Only having emotional empathy makes no sense to me though. How could you care about others’ emotions if you do not understand them?
It's a question of the situation being explained, if you understand the negativity of experiencing something & see someone else going through it you know that pain & feel bad for the person or control yourself.
On the other hand if there's little things going on like reading a look, pose, pitch change in voice or understand that what is being said or not said holds the opposite meaning with no pre explanation then you completely miss what's being said between the lines or your voice comes across as monotone & ppl expect you to mirror the way they would have responded which you did not; so ppl misunderstand you.
Basically we need a manual for stuff that either has unwritten rules, rules of engagement flip flop on the fly or are taken for granted as understood & thought not to be necessary to teach.
Many Autistics work in patterns or go into a conversation with a preconception of the act, sort of rehearsing their lines & when the flow goes off script then we're lost as fuck as we don't understand the rules & limitations of this interaction & as such come across as flustered, disinterested or stiff, awkward.
We lack spontaneity & being able to adlib off the cuff while being good at structured tasks we can imagine with good accuracy to the actual outcome. It's why you'll get an autistic that will happily do a task for hours on end without complaint or stay at a job for as long as possible, we feel safe in the sense we're not encountering the unknown that throws us for a loop & could lead to bad times that we're not skilled at navigating.
NT ppl on the other hand bore easily & need constant fresh experiences to stay focused.
A little thing about eye contact, personally I have to force it & two negative side effects I can experience from it are:
1 - Losing track of my thoughts & fucking up what I was saying mid sentence like I got distracted.
2 - feeling uneasy & shaking a little like some sort of weird sensation has burrowed into my head, sort of like a cold chill up your spine but not really.
Now the thing is why the fuck is that, could it be some sort of PTSD thing or is there something in my brain sending those signals out without being consciously aware of it.
Why is the eye contact aversion associated with ASD.