To me, it looks like the 2 are separate but have similarities that look the same.
But first we have to take into account personal preference. Some autistic people prefer to also call themselves HSPs. Here I’m talking about them being separate.
The biggest similarity is that both experience heightened sensitivity to emotions and senses.
The biggest differences are with understanding emotions. An autistic person may not have a full understanding of every emotion. According to my autism diagnosis report, I understand some of my emotions and some of other people’s emotions but not all. The emotions I do understand, I don’t have a 100% understanding.
For example, I understand maybe 70% of emotion in general. 60% of my own happiness, 70% of my own sadness and 80% of my own guilt. I understand 60% of other people’s happiness, 70% of their sadness and 55% of their guilt.
In other words, I’m all over the place.
Highly sensitive people are probably around 90% understanding all over. Emotions in general, their own emotions and the emotions of other people. With autism, the ways we experience emotion can be all over the place and almost random. With highly sensitive people, the experiences are more general and predictable.
With autism, the experience can be the same intensity, but the understanding isn’t there.
It takes an autistic person a lot longer to recover from an overstimulating sensory experience. Let’s take misophonia, an intense dislike of eating noises. Highly sensitive people will forget and recover pretty quick after they leave the table, whereas I will feel annoyed for hours after and those chewing noises will be going round and round inside my head for the rest of the day.
Autistic people actively seek out sensory experiences they enjoy, like constantly rubbing a smooth stone in a pocket. I find myself fiddling with a cassette tape. I like the feel of the smooth plastic and I like the noise it makes. I don’t think highly sensitive people bother with anything like that.
Is empathic attunement a quality of HSP/SPS?
Yes, very much so. Empathy is strongly tied in with emotions and therefor a large component of HSP/SPS.
Can it comorbid with ASD and CPTSD, if so how can they display themselves and affect each other?
With empathic attunement, I think the biggest problem is that it
doesn’t display in autism, but it is there. The classic double empathy problem: we have heightened empathy, but we don’t outwardly display it in a way that other people can detect. This leads to the old stereotype that autistic people lack empathy when we very much do. Since empathy is so strongly tied in with emotions, we feel it strongly, but can’t fully understand it, can’t describe it and don’t strongly project it outward. Sorry I’m not so sure about PTSD or CPTSD.
Finally, the biggest difference is that autistic people can be both hypersensitive and hyposensitive. Some autistic people can have a near zero reaction to pain, for example, while highly sensitive people cannot be hyposensitive, only hypersensitive.
