I have highly abnormal empathy, but it's not specifically autistic AFAICT. Pulls in a lot of disparate directions.
I'd actually love to know if there's a diagnosis that fits, as I have a very confused profile of extreme hyper/hypofunctionality relative to most people.
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Do you have a thread of characteristics you experience? I'm also curious about what you're describing.
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No, but I'd be very happy to write out a few here.
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As you prefer - I'm not qualified to comment, but have an interest in personality disorders and the "high empathy" point you mention happens to be resonant for me personally.
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Let's start with social stuff.
I'm fairly socially inhibited. Have a lot of anxiety traits. Hyperreliant on verbal ability.
Cause of anxiety: I have trouble with social fluency. I understand social rules implicitly, but get overwhelmed by density of info/second guess a lot.
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This may be partly due to upbringing, as I've been making major improvements in these areas over the last years and don't seem to have base-level issues with functioning.
Apart from the lack of socio-emotional latent inhibition. I have to look away from faces when talking, e.g.
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When I'm not anxious, I tend to be hyperextroverted to the point of being a nuisance to people who can't deal with high energy.
I'm talkative, intense, very larger than life, sort of effortlessly/unintentionally taking up space.
I can turn this off, but it *wants* to be on.
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That's mostly it for explicitly social stuff.
With empathy, I am ridiculously sensitive to sensory inputs and information about people in my environment, and constantly modelling people intuitively. I wasn't even aware of this until earlier in my 20s, but I have always done it.
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E.g. I've had multiple experiences of telling people stuff "they've heard from their therapist"/that they don't believe at the time and later go "holy shit, dude, how?"
This is not something I can switch off. It's compulsive.
I am so socially hypersensitive that I have a lot of experiences that seem/are pre-cognitive wrt. others.
I pick up changes in people and notice problems weeks in advance of attendant behaviors. Sometimes these come in dreams.
It's incredibly hard to lie to me, if I know you.
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For cognitive content, I have a lot of weird hyper/hypofunctions intermixed.
I have a lot of savantisms, areas where I pick stuff up effortlessly and develop unusual skills. I'm constantly bridging topics and seem to have massive parallel processing, even for a human.
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