The Double Empathy Problem — who is translating?

Think about a time you were in a room,....a meeting, a social gathering, a classroom, where the unspoken rules seemed clear to and were being followed by everyone else, but did not feel like a fit to you.

Maybe you navigated it. You watched, adapted, mirrored. You did what was needed to move through the space without drawing the wrong kind of attention.

Now ask yourself: who was doing the work of understanding in that room?

"The assumption, often unspoken, is that the person in the minority is the one who needs to adjust — their voice, their way of being, their way of communicating."

This is a pattern that shows up in many spaces,....workplaces, families, schools. A common stance is that the majority voice is the one with the most insight. The one that should be followed.

And so the voice of difference becomes the one that has to change or adapt. A way of dressing. A way of expressing. A way of being.

This can be visible enough to challenge. But frequently, and this is what makes it so wearying, it happens outside of anyone's awareness.

Enter: the Double Empathy Problem

The Double Empathy Problem challenges this line of thinking from an empathy point of view.

The term was originally coined by Dr Damian Milton, applying it specifically to the relationship between autistic and non-autistic people. It challenged a long-held idea, that autistic people lack the ability to empathise and reframed the situation entirely. Milton's insight was that when miscommunication happens, it isn't a one-way failure.

It's a two-way mismatch.

Both parties are, in their own way, failing to fully understand each other.

And here's what makes this particularly worth sitting with: autistic people, navigating a world built around neurotypical norms, are constantly being asked to put themselves in the place of others, to adapt, to translate. If empathy is, at its core, the act of placing yourself in someone else's experience in order to understand them....

then autistic people in neurotypical settings might, in some ways, be practising a form of empathy more actively than those around them.

"The one doing the most translating isn't necessarily the one who understands the least."

Beyond autism — a wider lens

The Double Empathy Problem can be translated beyond the boundary between autistic and non-autistic experience. It can stretch across neurodivergence more broadly across what some researchers and communities have called neurominorities (click for definition — see 2/3 down the page).

The same dynamic where the minority voice is the one asked to do the work of understanding can be felt across many different kinds of minority experience.

Consider what it means to be in the minority in any of these spaces:

NEURODIVERGENCE ADHD, autism, dyslexia and other neurominorities navigating predominantly neurotypical expectations	IMPAIRMENT & HEALTH Those living with disability, chronic illness or health conditions in spaces not built around their experience
ETHNIC & CULTURAL Navigating spaces where the dominant cultural reference point isn't yours — where your way of dressing, expressing or being is marked as different	GENDER, SEXUALITY & SOCIOECONOMIC Where norms are built around identities or circumstances that don't reflect your own, and adjustment is assumed rather than negotiated

In each of these contexts, the same imbalance can quietly take hold. The majority way of being becomes the invisible standard. And the person in the minority, without it ever being said out loud, becomes the one responsible for bridging the gap.

The exhaustion of that. The accumulation of it. The way it can sit in the body before it ever reaches words.

That is what this imbalance, in working to be understood across spaces, and the resulting feelings and experiences can look and feel like. And it is worth naming.

A MOMENT TO REFLECT

• Have you ever been in a space where you were doing the most work to be understood and had that go largely unnoticed?

• Where the expectation was that you would adjust, without the same being asked of those around you?

• If that resonates, you're not imagining it. And you're not alone in it.

What this means in the therapy room

This is something I hold consciously in my work. Let's explore what moving away from the constant filtering of communication, processing or making sense of things could look like.

The space we build together is one, where your way of being is the starting point for this.

There is no single correct way to understand the world. There is only what arises when two people are genuinely willing to meet each other.

For another perspective on the Double Empathy Problem, have a read of A bridge between neurodivergent and neurotypical - What is your native tongue?

Something here felt familiar?

You might have spent some time being the one who does the translating and be curious about what it might feel like to be in a space where that isn't required, I'd be glad to hear from you. Reach out whenever you're ready.