Autism and Anecdotal Sharing

Greetings Earthlings! 🙂

Another week, another autistic trait I never knew about! In today’s post I’m going to take a look at the trait of anecdotal sharing, also known as anecdotal empathy or reciprocal disclosure.

Please explain Aoife, that’s a real mouthful!

Anecdotal sharing is an autistic trait where an autist will respond to someone else’s story with a similar shared experience from their own life. For example, if someone tells a story about their grandmother dying, instead of saying something sympathetic like “I’m sorry to hear that“, an autist might relay a similar story of their own experience of the loss of a loved one.

Now you might be thinking that this is a normal social interaction that conveys empathy, but apparently it’s considered an autistic trait!

This is very interesting as it tracks with my own social experience growing up. I often found that people told me I was quite selfish and that I had a habit of always relating things to myself in conversation. “Not everything’s about you Aoife!” was regularly exclaimed.

I found this quite hurtful as I could never understand why people thought this of me. To my mind, I was just trying to relate and empathize with people by relaying similar experiences in my own life, but seemingly neurotypicals view this differently. In one particular instance, I was discussing something to do with the Irish language with my cousin, and my lateral brain brought up the high score I had received in my oral Irish exam. To my mind I was just relaying a simple fact related to the discussion; there was no bragging or bravado. But, my cousin remarked “I don’t like to toot my own horn, but toot, toot!”, and I was mortified. I could not understand how I had been taken up so badly, and it stuck with me for many years. Ironically, the ’tism comes from that side of the family 🫠

To an autist who struggles to convey empathy, it makes logical sense to relay similar stories to show someone that you can relate to the experience. If someone were to tell us a similar story in response to one of ours, we would view it as they get me, and would never think you were trying to monopolize the conversation.

So if you’ve got an autistic friend or family member, be kind when they tie experiences back to themselves in conversation. They’re merely trying their best to connect 🙂

Hope you enjoyed this post dear Earthlings!

Have a lovely weekend! 🙂

Aoife