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?
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.
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?
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.