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?
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.