Things have settled down over the last couple of days. I'm not sure why or how, but right now I'll take I can get.
Big Brother in particular has been having good days lately. This is huge. He is such a sweet, funny and amazingly intelligent child when the behaviors don't get in the way. Just yesterday, he converted an old, broken RC car into a Transformer. We were all very, very impressed.
When you read literature on Asperger's Syndrome, empathy or lack thereof is often discussed as a deficit area. Kids on the autism spectrum are seen as being without this important quality. But I find that the opposite is true -- at least here.
As you may know, Big Brother and Twin Sister are fraternal twins. And they've had that amazing "twin" connection since birth. They had their own language, learned to share almost from birth and are just in tune with each other.
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Empathy is very hard for those of us with Aspergers. It is not that we don't feel it, we do, it is just that we don't know how to express it in a way that NTs would understand. We will frequently do something that would make us feel better, but that may not make you feel better so the natural reaction is to think we don't care or feel empathy.
Big Brother knows exactly what makes Twin Sister feel better maybe because similar things make him feels better. He knows that her blanket but not a hug makes her feel better or that hugging the cat rather than hugging a human helps. These are things that if he did them for an NT child might make him seem like he didn't care.
It's so wonderful that they have each other as support systems.
Empathy is a myth. No one knows how another feels except as an intellectual concept. The best we can do is to be considerate of others and do for them what we know from experience they like, usually because they have told us.