Neurotypicals Are Confused About Empathy, They Want Sympathy

What many autistic people struggle with is showing sympathy, not necessarily empathy

image generated by AI at Freepik

Author’s Note: The words “allistic” and “neurotypical” are not synonyms and instead have slightly different meanings:

• an allistic is someone who is not autistic (for example, people with ADHD but not autism are allistic but not neurotypical)
• a neurotypical is anyone who does not have a neurodivergence such as autism, ADHD, OCD, Tourettes, or a mental illness. One can be both allistic and neurotypical, but there is a subtle, but important difference.

When neurotypicals (people who are not neurodivergent) say that autistic people cannot show empathy, or when they assume we don’t feel any, what they are saying we don’t show, is sympathy.

Now, I want to be clear, some autistic people do struggle with empathy, but most people conflate low empathy with no compassion. Compassion is not a synonym of empathy. Not truly.

People with low empathy can still care about other people or do the right thing by other people, but they may not be able to understand well what the other person is feeling.