Autism is an actively lived condition. Thousands, even millions of people have it. Most of them now adults. In that time, we've all been thinking about the treatment we've had as children, and as adults, and what autism is, what it means for us, and what we should do because we have it.
The answers to those questions vary by the person, but like any communicating people, we have, as a group, gotten together in places and done some thinking. New philosophies have risen based on those thoughts. One of these is the Double Empathy problem.
The basic understanding of autism is that some people are born different, the difference is in their brains, and that makes them have trouble communicating with others. This would be the single empathy problem: autistic people, we're told, have trouble communicating.
The thing is, it's not that simple. Scads of personal testimony from autistic people networking with other autistic people have led to researchers doing studies on it... and it turns out we communicate with each other just fine. The problems come when you mix autistic and neurotypical people. Why is this?
It's because neurotypical people are set in a single, accepted way of communication. Specifically: verbal speech in very limited, specific patterns, plus a layer of non-verbal body language reading. Anyone who doesn't communicate in that manner, or not exactly in that manner, is deemed "broken" and summarily ignored or not taken seriously.
Autistic people, especially adults, don't do that as much. We understand and recognize a broader range of communication, because we ourselves use a broader range of communication. We've spent years learning to be polite and respond appropriately and trying to think in ways unnatural to us, and it's granted us a form of empathy that neurotypical people... entirely lack. Because if all you use is one form of communication, you are blind to any other kind of communication.
Research is beginning to bear this out. I don't expect the results to change much as these studies are repeated for scientific rigor. To get an idea of the kinds of calculations you should be doing when faced with an autistic person (or really, any person that strikes you as "different"), check out this example behavioral analysis of a child named Sam in a school classroom. How many of those factors occurred to you, when presented with the restless child at circle time?
This is the Double Empathy problem. Yes, autistic people have trouble communicating to neurotypical people. But no, that's not a 100% us problem. Communication is a two-way street, requiring perspective-taking from both sides. Neurotypical (NT) people don't communicate back to us in ways we understand, but we're still blamed for not understanding. See how this works? You'd think, if neurotypical people were so ideal and wonderful and everything we autistic people should strive to be, that y'all could communicate back to us in ways we understand. But that's not the case.
In more visual terms:
Autistic person ------> NT person
(difficulty communicating and being understood)
NT person ------> Autistic person
(difficulty communicating and being understood)
And yet:
Autistic person ------> Autistic person
(no difficulties)
Double empathy. Double. Two-way. Neurotypical people are part of the communication problem. We appear to be have different sets of social skills. Autistic people are demanded to learn neurotypical social skills. Maybe y'all should learn ours, too.
Absolutely!!!
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