 Good day and welcome back to the Asperger's Growth YouTube channel with your host, Mr Thomas Henley of course. Today we've got an autism topic related video. We're going to be talking about autistic people and empathy. We're going to be talking about autism, morality and the evil things that autistic people can do. Yes, you've heard it here. Autistic people are not glorious and angelic innocent beings who have descended from the heavens to bless this neurotypical world. We are humans with evil and good depending on our personality, our values, our behaviors. It's not as clear-cut as we are good or we are bad and in this video I'm going to show you why that is and hopefully change your mind on this particular topic. Before we get into it, make sure to like the video if you like it and subscribe and do all that jazz. Go over to the Instagram at Asperger's Growth. You can ask me all sorts of dating Q&A questions that I will review on my channel if you are interested in that and there's also a lot of stuff about the personal work that I've done in public speaking, modelling, things of that nature or very lovely stuff but without divulging too much and straying away from the topic, let's get into the video. So, I believe that seeing all autistic people as good, as benevolent, as angelic creatures is a product of infantilization. Infantilization being the action or behavior of treating adults as infants. Now, if you think that you have this view of autistic people, I'm not saying that you're a bad person. I'm just saying that we need to do a little bit of a reality check on this because saying that every autistic person is good and can do no wrong is just plain wrong. I think that this has come about for perhaps a positive reason. We had a lot of research done by a lady called Lorna Wing who theorized that autistic people like empathy. Going further, there was a study or a few studies that Simon Baron Cohen has done which looked into two main factors in empathy. Cognitive and adaptive empathy. Cognitive, you can see and perceive emotions in other people. Adaptive, you have an appropriate emotional response and just to get it out of the way, autistic people, quite low in cognitive inherently. We can work on it but inherently it's quite low. Adaptive, pretty normal. So with a lot of advocates and allies trying to crush this horrible autistic people that have empathy myth, we have created a little bit of a misconception around that. I'm afraid that people will take this and give autistic people too much of the time a free pass for being a nasty, bad, abusive human. This is a really big problem as far as relationships because if someone has the idea that they can do no wrong and everything that they do is a product of them not understanding or cross cognitive differences then they may not get out of these situations and stay with this person despite all the pain and difficulty and trauma that they may receive. So what I want to ask you is what springs to mind when you think about autism, morality and empathy? Do you think that these autistic people are benevolent, law-abiding, you know, rule-abiding humans who are hyper-hyper empathic and innocent and harmless? Or do you think autistic people are evil, lacking empathy, self-centred, aggressive and rule-breaking? Or do you think that autistic people are humans? A little bit of a spiky human, maybe a bit different, a bit of a human with a twist but still has flaws and beauty alike? Well, I know that's a little bit of a loaded question but I'm going to explain why I think that it's the third one basically. Yeah, evil or good, neither of these statements are true for everybody. I haven't seen any studies on the morality factors of autistic people but I can hazard a pretty good guess from the news and stories and personal experiences and experiences of people in my life that, you know, saying that autistic people are inherently good or bad is a really bad call. There are some autistic people who have done some really evil, horrible stuff and there are a lot of autistic people who do some really good stuff and the majority of people, well, they probably lie just in the average, you know, flaws and good things just like everybody else. You know, it's important to take us back to a little bit of early sort of psychology work done by, I believe it was Carl Jung who talked about the concept of the shadow that behind our conscious brain and our decisions, we have a shadow which encourages us and makes us want to do evil things, bad things. For example, with me I had to do a lot of work integrating my shadow because I am actually quite an aggressive, angry person in my core. I'm very forward and blunt and perhaps a little bit too aggressive for my own good. I've never done anything to anybody outside of combat sports but definitely within combat sports I was probably one of the more aggressive fighters that you could come across and I really had to sort of balance that with the view of myself in daily life being quite pacifist and quite quiet in nature. So it's very different to how I present on the outside and how I behave. You know, the important thing about this is that everybody has a shadow even the benevolent, amazing, charitable, award-winning, Nobel Peace Prize-winning people, they still have a shadow. They still want to, they still have background desires to do evil things. But the point is that these, this is not, doesn't have to be you. It's a part of your brain which encourages you to do things that are very self-centered and very uncaring and you have a filter through, you know, your conscious mind is a filter to filter all through that all that evil stuff and say, hey look, probably it's not going to make me feel better in the long term to do these evil things so I'm not going to do them. It's important to acknowledge it, it's important to understand and control and integrate it. Perhaps me integrating my aggression is, you know, me getting rid of that aggressive energy through weightlifting or through taekwondo or martial arts. You know, it's important to first be aware of that. There is a difference when it comes to autistic people between not being aware and choosing to ignore other people's needs for their own personal gain. I don't, I don't want to see adults, autistic adults being let off the hook for being abusive and self-centered to others and no matter the reason for it. It all comes down to how you see autistic adults. Monsters with malevolence and no empathy, angels with no personal weakness or flaws or humans with flaws and beauty alike. Don't give us a free pass, please. Get out of abusive situations. You know, it's, it's important to, you know, trying to get around this and trying to think about yourself in relation to an autistic person in either an intimate relationship, interpersonal friendships, family, think workplace, things of that nature. Number one is to be patient and diligent, you know, when trying to understand an individual's actions and behaviors and words and where they come from. It's important to, to research into autism, to understand it from experiential and factual, factual elements. You've got, you know, diff, different bubbles of, of arenas and I would, I would really try and stick towards the experiential part. So listening to autistic people talk about issues such as this. Once you've done that, communicate about the issue. Oh no, communication. I'm going to have to sit down and talk to, talk to them. Yeah. Yeah, you do. You need to try and reach some level of clarity on this and rule out any miscommunications. It's important to be quite posed and quite adult about this, you know, especially when you're talking about emotionally sensitive things or your partner, maybe quite aggressive or, you know, physically or emotionally abusive or verbally abusive. But in order to try and get past this, you need to communicate. If they're not willing to sit down with you and try and talk things out. I'm not saying sit down in front of you and let you shout at them. Talk, talking things out with the mindset of we need to fix this. Then I get, I guess step three would be removers from your life if we cause you pain and no and show no progression towards change. You wouldn't treat a neurotypical person like that. You wouldn't, I guess some people do, but you wouldn't in general treat their behaviors as something out of their control. It's important not to, not to infantilize autistic people, not to treat them like children or treat them like, like they don't understand things. You need to treat them as an independent adult. And if they're not on it, if they don't act like an independent adult and they really haven't done that work on themselves, then that's their problem. It's not your problem. You can help guide them and you can show them love and you can open your arms to them. But if they are just so scarred from the past and they just have so many traumatic experiences that they're incapable of approaching relationships in a positive adult calm way, then they're probably not for you. They're probably not worth it to be friends with, probably not worth it to be in a relationship with. You know, we are subject to a lot of abuse and pain in our life. You just have to look at the statistics, a lot of mental health difficulties. But as with everybody, it's what we do after the fact that really shows our true character. I've had absolutely horrific, horrific, painful experiences in my life dealing with a lot of severe mental health conditions. But I always try to work on myself. I always try to improve my emotional social understanding of things. I always put other people's well being, you know, similar to mine in terms of how much I care. I try to treat everyone as an equal. It kind of sounds like I'm trying. I'm right to it in my own own ear, but I'm just trying to make a point that if their true character is to absorb all of this and produce negativity and push it back out into the world, they're probably not a good person to be around, autistic or not. It's awful that we have to experience these things and it's just so common. But it's not your fault. Individually, you didn't cause them pain. Well, I hope you didn't. And so they should have the clarity of mind to say, hey, look, I've had these bad experiences, but my experiences with you, my experience with other people have offset that and I'm going to try and have a more positive mindset towards the neurotypical worlds, towards other people to go out into the world and do good and try not to do bad. Try to integrate, control that shadow that you have. I'm going to leave that there. I realize that this is a very important topic to cover and perhaps quite deep and quite sort of against the narrative that's pushed out quite a lot, but I just don't want to see anybody abused and I don't want to see anybody in pain and struggling emotionally and not having the life of their own when they're friends with, have a family member or are in a relationship with an autistic person. Don't give us a free pass. Please be understanding, be patient, understand, you know, research, try and educate yourself. If all that fails, there's nothing else you should, you can do and nothing else that you should do. You need to think about yourself. I'm going to leave that there. I hope you have enjoyed this video. I have definitely enjoyed doing this. This is all from all of all of my autism topic, but topic videos are based on posts that I've made on Instagram. So if you want to go check the awesome little photos and write ups that I've done on Instagram, please head over to there on Asperger's Growth. A lot of stuff on there. You'd be, you know, it's good, good, good page to follow objectively. You know, there's no, there's no subjective little push from the fact that it's me. Yeah, I would really appreciate that. And make sure to subscribe and like if you want to see more videos like this. Anyway, won't keep you too long. Hope you have a lovely day. And I'll see you in another episode on the Asperger's Growth channel. See you later, folks.