Published on 12, July, 2020
Has anyone else noticed that they process emotions differently than neurotypicals seem to? I find that emotions take longer to sink in, my reactions are slow and delayed. This applies for good and bad things - I just don't feel things for a while, then it might hit me out of the blue - or not at all.
One of the things that I really dislike is being asked how I feel - cringe! I don't always know, so when someone asks I'm scrambling to figure it out quickly, or I just make something up that sounds plausible. ;)
Anyone else have similar experiences?
Ok, what do you mean that you aren't getting all the information from your anatomy as others do?. Is it our bodies that don't send much signals? Is it our brains that can't notice or read it? Is there something I can read about this. Webpage or so? Thanks!
No, lol. She's NT. She intuits what I feel. She doesn't think her way to what I feel at all. God knows how she just knows, but she just does, lol. And that is why I love her :-)
oh I'm so happy to see these replies! I'm thrilled that I'm not alone in this!! :)
I totally understand what you are saying about the label for feelings...I don't have the words for them. I mean I know all the names of feelings intellectually but I struggle to link the word to a feeling that I'm having.
Yes. I need to know when did the feeling start in order to have more data about the situation and intellectually guess what label I need to give them.. when I can't figure the starting point or the cause of the feeling it becomes 10 times harder or impossible to know what I feel.
When you say that she told you how she felt do you mean that she told you about her body signals?. When you say that she told you what she thought do you mean she talked about her brain thoughts at the moment or her opinion about the matter?
Alexithymia - our lesser or absence of ability to detect our emotions, arsing from problems with our interoception; we can't read the body's signals well which would alert us to emotions. Many, many autistic people experience this.
I do know what I am feeling, or perhaps was feeling, because I compensate intellectually. I work out the context, events, reasonable responses, other's reactions. I get there, but there is a lag because I am not getting all of the information from my anatomy that others would.
In fact, not long after I realised I could be autistic I really noticed something in my conversations with my best friend. She hadn't noticed over our two decades of friendship, but recognised it as soon as I mentioned it and realised it was true. She is NT.
If she is upset or I ask her how she feels, she will start with a description of her feelings, then tells me what she thinks. At that point I scratch my head a bit and ask 'what happened?'. As she gives me that detail, I start to understand why she is feeling that way.
If I am upset or she asks me how I am feeling, I automatically start by telling her what happened, I then moved to what I think as a consequence. At that point, she will say: 'so, do you feel x?' Often she is right, but it has taken me those few minutes to catch up with her and define the feeling.
So, you are no way alone in this.
Now I wonder, does this delayed response happen in each and all situations or is there a pattern or a certain "topic" like anything related to family for example, that delays the response?
For me, sometimes I just know that something that happened now did upset me or gave me a negative feeling, but it takes few days to process or simply understand why or what am I feeling (maybe I'll never be able to name it tho) but it definitely takes days to make some sense of it. Sometimes I feel nothing at all and few days later I'd notice that I started to become upset about it. I think that in third type of situations I could, to some extent, tell that "what just happened now made me feel sad/happy". I can see that there's no rule to how I process emotions that applies on every case. It's like I need to categorise them because the reaction can be different.
Yessssssssssssssssssssss. I'm so glad that you shared this with us! Thank you! I finally have found someone who has it similarly!!. I've told myself before that "I think that I'm reacting today to a nightmare that I've had like 3 nights ago!" But my brain said "not possible! How could it be?! I've never heard or seen anything like that?!, You are probably reacting to something else but what?! Nothing at all comes to mind". Now I read that there's something called (delayed processing) . Oh it's a thing! I wasn't imagining it my lovely brain! See! The more you learn!. Maybe I should trust my feelings more even if my brain says "nah". I've been trying to do that so hard recently but seems like more work needed. I also don't like when someone asks me how do I feel because I think that I won't find an answer to that at the moment. To answer this give me few days!. Ok, it's time to go read more about delayed emotional processing