The Double Empathy Problem, From the Inside

Non-autistic people have always struggled to understand me too. We just never talked about it that way.

For most of my life I was told that I had a social deficit. That I lacked the ability to read people, to intuit social situations, to understand what was going on in a room. The framing was always the same: there was the social world that everyone else understood naturally, and then there was me, on the outside, missing something fundamental.

I accepted this framing for a long time. It fit my experience in some ways. Social situations were genuinely hard. I did miss things. I misread people. I got feedback, sometimes brutally direct, that I had done or said something wrong — without having had any sense that the wrong thing was happening.

Then I learned about the double empathy problem.

Dr. Damian Milton, an autistic researcher, proposed in 2012 that the communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are not one-directional. Non-autistic people are also bad at understanding autistic people. They misread autistic facial expressions, misinterpret autistic communication styles, miss autistic emotional cues, and impose neurotypical frameworks on behaviors that do not belong to that framework.

The deficit is mutual. The difference is that for decades, only one side of the interaction has been called the problem.

This was not abstract for me. I thought about specific interactions. The times I had communicated clearly — or what felt clear to me — and been misunderstood. The times I had expressed something straightforward and had it read as passive-aggressive, or cold, or rude. The times I had tried to connect around a topic I cared about and watched attention slide away from me in a room.

In every one of those interactions, the conclusion drawn was that I had failed to communicate. It was rarely considered that the other person had failed to understand.

Research has tested this directly. Studies show that autistic people communicate effectively with other autistic people. When the mismatch is removed, the communication works. It is specifically at the autistic-non-autistic interface that friction occurs — and the friction runs in both directions.

This does not mean I have nothing to learn about navigating social situations designed for neurotypical people. I do. But it changes the frame significantly.

I am not broken at socializing. I am calibrated for a different social operating system than the one most people around me run. When I interact with other autistic people, I find I have to work less hard. I am understood more readily. I do not spend the following days replaying the conversation looking for what I got wrong.

The double empathy problem has one practical implication that matters more to me than any other: when an interaction goes wrong between an autistic and non-autistic person, the work of understanding should not fall entirely on the autistic person. The non-autistic person in the interaction is also operating with incomplete understanding of the other party.

Meeting in the middle is an act for both people, not just one.