Friday, August 1, 2008

Learned Empathy

I remember when I was growing up in the mid-to-late 90's, there was a heavy emphasis on EQ, or Emotional Intelligence.

Not fitting in with my peers, I become very interested in this EQ-thing, as well as quasi-psychology as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It was the only thing I knew that could help me understand others, although I don't think the book was meant for, or written about, 10 year olds.

Looking back at it now, I can see it as a "symptom", if you will. Since I was not able to make and keep friends through normal means, I made my peers into "lab rats" and applied the theories I read in the books. It did not really help.

At the time, when EQ was very much in the limelight, I remember not feeling I "fit" with how one should be, EQ-wise. I felt that I did not fit the shape making out "a good person". In 1990, EQ was defined as "the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.". Read that again, and think of the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's Syndrom.

I tried so hard to get a high EQ-score in the tests published in women's magazines. After taking a few, I saw a pattern and adapted my score, manipulating it, if you will, to be able to "brag" about my high scores. I learnt, through these tests and articles, how a "normal person" felt, thought, behaved and treated others. It's a lesson that has stuck with me through my life since then, making me the person I am today, through constant manipulation of my thoughts, feelings and behavior against others.

When I first started reading about Asperger's Syndrome, and autism, I was very against the idea that all autistics have problems with empathy. I still do, in a way, due to the notion that every autistic is different. What I had problems understanding is that there is a fine line between empathy and sympathy.

While empathy is the ability to recognize or understand other people's state of mind or emotion, and what is talked about as being able to "put one self in another person's shoes", sympathy is defined as concern and sorrow for another person's situation or misfortune. The idea that autistics lack empathy is known as Theory of Mind; the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.

Looking at it now, a couple of months on, and with new experiences and understandings of myself as well as autism, I can see that I do not employ this theory of mind. Most of the time I am able to "use" it through the things I have learns about other people, feelings and "common courtesy", but when I'm stressed out, angry and panicked, I catch myself speaking and acting out my true feelings.

One of my greater flaws is my perfectionism. Although I can be very hard on myself to be as perfect as possible, I might be even harder with others, be it the mailman who is an hour late, or a salesperson in a store I gone to to get something I simply must have straight away (yet another flaw, my impatience).

Being able to recognize this flaw, and putting in the context of autism, I see that it is not simply that I am unreasonable, although I clearly am, but it's an unreasonableness I cannot help. The unreasonableness is a product of my lack of empathy, and I have to stop and think about it when I've calmed myself down that maybe, just maybe, this person cannot really do anything more than she or he already is. That is no excuse, thought, because now that I am aware of it, it is something I can work on.

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