Speaking the language of emotions …

Continued from part 1

After spending just two weeks as an academic liaison for twenty-two people on the Autism Spectrum (and getting a sense for their inner lives), I started to observe my own behavior more closely. I’m very sensitive to sounds, colors, movement, and social cues — I love patterns, numbers, and being alone, and I have intense (often excruciating) empathy. I wondered: Am I on the Spectrum?

I went home from work one night and took this Autism Quotient test, and got a score of 15:

Your score: 15
0 – 10 = low
11 – 22 = average (most women score about 15 and most men score about 17)
23 – 31 = above average
32 – 50 is very high (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 35)
50 is maximum

Hmmm. Okay, so I wasn’t on the Spectrum, but I also wasn’t (as I had feared before I started the job) at the opposite end of the empathy Spectrum from my students. And yet, I could not reasonably call myself neurotypical either, since my empathy has — throughout my life — set me so far apart from average people. I continued to witness unmanageable empathy and sensitivity in my students (whom I now called my friends), tried to figure out where it fit in with the reigning theories about the alleged lack of empathy among people on the Spectrum, and went forward with my job.

My husband was accepted into a Master’s program in Nursing, and we moved away from that job within a few months, but I didn’t stop thinking about my friends on the Spectrum, about neurotypical privilege and mind-blindness, and about the subject of empathy.

Reclaiming my empathic title

Three years later, in 2009, I was asked to rewrite one of my books on emotions. This is a longer story, but I had worked for many years as an empathic healer, and had mistakenly framed my skills as paranormal or psychic. When I realized my mistake, I ended my career (in 2003) and returned to college to study sociology, social movements, and, well, everything.

I now understand why it was so easy to think that my empathic skills were mystical. Strong empathy is very unusual, and neurotypicals are deeply confused about emotions and empathy; therefore, my empathic skills were seen a magical thing. After studying intently and reorganizing my understanding of empathy, it was very nice to come back, rewrite my book from a non-paranormal viewpoint, reframe my work, and reclaim my title as an empath (in my previous post, I described an empath as a person who is aware that they read emotions, nuance, subtext, undercurrent, social space, relational behaviors, and gestural language to a greater degree than is deemed normal).

As a part of the research I did for my book (The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You), I read a book by two people on the Spectrum: Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron. Their book, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships is a fascinating look at two individuals who have very different experiences on the Spectrum.

Sean Barron is a male whose inner experience of autism has been extremely emotional, while Temple Grandin is a female who reports that her inner experience was and is primarily unemotional. This book is nicely balanced by Barron’s emotional perspective, and together, he and Dr. Grandin provide an excellent portrayal of what people on the Spectrum deal with emotionally and psychologically.

It’s a great entrée to understanding both the Autism Spectrum and the ways that neurotypicals intuitively understand social rules even though they weren’t directly taught about most of them. As I wrote in my previous post, neurotypicals understand social rules because those rules were socially created by neurotypicals for their kind of minds … it’s not because neurotypical social functioning is objectively correct or better than any other way.

As I read the book, however, I found myself arguing with Temple Grandin — not just because I had so closely observed highly empathic people on the Spectrum, but also because she was holding on very tightly to the old “emotions versus rationality” idea that isn’t supported by current neurological research.

We understand now that emotions are an irreplaceable part of rationality, decision-making, thinking, memory, and especially learning. In truth, we can’t be rational without our emotions, but I understand Dr. Grandin’s struggle to overcome an emotional functioning that was totally unhelpful to her.

If you asked her outright, Temple Grandin would probably agree with the idea that she is mind-blind and unempathic (this hypothesis is championed by British psychopathology researcher Simon Baron-Cohen) — but as an empath, I beg to differ. In fact, I differ strongly.

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Can I do this job?

In early 2006, I got a job working as an academic liaison for a group of 22 college-aged students on the Autism Spectrum. My job was to help the students with all of their academic needs: scheduling, counseling, learning accommodations, tutoring, social services, transportation … I was hired to create a total support system under and around the students so that they could successfully attend college. Before the job started, however, I had some serious research to do.

I’ve worked with and tutored physically disabled and learning disabled people for most of my life, but I had almost no experience with people who had autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. I knew a little bit (Rainman, sigh), but not enough to be able to truly help. So I got every book on autism and Asperger’s Syndrome at the public library and every book at the community college library, and I started from the ground up.

After fifteen or twenty books, I understood a great deal about the symptoms, history, approaches, and confusion surrounding diagnoses of autism or Asperger’s, which are quite distinct on paper, but are often diagnosed based on what kind of funding is available for each condition in each state, county, or school district. This means that the same child could be diagnosed with autism, Asperger’s, or PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified), depending on the supportive services available at the time of diagnosis.

Though autism and Asperger’s (and PDD-NOS) are presented as very different (though related) conditions, they are often mixed-and-matched by doctors, disability counselors, and schools, which is why I now use the term Autism Spectrum (and usually just Spectrum) instead of focusing on the subtypes. You can miss a great deal of crucial information about  individuals if you focus on a diagnosis that currently exists in a political battle zone.

I learned a great deal on paper about Spectrum conditions, but what jumped out most significantly for me was the repeated assertion that Spectrum people are not socially adept because they are “mind blind” and therefore unempathic. This hypothesis is championed by British psychopathology professor and researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, who theorizes that Spectrum disorders involve a lack of function in the mirror neurons that allegedly help us empathize with each other. Hmm.

As an empath — or a person who is aware that they read emotions, nuance, subtext, undercurrent, social space, relational behaviors, and gestural language to a greater degree than is deemed normal (you could also call me a highly sensitive person) — I was a little bit unnerved. I wondered: Will I be meeting people who are my diametric opposites? Will I disturb or unsettle them with my overabundance of empathy? Will they feel unsafe and alien around me — or will I feel that way around them? How should I behave? Can I do this job?

As it usually happens, the information I received from the academic and counseling-based books only gave me a small piece of the whole story. Those books were merely describing Spectrum people from the outside, so I went back and got books by Spectrum people themselves (such as Donna Williams, Kamran Nazeer, Temple Grandin, and Sean Barron). These stunning autobiographies helped me understand more about how painful and confusing it had been for these people to grow up in what is called the neurotypical world.

Oh, how neurotypical of you

In order to avoid labeling Spectrum people as damaged or abnormal, the word neurotypical was coined in the autism community to refer to people who were once called normal. (An aside: My father says that Normal people are the ones you don’t know very well yet.) The word neurotypical performs a kind of protective function that — in theory — neutralizes harmful language and treatment that might otherwise be directed at people on the Spectrum.

However, social behavior that is considered correct in the majority neurotypical culture (eye contact, speaking in turns, paying attention to what neurotypical people think is important, etc.) is called neurotypical too, which is really another way of saying that this is the expected and correct behavior. Using the word neurotypical as an adjective (neurotypical behavior, neurotypical gesture, etc.) is really not neutral in practice. It’s actually kind of oppressive.

I saw this almost immediately as I met with each student and his or her parents. The students were often coached — right in front of me — on how to behave, what I wanted to hear, how I wanted to be addressed … and this made me very uncomfortable.  I heard a few of the parents use the word neurotypical as a kind of slam: “A neurotypical wouldn’t ignore a direct question, so wake up!” Ouch! I continually wondered, just who is unempathic here?

The concerns I had before I met these students really faded away as I witnessed constant (well-meaning?) insults to their personhood and dignity, and their tremendous struggle to find a way to belong in the neurotypical culture. Within a day or so, my new focus was on how to shield them from the everyday oppressions of neurotypical expectations. I began to talk about neurotypicals in joking ways: “Oh, how tedious and neurotypical that is!” Or I’d affect a Homer Simpson pie-loving voice and say, “Mmmmm, Asp-burgers!” as if it were the most delicious condition to have. It was a good laugh getter.

But more than that, it was an empathic entryway into the world of these students, who I almost immediately called my friends. These were people struggling mightily to live in a world where they weren’t welcome, understood, or in many cases, seen as real human beings. The mind-blind, unempathic caricature is a case in point.

The mind-blindness of everyday people

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