I'm a deep Aspy, with an Aspy daughter (35, Lutheran pastor in North Dakota) ... and a 'full' autistic son (19), who graduate high in his high school class without accomodations in high school and is in his second year of transfer-classes at a local community college prior to transfer to 4-year. (He had like a 3.98 cum in HS, taking chemistry, Spanish, the highest math they had, the full load of college prep.)
I saw a study recently of testing empathy and sympathy between Autistic and Allistic (normal) folk. Normal folk did a much better job looking and sounding sympathetic, but ... that's as far as most actually went. Doing something later? Maybe 10-15%.
The Autistic ones did not do as well in the "Oh, gee ... " area. However, they had a far higher rate of actually trying to do something about the other person's plight. Around 40-50%.
Who's actually more sympathetic?
One example of how a full Aut may think that I've seen used the example of a female co-worker who wears a blue dress Monday, looks very nice in it, everybody compliments her. Tuesday she wears an over-tight poorly designed (for her figure) red dress , which makes her look a lot ... fuller in the middle, perhaps ... than she actually is.
All the Allistic's still compliment her. Then at the water-cooler, dump on her fashion sense.
The Aut-boy, wanting to actually help, tells her privately the red dress makes her look fat and she should go home and change to the blue dress because she looks so much better in it and people are mocking her over the red dress.
It's actually a very sincere attempt to help ... and also, such an epic FAIL to be beyond understanding for most Allistic people.
Life is not always easy on the outside looking in. What's the difference really between Lars (Autistic diagnosis), and Anna and myself (Aspergers)?
We're like the woman who's early in pregnancy so not showing unless you really look in the right clothes at the right angle. We're fully Autistic, we just don't seem so obviously to most people. We don't do stimming and such in a way that others catch, as they see easily with Lars.
But the part of the brain that handles subtle social cues from the eyes & ears for other people, active since birth, and which for some carries 50-60% of the total "communication" received from another and "sends" just as much ... doesn't work in our brains. No, it's not so gross as to be even close to "body language" ... this is tiny activity around mouth, nose, eyes, and very slight changes in breathing and vocal tension while someone is speaking. If you do this, you can't sense it any more than you know exactly which muscle is firing at exactly what percentage ... every muscle ... when you lift your leg.
Don't think about it, do you? I mean, have you ever been able to consciously control every minute separate muscle attached to your legs?
So Anna and I don't do any better than Lars at "receiving" up to half the content we're just expected to get. And as we aren't controlling those subtle things like others do, our "sending" as we talk drives some people bonkers. Particularly, they know we're lying, faking, or hiding something ... that happens a lot.
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