Navigating the Experience of Hyper-Empathy in Autism

Empathy is 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 to autism, 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," explains Dr. 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 Hyper-Empathy?

Hyper-empathy is the term for someone being too in touch with the emotional state of other people. Feeling what others are experiencing too strongly is hard to wall off, and a hyper-empathic person may find themselves regularly tired or worn out just by being around others. Signs of hyper-empathy include:

• Knowing how someone is feeling without them telling you
• Deeply experiencing someone else's feelings when they tell you about them, even when they are going through something you have never gone through
• Understanding the hierarchy and dynamics of a group of people without being informed of them
• Feeling overwhelmed when people discuss their emotions with you
• Anxious attachment
• Being a "yes" person because your own needs feel less important than someone else's
• Overwhelm at physical contact with others

How It Shows Up For Autistic People

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.

The Link Between Hyper Empathy and Trauma

Marschall also explains that hyper-empathy can be caused by trauma. It wasn't until receiving my diagnosis that I realized autism helped to explain the numerous times in my life that I had been in abusive situations, an occurrence—particularly concerning sexual violence—that is disproportionately higher for autistic people than neurotypical ones.

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 for autistic children are 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 to alexithymia in 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.

Personally, I have had countless partners be shocked by the poetry I wrote them because they thought I wasn't invested in our relationship or didn't feel strongly about them, due to my lack of expressing otherwise.

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.

How to Deal

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

That's been a priority for me since making the connection between the two things, and already it has enabled me to feel more understood by people in my life.

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

Boundaries

If you find yourself performing favors you don't have the energy for because it's hard to say no, or getting exhausted by too much physical contact with strangers, this is a great opportunity to learn how to set boundaries and communicate them.

For those close to you, you can begin by explaining—in writing if easier—why certain acts are hard for you due to the amount of empathy you feel. Marschall recommends that you "tell the people you trust how you communicate so they can understand and support you." Boundaries are not set as a means to control other people's behavior but to help others understand your personal limits or capacities.

For example, once I learned about the connection between hyper-empathy and autism, I realized that it explains why I hate hugging strangers. I get emotionally overwhelmed by the physicality of others because it is a huge cascade of emotions hitting me all at once.

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 made an instagram reel about 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.