Autism articles painfully lack how autistic experiences feel like for the autistic person. The writings will explain what a meltdown looks like, advise how to accommodate a child with sensory sensitivities, or clarify the autism diagnostic criteria. Research articles will spell out the results of experiments on the differences between autistic and allistic (non-autistic) people: how their brains function or how they approach situations differently. But if you try to research how to write an autistic character, what the autistic life is like from the inside, you’ll be in a desert field with only a few dry tumbleweeds.
This is especially important if you’re writing from the autistic character’s point of view. How can you write how autism feels if no articles will explain it to you?
That’s why I’m beginning this series of articles. What are the different traits of autism, what do they often feel like, and what do they feel like to me personally?
Hyperempathy and hypoempathy are common experiences among autistics. Some autistic people have one, some have the other, and many have some degree of both. They aren’t part of the diagnostic criteria at the moment, but they tend to coincide with autism nevertheless.
Let’s begin.
1. What Are Hyperempathy and Hypoempathy?
Simply put, hyperempathy is when you feel more empathy than the “norm,” and hypoempathy is when you feel less empathy than the “norm.” Like other autistic traits, they won’t present the same intensity or lackthereof in everyone, and of course will behave differently in different people.
Now, to further clarify and bust some stereotypes: hyperempathy and hypoempathy don’t affect kindness. They don’t affect how good of a person someone is, or on the flip side how uncaring someone is. Hyperempathy and hypoempathy are about the feelings of empathy. A hypoempathetic person may feel little empathy toward others, but they’ll often still do their best to be good to them.
Hyperempathy often presents as feeling the emotions of others around you. Hypoempathy, on the other hand, is often when someone struggles to feel feelings about others’ situations.
Let’s go into a lot more detail below.
2. My Experience with Hyperempathy
As stated above, many people with hyperempathy feel the emotions of those around them. An autistic person might not understand why their friend is angry, but they’ll feel angry too. If their other friend is sad, they’ll feel sad too. And if their third friend is stressed, they’ll feel stressed as well.
This can lead to social interactions being exhausting, as they’re constantly taking on others’ emotions.
I don’t experience hyperempathy with every emotion, but I do experience it with embarrassment. I can’t stand watching someone embarrass themself. This causes me to not enjoy embarrassment humor—even in fictional stories, whether on TV or in a book, watching people embarrass themselves, or just be awkward, is awful. I can still watch the show or read the book, but it’s very uncomfortable, almost painful, and I avoid media that consistently relies on embarrassment.
Another feeling I’m hyperempathetic about is physical pain. If someone’s describing an injury they had, I can feel that injury on myself. Not actual pain, more like the kind of pain you’d experience in dreams, but it’s still rather uncomfortable to imagine an awful injury on myself. And the more detailed the person’s description, the more acute the experience. This is a very distressing experience for me because I’m sensitive to pain and fear severe injuries. It also feels like my thoughts are out of my control, that I have to struggle to make the feeling stop. I have to rub that area of my body or do other tactile stimming in order to get it to stop, to get my mind to focus on a different sensation than the pain. I won’t actively cut a conversation off to stop this experience, but if someone tells those stories often, I will avoid being around them.
Another aspect of hyperempathy many hyperempathetic autistics experience is heightened empathy toward inanimate objects. For many people, this also includes animals, but for me, it’s just inanimate objects. Mostly, if I feel empathy for an object, it’s sorrow. I hate throwing non-trash items away because it feels like I’m throwing away a little person who had a life while in my house, and by throwing them away, I’m technically killing them—they’ll get crushed up once the garbage truck takes them. This is especially true if the object looks like something that could be alive, like a stuffed animal or Barbie doll. It’s even painful for me to watch people destroy objects in anger on a TV show, especially if that object meant something to them or another character, because I just feel hurt for the object. Objects are innocent. They never hurt anyone. They don’t deserve that! It’s even painful for me to watch object-destroying videos others would find soothing, like those popular compilations of crushing things in a hydrolic press.
Hyperempathy is heightened empathy.
3. My Experience with Hypoempathy
For me and many other autistic people, hypoempathy is knowing, logically, why your friend is sad. They are sad because their grandpa died. This makes them sad because they won’t see their grandpa again until the afterlife, or maybe they don’t even believe they’ll see them then.
But I won’t feel sad for this friend. I’ll have difficulty putting myself in their shoes. I’ve never had a loved one die, so I can’t make myself feel or understand what it’s like. I can ask the grieving friend what I can do to help, but I can’t empathize with them, and I won’t easily know what to do to ease their pain.
I lack the feeling of empathy.
This is especially true, for me, with distant problems I see on the news. My family or friends sometimes feel sad or even cry because of news, but if the news doesn’t affect me, and it’s not an issue I’ve ever related to, I don’t feel bad. I recognize that, logically, it was a bad thing that hurt people, but I don’t feel empathy for the subjects of the tragedy. Those sad YouTube ads trying to get you to donate to their cause just irritate me because I despise when people try to make me feel a certain way because “I should.”
I do feel empathy in some situations, however—mostly in situations that are similar to ones that I’ve gone through, particularly if they really impacted me. I can also feel empathy for unfamiliar situations with fictional characters I really like or real people I’m just really close to. This kind of connection to someone is rare for me, however.
But it’s a little easier to feel empathy for others’ happiness, particularly if it’s, again, someone I’m close to. After all, everyone wants to feel happy, and excitement is contagious.
Part of my experience with hypoempathy, however, is that it makes me feel bad about myself sometimes. I try to force empathy for others, stoke those feelings to life by pulling on the logical experiences I know of their situation. I can force the feelings a little bit, but not a lot. You see, empathy is a value so commended, lifted up, in American society that if you have no empathy, you’re automatically considered an awful person and deserve to rot. Soon after I’d written the first draft of this article, even, I came across a Facebook post saying how disgusting and awful people without empathy are. I know, logically, I can’t change the way I was born, but my perception of myself is something I need to work on, and society doesn’t say kind things those who experience hypoempathy. People don’t realize empathy is about feelings and not behavior.
Another aspect of hypoempathy I experience is sometimes I genuinely don’t know I’m “supposed to” be sad, angry, etc. in reaction to a story someone tells me. This happens when I hear a real story where I don’t know any of the participants. For example, when I was on a study abroad interim trip to London my final year of college, a group of us went on a ghost tour. The guide, toward the end, shared a story he’d heard from a previous tour member about a haunted hospital we walked past. In the children’s ward, if a certain water fountain turned on by itself, that meant a child in the ward would die before morning. And in the story, though one child seemed like they were on the mend, they died. I thought this story was cool worldbuilding. My author brain went, “Oh, that’s an interesting curse/prophecy sort of thing.” Because I was so far removed from the situation, and didn’t know any of the story’s participants, it was only when I mentioned afterward that that was my favorite story of the tour and everyone else said it was sad that I realized the “correct” reaction to the story was sadness. Because I didn’t see any of the participants in the story being sad myself, and didn’t hear about them being sad in the story, I didn’t get it.
One final way hypoempathy affects me is I usually don’t miss people. I will only miss people if (1) I am used to them being in this situation (like at an activity or a general location) and they are not or (2) if I really, really like them (which is very rare). For example, while I was at college, I hardly missed my family. Ever. I also never missed my boyfriend when I had one—except for one time when he was absent from a club meeting we both regularly went to. I do, however, regularly miss my sister who’s at college, because I’m in a place I’m used to her being in (home). I also know I’d miss my current best friend if we couldn’t talk for a while because I’ve never been this close with a friend, and she and our projects have been a big part in giving me a drive for life again.
Hyperempathy and hypoempathy are often a part of the autistic experience. And most importantly, they have no bearing on someone’s moral character. They are simply different ways the brain functions, and revolve around the feeling of empathy rather than the actions of the person. As such, when writing hyperempathy and hypoempathy, don’t make them indicate the character of those who experience them.
A person can even experience both at once. Maybe they feel the emotions of people around them, but also don’t miss people when they’re gone. Maybe they can’t feel empathy for others most of the time, but do strongly for one or two emotions and certain specific experiences.
Hyperempathy and hypoempathy have both benefits and drawbacks. Maybe a person is great at knowing what others are feeling, but experiencing others’ emotions all the time makes socialization exhausting. Maybe they don’t experience homesickness, but feel alienated from their more empathetic peers.
They are simply two common, neutral traits of autism.
Welcome to my new experiences series! I’m going over different aspects of disabilities and mental health struggles, what they’re often like, and specifically my experiences with them. I hope you find these articles enjoyable and informative!
I also offer sensitivity reading services for autism, anxiety, OCD, and other related topics! Click here to learn more.
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