 Hello everybody, welcome to the video. Controversial ASPY here, both autistic and non-autistic, combined into one brain. Today we're going to be talking about double empathy. Is that a paradox? Who knows, you'll have to watch the video. And you will be able to watch it after this short commercial title break. It should be happening around about now. So, what is double empathy? Double empathy has been coined or termed by one of the researchers at Manchester. It's a two-way lack of empathy. In one sense, autistics find it hard to empathise with non-autistics. In the other sense, non-autistics find it hard to empathise with autistics. Which is a big, big problem, and it's one of the problems that I've been trying to decode with my personal logging of my experiences and writing through my videos. I have a very unpopular opinion. I believe that the way that non-autistics socialise is more fruitful for wellbeing and happiness than the regular autistic way of communicating, which is very factual and logical and doesn't usually include a lot of emotional talking and about group dynamics and feelings, which is a very big difference between the two. So, just to give you a little bit of background why I'm like this. At school, I was always a very, very sociable kid. I would always gravitate towards people who liked to talk to me. Obviously, that's what I do here. Great discovery there, Tom. But the people I liked were the people who were very emotional and liked to play. So it was typically non-autistic people that I used to gravitate around. My parents used to sort of facilitate me socialising with autistics. And it sort of went well. It was sort of good, but I didn't enjoy it as much. I liked the very social environment that is shown a lot more in non-autistics, I believe. Moving on to my secondary school or sort of coming up through primary school. I had a lot of friends who were female and that has been a really big part of my life, which is learning how to communicate with girls, which I found to be the most enjoyable form of communication. I adopted a lot of the ways that they spoke and hence my sort of feminine vibe, I guess. But what it did teach me was that my way of communicating, even though I... When you're autistic, we have this sense of single-mindedness because we don't tend to think about outside of our box of logic. This can be good from any instances. Sorry about that. Someone's on a skateboard. Yes, he's got long hair. Yes, he's got a beanie on. But this logic can be very... It can stop you from being open-minded. When I say open-minded, I'm not saying accept things, but when you have such a logical backing and you feel like that's superior, you tend to block off a lot of what people are saying or dismiss it in your mind even if you are listening or try to show them that you are listening. And that's a very bad thing in terms of my life and I feel like it affects a lot of autistics as well. Now, it's not all a simple bag of chocolates that you know what the chocolate is. It's always a mixed bag. It's always different for different people. But in this video, I'm trying to get across the fact that it's better if I talk about some people that I know. There's a sort of subcategories of autistics that I've found. There's a lot of people who, like myself, very readily want to socialise and emotionally connect with people. We tend to have a lot more like mental health issues and stuff. It can be on sort of a sliding scale and when we come out from school we can either become very jaded and non-sociable or not try to put in as much effort because we've been bullied or we've had some bad experiences and people haven't understood us because we're autistic and it's self-explanatory why. And then you have a group of people who, like myself, very readily like the emotional connection that we get from talking to people. So we learn a lot about non-autistics, learn about how they speak, how they interact, how they in groups as well as singular people and how they express their thoughts and feelings in varying degrees of difference towards ourselves. On the other side of the spectrum you have, it's another spectrum, it's a spectrum within a spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum you have the very confident people who don't tend to be very socially or emotionally directed. These people tend to grow up, they can stand for themselves, if someone's bullying them they'll punch them or humiliate them with their intelligence or something that is a little bit different to the other subgroup that I've made up in my mind. But these people can be very difficult to talk to, very blunt, almost to the point where it's offensive. They'll very readily offend someone. Despite no benefit to doing that, just stating the fact, which is if you didn't sort of incorporate the social side you know you realise how you would think about it, you'd state the facts because they're more important. If you were trying to organise something, despite that you would insult someone which may be less productive and less logical to do but because you're so logical in communication. You would go with that sort of route of being completely blunt and offensive without thinking about it. That's one of the issues because I've sort of got myself to a point where I understand autistics a lot more than non-autistics but I do understand non-autistics a lot and I'm sort of like a little bit of a hybrid. I don't feel like there's a lot of people in the autistic community who bottle themselves off in groups and especially in forums and community pages on Facebook. This place is sort of a breeding ground for single-mindedness. If you go into these groups and you talk about issues, you're not exposed to contrary opinions in a lot of cases and even if you are, there's a very overwhelming majority of people who are very vindictive and they complain about non-autistics a lot rather than trying to further everyone's knowledge about non-autistics in order to make life better. They focus on more of the negative side of it and you know, we're not built for your society which is true but it's not their fault, they're not doing it on purpose. We are the minority and I think it's always good to bring your attention back to that because you wouldn't expect a very small group, maybe like one or two percent of people with physical disabilities or something and you would have to change your whole society structure, your whole buildings, everything like that. It just happens to some degree which is good, I'm not saying it's bad but you wouldn't change the whole of everything. It would be more of an add-on thing after you've finished the more important things that cover most people which I think is a good way to structure society because a lot of people, especially when those tight communities see that as discrimination or not taken as seriously which is a very bad thing to do because if you box yourself into that group you'll find that it's very difficult to talk to people who aren't autistic, which are the majority and if you can't talk to them and convince them and you're more very volatile and offensive and single-minded then you won't be able to convince them and no change is going to happen from that. You're just going to box everybody off into this little knit community that although can be helpful for some people, after a while it breeds a very negative view of different groups which is a bad thing if you know anything about history. Talking about being sort of a little bit of a hybrid between the two minds I actually find it very difficult to talk to very single-minded and even if they are very logical I find it very uncomfortable to talk to people who don't have that social understanding or don't incorporate emotions into a valid part of communication and a lot of the time this can happen. I'll get initially annoyed and hungry that they are being disrespectful or they're not thinking about it too much and they're more just fluently just spitting out facts and logic without thinking about the consequences and it can be really hard because I would initially get really annoyed and hungry but I will also remind myself that I used to be very similar to that probably less than them but especially as a kid, as a teenager, I was very much like that and it sort of makes me laugh, it makes me chuckle a bit because I can't really get upset that people are on the same side they are being single-minded and they're not trying to think outside the box about how other people work and compensate for that which is something that the autistic community wants non-autistics to do and it's a very bad dynamic of people boxing themselves off and getting annoyed at certain groups and basically just ruining the possibilities for building bridges of understanding and building more walls of hatred which happens a lot in the autistic community I keep saying it, it's a nice little buzzword that I use a lot I don't know how else to put it, so if you're having a way of putting that just tell me because it's getting on my nerves so if you're watching this and you find yourself identifying with a certain group a good thing to remember is when you're trying to think of yourself objectively although logic is better usually logic takes in this account where a lot of our actions and our things that we do are very ego based I know it's used a lot in spirituality, I'm not using it in that context but we tend to get a lot of our emotional validation and good feelings from making sure that our ego is high and you can see a lot of those people who are very single-minded and don't really care about other people's emotions I like to beat people and show people that they are better than them so they can feel good rather than talking and emotionally connecting with people to feel good which is a very big difference and if you just think for a second and just comprehend that maybe if you're more on that side of logic is key, logic is king think about that a little bit and consider the reasons for the actions that you have and consider that maybe incorporating more of an emotional understanding into that would be more beneficial which I think it is, definitely so this is being a small little video on the double empathy rule paradox and it's not a paradox, it's not really a cyclical thing that you can't escape but it is a good thing to sort of understand when you're thinking of developing yourself as an autistic and also understanding autistics if you're not and you're watching this it can be very good to understand the sort of mindset that certain autistic people can have and the reasons for the actions if you know that a bit more you can be a bit more empathetic to them although they're not very empathetic towards you obviously you have to set boundaries and you have to tell people when they're being rude and stuff which I think is good, it's good to tell people when they're being rude because they have difficulty with social understanding and emotional understanding it doesn't mean that you have to compensate for that just maybe don't react as much as you would do to a normal person becoming it from the autistic side trying to understand yourself a bit more I recommend just like going over this video a bit more and making notes on the things that I've said and trying to sort of relate some things towards yourself it can be a very difficult thing to do especially since autistics come from the inherent logic, dynamic thing that sounds really intelligent but it's not I'm just mixing words together but if you get those together and you remember that although it may make you feel bad to agree on some things that may be bad about yourself is a very good step especially if you make sure that you know that you're very ego based and you can tell from the traits and stuff that I've described for very logical based autistics I hope this has been an interesting video for you I have sort of had a realisation that I'm sort of playing to the whole not really but I want to set aside my videos for something different I have very refined opinions on the nature of autistics in our society and the way that we react and interact with people in general and I want to talk a bit more about that because it's not something that's seen readily on YouTube or in many places to be honest and I think we need a bit more of that in order to make sure that our society grows in the way that benefits both on non-autistics and autistics Thank you very much for watching guys if you like the video give it a like if you dislike it don't dislike it just click the like button anyway and if you have any comments about this stick them down below you can be as blunt as possible if you want it won't shift me I'm a rock, I'm a stone or if you have any comments about it or your personal experiences maybe you've done this list and stuff and try to analyse the possible ways that you're being single minded tell me about it if you put it down in the comments other people will look at it and they won't have the initial reaction of saying screw you like autistics are king logic is king emotions don't mean anything they don't benefit anyone anyway hope you guys are having a good day it's nice and sunny out here in Manchester hoping to put a few more videos together getting a lot of work done very bored but these videos are pulling me through see you later guys logic