Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional 2E Aspergers Adult + OE very sensitive child

Any advice or recommended reading materials for help getting a 2E Aspergers adult (who honestly believes that emotions are unnecessary and harmful) to get along with a child who has overexcitabilities and is very sensitive? Adult admits to not experiencing empathy (or seeing any value in empathy) and child is overflowing with empathy in addition to having own strong emotions...

Adult has no interest in changing. Child is a preschooler. Both are PG.

I'd like to find a way to help them coexist happily.

PM in your inbox.

I thought emotions were basically an essential component of decisionmaking.

Plus, emotions contain actual information.

Bump.

"who honestly believes that emotions are unnecessary and harmful"

This is really hard. If the adult is a parent - I think you have to tackle this, and - Spock-like - appeal to reason.

Accept for the sake of argument that emotions are unnecessary and harmful. Nevertheless, emotions are real, and often biochemically driven. They play a profound role in shaping behavior, and evolution made it so. There is a survival imperative served by "fight or flight." There is a survival imperative served by love. There is a survival imperative served by empathy.

So emotions and emotional responses are hard-wired. They exist. You can't ignore them away. In fact, ignoring them will just RAMP THEM UP in response to the survival imperatives they address.

As MoN says, nothing will happen until this person is ready to change. And this person will reject emotional pleas about the child's needs. So it seems to me the focus has to be on unemotionally intellectualizing the reason that change here is a good idea.

Also - this is easier to say than do - but I'd try to keep foremost in your mind that this adult is likely wildly afraid of emotions. Just guessing. But I'd put money on it.

I have had a related conversation with a handful of 2e adolescents on the autistic spectrum, and have often taken the studying-an-interesting-natural-phenomenon approach, combined with the pragmatic concerns of how this affects attaining one's personal life goals. Emotions may be experienced as unnecessary and harmful to this specific individual, but the empirical fact is that the vast majority of humans operate in the emotional realm. One's options are

1) to abandon all situations that may be affected by other humans,
2) live in a state of perpetual conflict and frustration with them, or,
3) study their behavioral patterns, and learn to manage interactions with them in a way that is mutually functional.

Humans are not unlike other natural phenomena or areas of study (weather, projectile motion, integrated circuit design), in that there are patterns and generalizations that can be made, with a fairly high level of predictive value. Like weather, it's not 100%, but still not random.

Thanks so much for replying. I had somehow missed them earlier, but they are spot on. I really appreciate it.