r/AutisticAdults • u/UbaSteve • 1d ago
Justice feels like empathy to me. Apparently that made me difficult.
I recently learned about justice-oriented empathy, where you don’t just feel bad for someone, you recognize the system hurting them and want to change it. Not “aww, poor kid” but “why is the teacher humiliating them in front of the class?”
As a kid, it took me a while to learn to put on my mask and ignore unfairness. One time, a teacher mocked another student’s reading difficulty. Everyone laughed. I told the teacher it wasn’t okay. I got sent out of the room for being disrespectful. In retrospect, this happened a lot, I'd get in trouble for standing up for someone else or pointing out hypocrisy. I always left confused, wondering how the truth could be wrong.
While unmasking as an adult, I've embraced this empathy again, that deep, almost involuntary need to speak up when something's wrong. The emotional intensity, the black-and-white sense of justice, the inability to just "let things go" when people were hurt. But people didn’t see that as empathy. They said I was cold, defiant, or too intense.
Now I’m wondering how many of us experienced this kind of empathy, but had it erased or mislabeled because we didn’t express it the “right” way? Did your sense of justice ever get you labeled as difficult? Did people overlook your empathy because it didn’t look like theirs?
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u/dablkscorpio 1d ago edited 1d ago
Justice sensitivity is highly tied to autism. It tends to come from a more rigid / black and white sense of morality. For example, you may have noticed how much allistic people lie when from their perspective they use white lies or false pleasantries to make communication easier. The not "aww poor boy"could stem from the fact that a lot of us experience cognitive empathy to a greater degree than affective empathy, which I actually think is a good thing. People's tendency to prioritize the latter often means they neglect the issues of people they don't relate to. We're also more likely to do the 'right' thing, even if it ends up hurting us professionally or personally. This can be a blessing and a course though. At least for me, this thinking style can lead to persevation in the presence of thought patterns that just feel fundamentally wrong to me.
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u/Teleporting-Cat 1d ago
Interesting, I've actually read that it's the other way around- we tend to have difficulty with cognitive empathy, but have very strong affective empathy.
It definitely seems accurate in my case- I have a hard time "thinking myself into someone else's shoes," or trying to guess what reaction someone is hoping for when they share something difficult with me- but I have a very strong visceral, emotional sense of empathy, to the point that I intentionally choose damaged items because I feel bad for them being left behind, hugged my car goodbye and cried when I re-homed her, and bring homeless people home with me.
I have the same overdeveloped sense of fairness that OP described, and I feel like that also fits into the high affective/low cognitive empathy paradigm.
Where did you read that it was the other way around? I'd be interested in the reasoning behind that conclusion.
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u/dablkscorpio 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's not one way or the other. Per usual, autism represents a wide spectrum of characteristics depending on the individual. One myth that used to get tossed around is that autistic people in general were low empathy. The specific cohort that represents this stereotype generally experience cognitive empathy more so than affective. However, autistic folk by definition have spiky profiles, existing on one extreme or the other. So the autistic folk who experience a high degree of affective empathy often are those who are coded as women/girls and mask to such a high degree that they were never diagnosed in the first place, or otherwise because they criteria was based on common stereotype. Obviously people who are coded as men/boys experience affective empathy too. But I think the broader point is that in recent years autistic communities have tried to combat the low empathy narrative by arguing we are highly empathetic or even emotional, which is somewhat true, but really I believe the focus should be on the different types of empathy. For someone, like myself, I fit a lot of the traditional stereotypes but there's a lot more nuance to it, ergo my original comment. I have poor interoception / alexithymia and rarely experience emotions viscerally which 50-60% of the autistic population can relate to. Fellow autistics are the opposite and feel quite intensely. Hence, a spiky profile in either direction.
ETA: The notion that autistic people have both low cognitive and affective empathy is corroborated by very early research that suggests we don't have theory of mind. Clearly, this isn't the case across the spectrum and I generally take offense to this broad brush. My guess is that the double empathy problem affects how theory of mind is evaluated. If allistic people are always the control group, a bias is already present in research in my opinion.
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u/Teleporting-Cat 1d ago edited 1d ago
If allistic people are always the control group, a bias is already present in research in my opinion.
This just absolutely blew my mind. It's rare that a single sentence reframes so many disparate confusions into something that makes sense. Thank you.
Also, you're correct that I'm a high-masking woman who wasn't diagnosed until my 30s. There's so much here that I need to parse and mull over! I appreciate your insightful and informative comment, I'm going to be coming back to this and giving it a lot more thought!
Eta- yeah, the whole "low empathy/no theory of mind," thing is something I came across frequently and could never relate to. Seems like that myth just will not die and still gets thrown around far too much. It was one factor that contributed to me not seeking a diagnosis for so long, because I feel things DEEPLY.
Alexithymia is another one I can't personally relate to. I find it difficult to imagine what it might be like (hard time with cognitive empathy lol) but it's a fascinating concept. If I understand correctly, it's different from the way people with psychopathy are a few steps removed from their emotions, but still tied in to how the amygdala is wired? It must be tricky to put into words.
Do you have synaesthesia?
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u/janitordreams 1d ago
This is me to a T, and it's caused me so much trouble in the past. I'm actually experiencing conflict due to this right now.
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u/poodlefanatic 1d ago
My empathy is still often overlooked because I don't express it the same way as most people. Even when I try to explain it. I got punished so much as a child for not "performing" empathy well enough (and many other things I now know are related to AuDHD) and even though I'm late 30s now, my parents both still think I'm just being intentionally difficult and treat me accordingly (by trying to punish me still... even though I'm 37...).
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u/UbaSteve 1d ago
I also have parents that never tried to understand me. Surely my teenage anxiety would have simply gone away if I had just exposed myself to more uncomfortable situations. Never mind the debilitating stomach aches that came on before social situations, just push through the pain. Or my non-existent self-confidence from being on the humiliating side of so many failed attempts at socialization.
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u/poodlefanatic 22h ago
Yeah my parents also believe I just need more "exposure therapy". I've tried to educate them on autistic distinct anxiety and I've shown them peer reviewed research showing that exposure to triggers doesn't result in tolerance for autistics, but they aren't interested in listening. I grew up in a family where anything deviating from the arbitrarily defined "norm" is Very Bad and any kind of social or mental health struggles are personal moral failings rather than my brain is literally wired differently.
Proper support would have made such a huge difference in my life and I've never had the kind of support I need to function, which is why I'm burned the fuck out and unable to work and disabled by chronic illnesses (related to living in constant fight/flight for decades) and it's generally just not a good situation. But everyone's solution seems to be work harder rather than give me basic accommodations to help me function or, in my parent's case, treat me with bare minimum respect and decency. They view me as an extension of them rather than a whole ass person and they have no interest in learning about who I am, just in continuing to stuff me into a box I never fit in and then getting pissed at me when I (understandably) do not fit their narrative of what they think I should do/be like.
Sorry, feeling kind of salty about this stuff today.
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u/Geminii27 1d ago
I got sent out of the room for being disrespectful.
They earned that disrespect with their own actions.
I've told people in my direct chain of command at work, to their face, that no I don't respect them just because of their current job title; that's something they have to earn personally if they want it from me.
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u/twoiko 17h ago
This has always been my biggest issue, people who assume that since they're in a position of power that we must respect that power without question and without reason/explanation.
I'm sorry, but I didn't join the army, I'm not here to be abused and manipulated for the sake of your ego. Yes, I will call out your BS no matter how big you are, if it affects me or someone I care about.
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u/Geminii27 9h ago
Heck, even in the army, 'respect the rank' doesn't mean 'respect the idiot holding that rank'.
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u/DoctorKrakens 1d ago
It's extremely fucking irritating. I get the most upset about this in regards in the death penalty and the general public's opinions on it, especially locally. I've gotten banned from my country's subreddit because it made me so upset to see fucking braindead morons with hamster brains always calling for the most obscene and horrendous middle age punishments in news articles regarding crime.
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u/greenfieeld 1d ago
I used to believe in the death penalty because I do think that there are some crimes so horrible committed by people who cannot be reformed or redeemed that it's the only practical solution, but then I remembered that the people getting to decide who those people are and what crimes are "deserving" of death are the government, and that they should have absolutely no place in getting to kill people unless they're protecting innocents from an immediate threat like a foreign invasion or terror attack.
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u/UbaSteve 1d ago
Exactly like that. Sometimes I see arguments for or against the death penalty relating to cost. Like, damn dude, that is a human being you're talking about.
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u/DoctorKrakens 1d ago
They don't see it. I hope this doesn't count as breaking rule 1 but the demographic of people from my country that use reddit are generally the most horrendous kind of people that just tick me off. Especially when they're backed up by jackass politicians that insist the mandatory death penalty is keeping the country drug free, even as more children get hooked on drugged vapes by the day.
Semi related, I'm interested in keeping DOMESTICATED rats as pets and have thus done research on it in regards to the local community. Yet again, on the local subreddits, any posts asking about where to find pet rat breeders is met with quips by idiots who think they're ten times as smart as they actually are about how you can find some diving into the sewers.
Ignorant garbage human beings.
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u/UbaSteve 1d ago
I've heard rats can be such sweet pets, that they even show emotions. Unfortunately where I live they're illegal to keep as pets.
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u/Gardyloop 1d ago
Rats are gorgeous, loving animals. The only problem is they tend to die early.
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u/twoiko 17h ago
I love keeping rats, I just wish they lived for more than 2 years or so.
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u/Gardyloop 8h ago
My friend kept losing them after about that long. Tragically prone to cancer too. Poor darlings.
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u/Psykotyrant 1d ago
Most laws and rules exist become someone at some time fucked up very badly….so everyone got punished by some new law.
For example, I’m not supposed to bury my dead pets behind the house. There’s like an entire page of various laws and regulations for that.
Fuck that. I understand that laws like those were made in a time where they were justified. Not anymore. The unwillingness of so many to look upon their old laws and regulations and erase them when they’re not necessary anymore is baffling.
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u/TimAppleCockProMax69 1d ago
I have this kind of empathy too, but I genuinely don’t care if it upsets the NTs. The worst part about having this kind of empathy is constantly feeling like you’re surrounded by idiots who are allergic to even the most basic forms of logical thinking.
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u/Sufficient_Strike437 1d ago
Yeah I know what you mean. And I’ve also gotten sperned for pointing something out that wasn’t fair by the very person I was trying to help/empathise with. I think sometimes it’s better / learned socially to keep my mouth shut about such things unless someone asks directly for my empathy/ justice. People don’t like to be told they are wrong or there is a better way to do/be, even the people you may be trying to help can take offence by highlighting it or they don’t need help.🤷
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u/SensationalSelkie 1d ago
This! My teachers always hated me despite me being a straight A student. I legit went on a rant at my principal in middle school in front of a crowd of parents about how she'd penalize students who she deemed as sinful (Christian school, think queer students or students who were questioning their christianity) for tiny infractions like forgetting their homework while failing to discipline the resident mean girls who were being awful to other kids but would say they loved Jesus and had parents who worked there or donated a lot of money. Got detention for a while. But then got banned from detention because I'd just sit and stare at her while smiling. So yeah.
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u/BobbyButtermilk321 1d ago edited 1d ago
yeah, It just manifests for me in such a way that if someone in my orbit (even just an acquaintance who doesn't even know my name) is wronged in anyway, it feels as if it was done to me personally. A lot of my worst moments are when I'm compelled to right a wrong done to someone else. people are downright terrified of me when I'm in that state, but I have successfully protected people (usually through intimidation since I'm a big dude or the legal system). It has backfired on me often, usually because the person in the wrong is either too powerful politically or because the person I'm protecting was a piece of shit who started it in the first place.
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u/janitordreams 1d ago
Yes, yes, and yes. I constantly have this problem with non-autistics. And by constantly I mean as recently as yesterday.
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u/PhoenixAshes667 13h ago
I've never heard the term "justice-oriented empathy" but everything you said described me to a T. It also probably explains why I became a social worker/advocate. I'm big on "stand up for what you believe in even if you're standing alone". I have AuDHD and lack impulse control, so while sometimes I plan out conversations line by line in my head, I'm also sometimes just as shocked as everyone else by my words and actions. If I think something is unjust, I will 100% speak up every time without even thinking. I'm definitely adding this to my "A-ha Autism" list 😅
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u/Apprehensive-Bar6595 20h ago
black and white senses of justice usually are not accurate that's all I'm going to say, the rest are probably good qualities to have, it's the black & white where it tends more into something problematic
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u/SpudDiechmann 1d ago
People don't like being told they're in the wrong, even when it's the truth. A lot of it comes down to maintaining their status in a social setting, which is reply undermined by being corrected or called out publicly. It's linked to he whole hierarchy thing that I can't abide either.
There are times it's powerful and useful trait (journalists, environmentalists, comedians, artists...), but times it gets you into trouble.
I used to be able to use it as a social tool, highlighting shared injustices to try to bond with a group. But I had to be sure that I was talking with people on the same side of the injustice as me. I also tried to frame it in a way that was humourous or offered alternatives, other wise it is just empty complaining which can also be detrimental.