Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsWhat Is Hyper-Empathy?How It Shows Up For Autistic PeopleHow to Deal

Table of ContentsView All

View All

Table of Contents

What Is Hyper-Empathy?

How It Shows Up For Autistic People

How to Deal

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Empathyis something we all like to think we possess. The ability to be in tune with others and their feelings naturally makes us kinder people, because when we can relate to what another person is feeling, we are more likely to behave in their best interest and less likely to intentionally cause them pain.

That said, sometimes the amount of empathy a person feels can be a bit too much and lead to overwhelm in someone’s life.

When it comes toautism, which has many attributes centered around how a person relates to others, you might have heard that empathy is scarce. That’s not necessarily true, though: While some autistic people exhibit low empathy, other autistic people experience hyper-empathy, or too much of it.

“Empathy is a spectrum, and many autistic people have either higher than average or lower than average empathy,” explainsDr. Amy Marschall, Psy.D.Hyper-empathy can add to the already complex autistic experience.

We’ll discuss what hyper-empathy is, how it presents in autism, how it may impact autism diagnosis, and how you can more easily deal with life if you are a hyper-empathic autistic person.

What Is an Empath and How Do You Know If You Are One?

For autistic people, it’s normal to have an excess of one attribute and a deficit of another. “Autistic people tend to have “spiky” skillsets, meaning that we tend to have either a lot more or a lot less than average of many different things,” says Marschall.

Even though it has been scientifically proven that autistic people may feel more or less empathy than average,the cultural narrative around empathy and autism is that they lack empathy. I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until age 46, and one of the many reasons I spent decades thinking I couldn’t possibly be autistic is because I’m hyper-empathetic.

In recent years, as prior studies about empathy in autism have been reviewed, scientists have realized that they are inconsistent in what those studies even consider empathy to be. One meta-analysis noted that “in 111 papers on autism and empathy, 31 unique conceptual interpretations of empathy were found. These diverged across 12 dimensions.” They said that those varied definitions impacted the outcomes of the studies, and that in turn, more work is needed.

Marshall says, “When people have been abusive to me, I may become overly in-tune with their emotions to predict when they might become harmful.” She adds that “autistic individuals are often abused for displaying autistic traits, and many traditional ‘treatment’ protocols forautistic childrenare abusive and traumatic. This might lead to autistic people developing hyper-empathy as a protective response.”

doing trauma work in therapy can reduce the feelings of hyper-empathy as well since the trauma responses may not be as prevalent or easily triggered.

Empathy Is More Intense, But Harder to Communicate

Lastly, hyper-empathy in autism can be particularly challenging because it’s common for autistic people to have a harder time vocalizing their feelings than neurotypical people. This is often due toalexithymiain addition to neurotypical standards that feelings must be spoken verbally to be understood. For autistic people, it means that they may experience a mountain of emotions while appearing uncaring or unmoved.

Until diagnosis, I had never known how to reconcile the fact that I feel emotions so deeply, yet rarely can I ever get those feelings to come out of my mouth as spoken words–unless I’m reading aloud something I wrote prior.

An Important NoteWhen discussing empathy, we should remember that it isn’t about feeling love or care for others, or a lack thereof. Marschall explains that “empathy specifically refers to the ability to literally feel someone else’s emotions, not the ability to care for someone else,” and that “lots of people who experience low empathy are incredibly loving and have strong connections to others, they just don’t have the literal experience of someone else’s feelings.”

An Important Note

When discussing empathy, we should remember that it isn’t about feeling love or care for others, or a lack thereof. Marschall explains that “empathy specifically refers to the ability to literally feel someone else’s emotions, not the ability to care for someone else,” and that “lots of people who experience low empathy are incredibly loving and have strong connections to others, they just don’t have the literal experience of someone else’s feelings.”

Understanding Autistic Burnout

If you’ve realized that you are hyper-empathetic as an autistic person, it’s natural to wonder how to navigate it.

Here are two concrete ways you can more easily navigate life as a hyper-empathetic autistic person.

Boundaries

Amy Marschall, PsyDI want to be clear that autistic people’s emotional responses are not ‘wrong,’ ‘bad,’ or ‘less than’ those of non-autistics. Ideally, we would live in a world where all forms of nonverbal body language are valued equally

Amy Marschall, PsyD

I want to be clear that autistic people’s emotional responses are not ‘wrong,’ ‘bad,’ or ‘less than’ those of non-autistics. Ideally, we would live in a world where all forms of nonverbal body language are valued equally

My girlfriend bought me a pin that says “not a hugger” and I decided to tell strangers that I like to start with a wave or a handshake when I meet new people. Additionally, to help people I know and people who follow my social media understand this phenomenon better, I madean instagram reelabout it.

Validation

As with many elements of autism, it’s important that we understand that different is neither better nor worse. Your hyper-empathy may make you shy away from groups or feel anxious in relationships, but that doesn’t mean you are any less emotionally equipped than anyone else. It simply means that the common ways society handles things don’t always work well for you.

“Unfortunately autistic people are often punished or misunderstood because we don’t always display emotions in ways that neurotypical people perceive it,” says Marschall. “I want to be clear that autistic people’s emotional responses are not ‘wrong,’ ‘bad,’ or ‘less than’ those of non-autistics. Ideally, we would live in a world where all forms of nonverbal body language are valued equally,” she adds.

Keep in Mind

Being hyper-empathetic can make your emotional life more challenging, and adding autism to that presents a unique combination of many feelings with potentially fewer outlets through which to express them. Know that the more you learn to express boundaries, and the more time you spend validating your own identity, the happier you will be, and the easier it will become to move through life.

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2 SourcesVerywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Shalev I, Warrier V, Greenberg DM, et al.Reexamining empathy in autism: Empathic disequilibrium as a novel predictor of autism diagnosis and autistic traits.Autism Res. 2022;15(10):1917-1928.A reflective guide on the meaning of empathy in autism research.Methods in Psychology. 2023;8:100109.

2 Sources

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Shalev I, Warrier V, Greenberg DM, et al.Reexamining empathy in autism: Empathic disequilibrium as a novel predictor of autism diagnosis and autistic traits.Autism Res. 2022;15(10):1917-1928.A reflective guide on the meaning of empathy in autism research.Methods in Psychology. 2023;8:100109.

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Shalev I, Warrier V, Greenberg DM, et al.Reexamining empathy in autism: Empathic disequilibrium as a novel predictor of autism diagnosis and autistic traits.Autism Res. 2022;15(10):1917-1928.A reflective guide on the meaning of empathy in autism research.Methods in Psychology. 2023;8:100109.

Shalev I, Warrier V, Greenberg DM, et al.Reexamining empathy in autism: Empathic disequilibrium as a novel predictor of autism diagnosis and autistic traits.Autism Res. 2022;15(10):1917-1928.

A reflective guide on the meaning of empathy in autism research.Methods in Psychology. 2023;8:100109.

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