Published on 12, July, 2020
I was talking earlier with someone elsewhere about how it is quite common for Autistic people not to recognise their feelings and it got me thinking! I normally say that my usual 'emotional state' is 'comfortably numb' that is, most of the time, I feel nothing. Right now, sitting here typing this, I feel nothing. I've previously wondered briefly about Alexithymia and I've even done the Alexithymia test online BUT Alexithymia is essentially not recognising one's emotions yet on the rare occasion when I do 'feel' something, I do know what I am feeling at that moment in time, in fact I've always thought that I'm quite good at understanding my own emotions, when I feel them. But the talk I was having earlier made me start to question if it's more that these 'rare occasions' of 'feeling' something are actually more rare occasions of me actually recognising what I am feeling. Am I feeling all of the time and just unaware of it, except on rare occasions? Is it even possible to feel and not be aware of feeling? Perhaps I am just being dumb/naive/overthinking? What are other people's views about this please?
I think you're right. People say to me "you look happy" or "you look annoyed" or whatever, but I don't have a physical feeling of being any of those things, its comfortable "numb" I think you mention. So my guess is that we still are going through the emotions, but for whatever reason these aren't picked up by our consciousness unless its something truly monumental. There's a sort of "link" missing between our bodies experiencing the emotion and our consciousness registering it.
I agree! Unless it's something really big, we don't register feeling an emotion. How does one recognise emotions when one doesn't feel them? I'm sure that somewhere there is a nice little self help book that details exactly how to do this! But do I really want to be aware of everything that I am feeling? That's actually quite a scary thought!