 Today we're going to be talking about something that is possibly something that will change your view of autism forever. I'm talking about cognitive empathy. This series is for any of you who are of the neurotypical variety, the non-autistic group, who are in a relationship or dating an autistic person. What are the challenges that you can expect? What are the good things? What are the ways that you can cross some of those challenges and and find a stronger, more intimate bond for a long-term relationship? This is the series for you and if you're autistic, there's definitely going to be things in here that maybe you weren't aware that you were doing and maybe you might want to try and improve the future and some things that you can learn just about general dating. A lot of the things that I mentioned, they're good for most relationships. It's just that they're more important and they're a little bit more nuanced when it comes to ND, NT, neurodiverse relationships. So let's get into cognitive empathy. Why doesn't my partner know when I'm sad? Why don't they know when I'm emotional? Why can't they see that I'm in pain? I'm in emotional discomfort. It really doesn't, it doesn't really lend itself to me feeling cared about and understood and supported in a long-term relationship. There are some difficulties around autism to do with empathy, but not particularly in the way that you think. The idea that autistic people don't have empathy has been debunked. We do. I can tell you as an autistic adult, I feel empathy extremely strongly, but there are two types of empathy. You have cognitive empathy and effective empathy. Effective empathy being showing a appropriate response to someone's certain state, their emotions, their experiences, their bad things, their negative things. Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to notice those things, the ability to know that you're another person is feeling a certain way, not based on direct communication. You can see, can I see where I'm going with this? Having a deficit in cognitive empathy can make it extremely difficult to build a strong bond if you don't know that the other person struggles with that type of empathy. I did a podcast episode with Professor Simon Baron Cohen, Professor Baron Cohen rather, and we talked all about his research into empathy, comparing psychopathy with autism, and they sort of show inverse profiles, like psychopaths showing immensely strong cognitive empathy, so they can manipulate you and they know that you're in pain, but they don't care. But they also have a very low adaptive empathy, so they don't show the appropriate response. It's all about them. They don't really care. They're just using their ability to see your emotions as a tool, as a weapon, as a method to manipulation. The autistic is the complete opposite. Lower cognitive empathy, adaptive empathy, I would argue probably higher than most people. We tend to be people who have a lot of negative, bad life experiences in a lot of different areas, even just in terms of mental health. And so, you know, people who have gone through negative experiences and pain, they're more likely to be a bit more empathetic than usual, to people who are in similar circumstances or feeling similar emotions. So, going back to cognitive empathy, and that situation where you're in a room with your partner, you feel like you're pretty much expressing that you are in deep emotional pain. You are very sad, but it's not so overt. You're not like crying. You're not, you know, expressing very strong changes in body language and facial expressions and tone of voice. And so, you're kind of at a level where the autistic person isn't aware. You may be guilty of this, and a lot of people are, but even if they do notice a little bit, and they say, are you okay? And you say, yeah, I'm fine. You know, most people would take that as, okay, something's not fine. What's wrong? What's wrong with them? As an autistic person, we place a lot of weight on verbal trust, especially to do with emotions. So, if you say, I'm fine, and they ask you again, are you sure? And you say, yeah, I'm fine. It doesn't matter how you say it. If you tell them that you're fine, they're going to think they're going to assume that you're fine. So, that's one of the first pitfalls that you can get in that situation. Another one would could be, so you're in that place, you're not feeling good, you're kind of expecting something from your partner, but you don't. So, you drag it out. You drag it out for ages. You carry on, hold on to that as a source of resentment towards your partner for a long period of time and never address it. There's the two bad ways of coping with it. Now, I want to highlight again that this information will help anybody in a relationship. A lot of people in relationships will really not have the best communication skills, and they're not going to say how you can help. If you're in a healthy relationship that has good communication, the person is going to say to you, I'm feeling really bad today. I've had a really bad time and you go, oh, I'm really sorry about that. Can I help? It's literally as simple as that, but it's not that it doesn't feel that simple if you're in a long-term relationship and you don't have that open communication and a lot of it's based on expectations and the other person being able to pick up on your mood. It becomes worse if you're with an autistic person because those natural deficits and cognitive empathy may mean that they don't pick up on it as much as most people. So it places even more importance on communication, verbal communication of emotions. Autistic people were more likely to describe and explain and go into depth on certain feelings and emotions and experiences verbally or through direct communication like signing and all that jazz, but not through nonverbal cues like emotional expressions, body language, tone of voice. So there's a really big disconnect between the both of you and it's really a highly stressed the importance of developing that open communication because there will be numerous examples of this happening throughout the relationship. If every single time that that happens it turns into something negative, you stew on it, you confront them about it, you get angry at them for it, that's going to put a lot of stress on your relationship and in actuality maybe they just don't know, maybe you've told them that you're okay. It's not their fault that they were born that way, that they have those natural inherent difficulties with cognitive empathy. So it's important to be aware of that and to try and work around it, it may take you a while to do that but I would highly encourage you to do that, it will absolutely change your your emotional experience and openness and vulnerability with each other just for the autistic person and specifically to know if you've got a problem, if you're feeling bad you're going to tell them and they don't have to worry about that and on the other side you will get what you want, you will get what will help, you may have to do a bit of thinking about what will help you in those circumstances and communicate that and although I might feel like a little bit of work it is important to put work into a relationship somewhere or another and if you put in all that negative energy in because they're not getting how you're feeling based on something that they can't see, it's going to be a big problem. Do it on your own, try and understand this concept, learn a bit more about cognitive empathy and autism and then try and address your behaviour and see if you get the response that you want. Nine times out of ten you will get the response that you want because they have adaptive empathy, they care about you. Distance yourself from the concept that the perfect romantic partner, your true love would always know how you feel and always know what to do at any circumstance, any point in life. Distance yourself from that notion, make up that empty space with communication and openness and vulnerability and that will do absolute wonders for your relationship. If it does happen and they don't give you the right response and you've explained it pretty thoroughly and you've explained it in a nice way, you're not being combative, you're not being confrontational and they still don't get it into their head. Try and again, try different things, try different ways of thinking about it and if none of that works, just tell them that you're trying to get over that barrier and if they're not going to be reciprocal of that and they're not going to put in the effort the other way, not everyone's a good person, not everyone's nice, some people are arseholes, some people don't care and some people might be psychopaths so I'm going to leave you on that note. Always, there's always ways to get around things if you're in a relationship with someone that you admire and that you love and that you enjoy, you'll also have some difficulties in some aspects of the relationship. If you want to stay up to date with all that stuff, you can stay subscribed, you can like the video if you found it helpful. I know a lot of YouTubers say this but it really does help. Push my videos out there because it takes a while to film and edit and put it out and you wouldn't believe how much effort it requires to make one small video and of course if you want to stay up to date with the work that I'm doing outside of YouTube and podcasting and all that, the public speaking, the training, the judging, there's a lot of different stuff that you can stay up to date by following my Instagram and if you want to listen to the podcast, the first season of the 4080 podcast is in full, it's on available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all host to different places, the website, thomashemley.co.uk and of course if you want to support my work, there is the join button directly below this video, you can give £1 a month to support me and I hope you've enjoyed this video, I hope you've taken something from it. What things do you want me to talk about? Is there an issue that you have with an autistic partner and I haven't covered it yet? Please drop it down below and equally if you're autistic yourself and you feel like this resonates with you quite a fair bit, please put it down in the comments, I'd love to hear from you. Take it easy. Take it easy on yourself. See you later folks.