this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Mental Health

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I often feel a connection (piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 day ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/mentalhealth@lemmy.world
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[–] katkit@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago

Yes, and there's a scientific basis to this: The double empathy problem.

One of the symptoms of autism used to be considered a lowered sense of empathy, as autists seemed to struggle relating to other people. But that's not the case: Autists only struggle to relate to non-autists (and vice versa), among their own both groups get along fine

So it's not an innate trait of autism to have lower empathy, we just communicate on a different frequency, which has to be decoded (which takes energy). If we meet someone who's on our wavelength, communicating is intuitively a lot easier.

It reminds of being in a different culture and meeting someone of yours.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 16 points 22 hours ago

I’m AuDHD and work with kids of the same population. It turns out to be a perfect job for me. From understanding what kids who can’t speak are trying to communicate, to using my own experiences to inform me of what my students are going through, to teaching skills and techniques that I had to learn the hard way, it’s been extremely rewarding.

It’s not uncommon for new hires to go through training and come out seeking diagnoses for themselves. I swear we self-select for others like ourselves, even if we don’t fully know why. The amount of people that see their younger selves in our kids is interesting. A new coworker just told me the other day that, after training, everything about her now makes sense, and that was enough for me to decide, “I like this person, I look forward to getting to know her more.”

[–] Geobloke@aussie.zone 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I feel this but with ADD. The oh shit moment when my wife and I realised that our mutual ADDness probably attracted each other

[–] moakley@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

I've had this happen so many times, although I think they can't usually detect me.

This happened with my daughter's teacher. At one point she told us that she had ADHD and I was like... yeah, duh. This parent teacher conference has been going on for two hours, because we both have ADHD.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 8 points 22 hours ago

Autistic person: are you..y'know..

Vs

Non-autistic person: you definitely have autism

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 19 points 1 day ago

I don't always clock but if you're in my clique, diagnosis you must seek

[–] paultimate14@lemmy.world 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I think that in the future, autism will be broken out into multiple sub-categories. Right now it's just too broad.

I make the occasional connection with others who have similar profile of autistic traits to me, but there's a lot of autistic people out there who are wildly different from me and I don't feel that same connection.

[–] magikmw@piefed.social 6 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

It's good that it's called a spectrum already. ADHD is still somewhat viewed as over sugared boys running around while it's also fairly varied in outward and inner characteristics.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 3 points 14 hours ago

I was diagnosed with ADHD (then called ADD) in the early 90s, so I didn't get the benefit of being able to recieve a dual-diagnosis until fairly recently. Something I learned during the process was there's a pretty dang high co-occurence rate between ADHD and ASD. I'm thinking that in the future ADHD will just be considered part of the spectrum.

[–] paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

It's a good start, but I think the reality is that it's a bunch of spectrums grouped together into one. I would point to all of the tests on embrace-autism's website and how many of them are measuring different things. On some of the tests I score on the autistic side of the results, on others I don't.

One area is social cues. The strengths of autism include things like having heightened sense, good memory, systemizing, attention to detail, and pattern recognition. For me I find that all of these things lead to me generally being BETTER than most people at recognizing social cues, and from previous discussions here there seems to be a population of people with a similar experience. But it seems that the majority of the autistic community finds that they are often oblivious to social cues.

[–] magikmw@piefed.social 3 points 20 hours ago

Yeah, all classification breeds generalization. I'm confident it will get better over time.

[–] toothpaste_sandwich@thebrainbin.org 5 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

What does "stimming" mean in this context?

[–] knightly@pawb.social 6 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Repetetive self-stimulating behaviors, like flapping your hands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

[–] toothpaste_sandwich@thebrainbin.org 4 points 20 hours ago

I see, thanks!

[–] Alberat@lemmy.world 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

i think he's a sc2 marine

[–] knightly@pawb.social 12 points 1 day ago

Luckily, yeah.

We might not all be able to smell our own, but I can and it's led me to some great friends over the years.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 4 points 23 hours ago

The same with trans people. I look at this somewhat androgynous person, they look at me and bam, instant friendship unlocked.

[–] Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The RNG didn't smile upon me with that ability.
I got the hermit extreme variation of asd.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Reading people is a skill you can cultivate with practice. It's just hard to practice when there's a risk of making eye contact...

[–] Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 2 points 20 hours ago

I completely agree, yeah it can be significantly improved upon like any skill.

It just doesn't seem to become automatic and doing it on manual and still missing key details is just kinda exhausting.

[–] Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

I mean I am usually correct when I think some one has the tism.

[–] felixwhynot@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Does nicotine count?