The First to Fall

Tag: healing

  • The Double-Empathy Struggle

    So a big part of this book is figuring out how people can do the stupid or terrible things they’ve done (and continue to do).

    The answer to that question has really proven a challenge. Frustating.

    It’s occurred to me that part of the challenge (maybe the biggest part) is that I’m trying to figure out where people diverge from reality in a way that I can understand. I keep looking for reasons I can relate to. Some sort of trap that, when I see it, I say, “I could see myself falling into that, too.” But I can’t find that trap.

    Because if the divergence of reality I see in the people around me happens at a point I would never have chosen…it feels alien, false, deductive. I need it to be human. Comprehensible to me. I want to believe that had I been there, I’d at least have seen how the mistake happened.

    It’s in this line of thought that I had a breakthrough.

    Maybe the difference isn’t in the choice…but in the threshold.

    I and others like me might just have a lower tolerance for unreality (a more sensitive detection system for contradiction). Because I think most people DO feel dissonance, but they just have more social circuitry telling them to ignore it. What is that social circuitry? And isn’t that the deviation from life’s baseline?

    When faced with serious problems, statements like, “This isn’t my place to question,” “It’s probably fine,” Everyone else seems convinced,” “It’s safer not to say anything,” and “It is what it is,” do more than annoy me. They fucking enrage me.

    So maybe the divergence is recognition. One group feels the glitch and names it…the other feels it and smooths it over. Because their nervous systems are somehow tuned to avoid rupture instead of detecting and responding to it.

    Maybe I feel reality differently. That certainly tracks. That would mean a problem of empathy across feedback thresholds. That mystery choice I’ve been looking for? The one I can comprehend as how people mistook fiction for reality? Maybe I’m not missing it at all. Maybe I’m simply seeing that, for me, there was no choice. There’s something that I would have felt that didn’t register with them.

    So let’s look at our fork again.

    Is it a different mix of people in the groups? We’ve ruled out innate cognitive superiority. Could there simply be a different mix of dispositions, thresholds, or nervous system types?

    Probably.

    Let’s say Group A has more people whose nervous systems respond strongly to contradiction, unreality, or unresolved pattern. And Group B has more people whose nervous systems prioritize social cohesion, comfort, and continuity.

    No talk of virtue…just configuration.

    Same species, same environment, different sensory weighting. It seems plausible that a small difference in feedback sensitivity across a few individuals could tip a group’s response to contradiction.

    Or is it really external conditions? Because I think these matter…but not in the way most people think. It’s not about environment determining outcome. It’s about environment shaping when and how feedback arrives. A harsh environment returns frequent, sharp signals (You’re wrong. FIX IT.) A forgiving environment allows more drift before consequences appear.

    So external conditions shape the urgency of model correction, and internal sensitivity shapes the likelihood of correction. Low sensitivity + gentle conditions? Drift compounds. Fast. High sensitivity + harsh conditions? Feedback (reality) stays close.

    Are “low tolerance for unreality” and “need for stable patterns” the same thing? I don’t think so…but they feel close.

    A low tolerance for unreality is detecting and suffering from contradictions between reality and model…it’s affective and stress-inducing. A need for stable patterns is seeking and requiring patterns that hold over time to feel safe…it’s predictive and structural.

    But they’re structurally linked, aren’t they? I need stable patterns because unreality feels intolerable. And I reject unreality because it violates the patterns I need to hold. They both express an orientation…a high-fidelity feedback requirement.

    SO…some groups contain individuals for whom predictive error is viscerally intolerable. Others contain fewer. Whether the group listens to those individuals determines whether the model corrects or compounds. The environment determines how quickly error becomes obvious. The culture determines how early error is acknowledged. And they nervous system determines how strongly error is felt.

  • My “Alexithymia” Isn’t What They Say It Is

    When I hear that someone is suffering (really suffering, with no way out) it hurts. The destruction of nature hurts. Reading about people in North Korean prison camps hurts. The quiet death of ecosystems, the slow violence of poverty, the stories I read here from other autistic people, the way the powerless get crushed by systems they didn’t create…this kind of pain gets in me and doesn’t leave. It’s like background radiation. I carry it everywhere.

    But when someone is suffering because of something they refuse to change, when they clearly could, but don’t…I don’t feel sad. Not really. Not even when I’m supposed to. And apparently that’s a problem. That’s not empathetic, I’m told. That’s cold. That’s…autistic?

    So I’ve been thinking: what does “empathy” mean to most people, then? Does it mean feeling what someone else feels, no matter what? Does it mean echoing their distress, even when that distress comes from avoidable choices, repeated again and again?

    To me, empathy includes being able to discern what’s really going on, and responding from a place of integrity. Otherwise, don’t we just cheapen words like “sad?”

    It’s strange to hear people say I “lack empathy.”What I feel isn’t absence. It’s selectivity. It’s proportional. It’s based on whether the situation actually warrants emotion, not whether I’m expected to emote.

    It’s strange how not reacting becomes the problem. Not the incoherence of the situation. Not the person refusing to help themselves. My failure to perform the right emotion at the right time is what gets flagged as a deficit.

    And maybe that’s why I’ve also been having such a hard time with the word alexithymia.

    Sometimes I look back on an experience…a conflict, a celebration, a goodbye…and only afterward realize it was happy. Or it was unjust. Or it was sad. At the time? I didn’t feel much of anything. I wasn’t there in the way people expect. And I find myself wondering, is that alexithymia? Is that what they mean when they say I can’t identify emotions?

    But here’s what I think is actually happening: I wasn’t allowed to be present. I was too busy tracking the expectations in the room. Too busy trying to be appropriate. Too busy masking. The part of me that might have felt joy, or grief, or wonder, wasn’t at the front of the line. It was buried under a survival protocol.

    So maybe it’s not that I “lack access” to my emotions. Maybe it’s that I’m not given access to the conditions where those emotions can surface.

    Maybe it’s not that I can’t feel. Maybe I’m just too busy surviving.