There is a fairly strong myth that suggests that autistic people lack empathy. Autistic people are often portrayed as aloof, cold, and distant. For many, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Empathy can be broken down into two aspects; cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy can be described as the ability to recognise and understand what someone else is feeling, whereas affective empathy involves feeling the other persons emotions. For example, when you see someone crying, you use cognitive empathy to figure out that they are sad, but you use affective empathy when you too feel sad.
Autistic people often struggle to read non-autistic people. Non-verbal cues are difficult to spot, categorise, and understand. Non-autistic people do this unconsciously (as far as I know), with little or no effort or thought. Autistic people have to spend years observing others, researching what their cues mean, and then memorising these facts. So when an autistic person is reading non-verbal cues, we are using a lot more energy and it is a much more manual process. This means that we often miss cues, or misinterpret the ones we catch. The difficulty can increase when we are overwhelmed or tired, as we have less energy for this process.
So autistic people can struggle with cognitive empathy, because we may not notice or understand non-verbal cues that indicate what someone is feeling.
This doesn’t mean that we have no affective empathy. In fact, I’ve heard of autistic people who are hyper-empathetic and struggle in the ‘outside world’ due to the onslaught of emotions from others. Like non-autistic people, our affective empathy can vary (some non-autistic people are highly empathetic, whilst others may feel little or no empathy in most situations). But autism itself does not determine whether or not we experience affective empathy.
So whilst an autistic person may struggle to figure out and understand what you’re feeling, that doesn’t mean we don’t feel empathy when we do figure it out. We may display this differently, though. There are many unwritten rules about how you’re supposed to act when someone is sad, happy, etc. Autistic people struggle with unwritten rules, because we don’t naturally know them. They’re difficult to learn because they’re, well, unwritten.
When someone is sad, I don’t know whether I’m supposed to hug them. I don’t know what the correct thing to say is. I don’t know what I should do for them or how to help. But, like a non-autistic person, I want to help. I want to reduce their pain and sadness, even if I don’t know how.
Usually, I’ll tell my parents ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to react’, and often they’ll give me some indication of what I should do.
It is easier to think ‘what would I want in this situation?’ (it’s still hard as I have to consider all of the variables that could have caused this to figure out how they may feel), but non-autistic people often don’t want the same things I want. When upset, they don’t want stim toys or to watch a TV show they’ve seen 5 times already. They don’t want to sit in the dark in a pile of cushions and toys. And they often won’t tell you what they do want, because it’s against social conventions.
I’ve figured out a few basic things though. Most people (especially in the UK) like tea, so asking if they’d like a cup of tea shows you want to help. Many people also like comfort food, so offering chocolate or their favourite food can help. Fulfilling basic needs (food, drink, shelter, warmth) can often be the best way to start.