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Emotionally intense

calmerchameleon

Are there others here who are more emotionally intense (in general) than the average person on Earth?

There's the phrase 'wear one's heart on one's sleeve' - being very genuine with emotions and very open and happy to share one's true emotions.

Generally, I tend to be more emotionally open than most folks I know. I can do the holding back emotions at work and places like that but I much prefer being open.

I'm yet to totally find my autism type - so I'd be interested to see if people who are quite emotionally open fall into any particular type of autism category.

I feel a certain bit of being 'at home' with people with pathological demand avoidance (PDA) -I seem to understand their way of viewing the world quite well. But I've never got close to having any formal diagnosis available. I had a lot of trauma in life and I got tentatively diagnosed with emotionally unstable personality disorder / borderline personality disorder (BPD) but I've never really found that explains things well enough. I'm also aware that quite a lot of females with autism conditions tend to get diagnosed with BPD and not all of those feel comfortable with that diagnosis either.

  • in reply to calmerchameleon

    me too Slight smile i mean I'd be quite interested to hear your story in getting diagnosed with autism and PDA

  • in reply to animalrant

    I'd be quite interested to hear your story in getting diagnosed with autism and PDA (if you're happy to share)?

    I understand that getting a PDA diagnosis can be a touch tricky for some.

  • yes im definitely emotionally intense. i was firstly diagnosed with BPD/EUPD but now my diagnosis is Autism, PDA and ADHD which makes a lot more sense to me. it's very common for autistic people to at first be misdiagnosed with BPD

  • in reply to Mark (NicheMarket)

    People diagnosed with BPD quite often seem to have strong empathy.

    Recently, I've been studying myself a little bit to see how my empathy and autism traits combine and play out.

    One thing I discovered lately is that it's hard for me to know where my anxiety is coming from. I'll know I feel really uncomfortable and I'm ok at broadly labelling my emotions after a while (anger, worry, fear, whatever). However, what I seem to be struggling even more with is filtering out which anxiety comes a bit more from within and which anxiety I've taken on/absorbed from others.

    I'm just starting to investigate this. Having had a recent anxiety attack, it finally dawned on me that maybe these have been coming because I'm taking on the the worries and uncertainties of others(?). (Given that much of the world has been freaking out quite a lot over the last several months.)

    I feel it would make some sense that high sensitivity, empathy and autism combining could quite naturally lead to showing BPD kind of symptoms/'behaviours'.

  • I definitely have problems not revealing myself to others. I'm not impulsive, don't blurt stuff, don't get conflictual, etc. I "own my emotions" too much of anything, but I do tell everyone kinda everything that's going on for me even when i think it's not a good idea to reveal stuff. I don't think I'm inappropriate, like don't reveal stuff and leave people feeling awkward, but am definitely an open book. So I have that bit.

    I think it's really hard to unpick some things whether they're autistic or coming from a trauma response. And this can make tackling the issue hard. I shutdown in an autistic way a lot, but there are some of these times where I'm probably dissociating. I've an ex colleague who sounds similar to what you're describing. She has a BPD diagnosis, but I see more autistic mannerisms, so I've assumed prob she's also got undiagnosed autism with it. Making sense of that I've thought would be really hard to find out what's actually going on. Making sense of ourselves is hard!

  • in reply to lostmyway

    Thanks for the reply lostmyway

    I'm actually more interested to know if there is a little tribe of folks on here who are both autistic and emotionally open.

    I just added a bit of background to justify why I'm interested in knowing which type of autism type people have.

    So, I'm not aiming for a 'hey, do you think I'm autistic?' kind of thing :)

    I'm kind of happy with the idea that I'm most likely autistic.

  • It's hard to say whether you are on the spectrum or not from what you say, . At the risk of sounding obvious, it would be a good idea to take a few online tests to see if you match some of the criteria of being on the AS.