Baron-Cohen in particular is the idea that people with Autism are unable to understand other people’s thoughts. In a variety of different research studies Baron-Cohen showed that people with Autism consistently struggled to determine what another is thinking and feeling which has given support to the common belief that brains with Autism must just not be able to perform these tasks.

However, more recent research (some of which was done by autistic researchers) suggests a different explanation for these findings. Detailed brain scans done with autistic participants during empathy tasks were able to replicate some of the findings set forth by Baron-Cohen and others, but two new pieces of information were also discovered. First, autistic participants and their brains performed as well or better than participants without autism in empathy tasks if the target of the empathy task was also someone with autism. Said in a different way, autistic people know and deeply understand what other people with autism are thinking and feeling. The second major revelation was that the brains of autistic participants did not lack all the brain activity we generally associate with empathy or understanding in conditions where they were empathizing with non-autistic participants. Rather, the brains of autistic participants indicated that they struggled to understand why the person would behave in the way that they did because it differed so radically from how the autistic participant would have behaved. 

New research like this, as well as insight into the lived experience of autistic children and adults, suggest a more nuanced understanding of how emotions work for some autistic people. It is not, as was previously suggested, a lack of capability that stops autistic people from behaving in ways that people without autism expect. Instead, this difference is more likely due to social and cultural expectations around what correct behavior should look like which is often taught and maintained through communication which autistic brains do not intrinsically understand. Autistic people, as more recent findings suggest, understand one another very well and are generally able to learn and adapt to new expectations when interacting with non-autistic brains once they are explained. 

The current state of the research, as well as the neurodiversity movement generally, suggests that a movement away from a view of autism as a problem of capability is needed. Instead of perpetuating the belief that autistic people just don’t feel things or don’t know how other people are feeling, there can be value in communicating about what the autistic person is feeling and experiencing. A benefit of this approach is that it provides the opportunity for deeper, more nuanced conversations to be had which avoid stereotypes or assumptions in favor of an active and informative dialogue with the people we are actually interacting with.

If you or your partner(s) are struggling with expressing emotions and feeling understood and want some help navigating through these interactions, reach out to one of our Neurodiversity Relationship specialists at Entelechy Therapy. 

References

Baron-Cohen, S. (2018, May 8). The truth about Hans Asperger’s Nazi collusion. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1 

Baron-Cohen, S, Leslie, A.M., & Frith, U, (1985) Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind?” Cognition, 21, 37-46.

Jones, A. P., Happé, F. G., Gilbert, F., Burnett, S., & Viding, E. (2010). Feeling, caring, knowing: different types of empathy deficit in boys with psychopathic tendencies and autism spectrum disorder. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 51(11), 1188–1197. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02280.x

Komeda, H., Kosaka, H., Saito, D. N., Mano, Y., Jung, M., Fujii, T., Yanaka, H. T., Munesue, T., Ishitobi, M., Sato, M., & Okazawa, H. (2015). Autistic empathy toward autistic others. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 10(2), 145–152. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsu126

Song, Y., Nie, T., Shi, W., Zhao, X., & Yang, Y. (2019). Empathy Impairment in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Conditions From a Multidimensional Perspective: A Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 1902. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01902

Walker, N. (2019, May 11). Nick Walker on Autism, Empathy, and Theory of Mind [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwAUE0Ev5tg