Photo credit: Krishanthi Puwanarajah
Aimee Cliff is a writer and therapist based in London. She began her career as a music and culture journalist, working as associate editor of The FADER and editor of Dazed Digital. As a freelance writer, she has bylines in The Guardian, Pitchfork, The Independent, Vice, and more. She currently works for a disability charity.
Q: What was your impetus for beginning to write Empathy Takes Action?
Aimee Cliff: When I first realized I was autistic and went through the diagnostic process, I searched for a book about empathy and autism. I knew that many autistic people had spoken up against the old stereotypes over the years, and I found reams of insightful and impassioned blogs, essays, academic studies, and social media posts—fragments, conversations, and data points. I read brilliant memoirs and nonfiction books by autistic authors that touched on the question of empathy, relationships, and connection in various ways. But I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted to read: something that dove deeper into the characterization of autism as an “empathy disorder,” and what this means not only for autistic people but for how we conceptualize empathy itself.
It struck me as unfair and unbalanced that there are books on library shelves that declare us to be “mindblind,” and nothing that counteracts this harmful narrative. I felt that this was a contribution I could make. They say that you should write the book you want to read, after all.
Q: How do empathy and autism relate? How did your experience of being diagnosed with autism in your late twenties change your thinking about how we show empathy?
AC: The longstanding stereotype of autistic people is that we “lack empathy.” This has been framed in many ways over the years—most popularly as a lack of what’s called “cognitive empathy,” or supposedly, the ability to imagine other people’s points of view. You’ll find that this trickles into day-to-day descriptions of autistic people as not being able to understand how others think or feel, or missing some kind of social instinct.
The more time I’ve spent investigating and meditating on this idea since my diagnosis, the more ludicrous I find it. As I’ve trained to become a psychotherapist, I’ve learned that most things are relational, not individual—particularly empathy. We all exist in relation to each other. Recent scholarship in the field of autism has embraced this idea via the “double empathy problem,” which I think has lessons for us all, not just autistic people. We could all get better at empathizing by embracing the two-way work of understanding and connecting to one another, rather than assuming that some of us are gifted at this and some are not.
Q: Why write an entire book about empathy? We don’t really have much control over how much empathy we feel, do we?
AC: I believe that empathy isn’t really an emotion, but an active process. It’s not something you feel so much as something you do. I believe that any of us can attempt to empathize with others, in our own unique ways, if we choose to. That’s a big part of why I wrote this book.
Q: For the book, you interviewed many people with diverse perspectives on empathy, from a non-speaking autism activist to a woman who self-describes as having “low empathy.” How did their perspectives shape your understanding of empathy? Did you learn anything from them that surprised you?
AC: I’ve learned so much from other disabled and autistic people in the years since realizing and accepting my own identity, and I’m continuing to learn from them all the time. One thing that surprised me in having conversations with people who describe themselves as having “low empathy” is how much I actually relate to their experiences. I think this goes to show how differently we all define and shape our own experiences, particularly when it comes to something as fluid as empathy and relationships. I believe myself to be an empathetic person, because I’m someone who is motivated to connect with others and understand them. But I also relate to people who describe how their trauma responses, neurodivergent traits, or other general ways of thinking and feeling can sometimes get in the way of connecting with others. I just have a different way of conceptualizing that than they do.
There’s a meta-lesson here, too: something that I’ve learned from my interviewees, and also from my therapy clients and my personal relationships, is that getting close to others involves making space for multiple realities and accepting the existence of different truths. Empathy, in this sense, is inherently imaginative and shape-shifting and full of surprises.
Q: You asked each of your interviewees for their definition of “true empathy.” How do you define “true empathy,” and how is it different from what we commonly think of as empathy?
AC: I spend a large part of the book searching for a definition of empathy, and ultimately, I feel like it is such a vast concept that it could mean something different—and feel different—to everyone. My own definition of true empathy encompasses the five pillars I describe in the book: it’s humble, it’s embodied, it’s amoral, it’s radical, and it’s work. By this I mean that it’s a conscious, active process of relating that we need to choose to engage in, by being curious about others’ experiences, tuning into our bodily instincts, and being conscious of social roles and power dynamics. This differs from our general understanding of empathy as something that you either feel or don’t—something that you passively experience like weather. I see it as a practice, a muscle that you can build.
Q: What ideas are you most hoping readers will take away from the book?
AC: I hope that readers will come away with the idea that we can all do the work necessary to have close relationships and meaningful connections. All of us. I don’t think there’s anything helpful in characterizing some people as “impaired” in this department. If we imagine empathy differently—if we see everyone as capable of it, everyone as included in its definition—I believe that could have such positive ramifications for all relationships. The potential to connect with one another becomes limitless.
Empathy Takes Action is out March 31. Find it everywhere books are sold.
