Published on 12, July, 2020
I have difficulty with emotions. I think the main danger is I tend to find myself trying to escape uncomfortable feelings by punishing myself. Why can’t I realise I am powerless over my autistic responses, my hypersensitivity my being easily overwhelmed. To summarise: I fear making life harder for myself because I cannot read the basic typical benevolence of the Universe and I go to the most negative paranoid interpretation. Getting unnecessary revenge then leads to consequences.
Well part of the distress of autism can come from having a social impairment alongside a spared intellect, the result over-time is that you try to make your condition less-painful for others at the cost of yourself, so this can lead to psychological-distress which then develops into manifested-behaviours that reinforce a safety-based stability.
Essentially your fear of psychological-distress is reinforcing negativity, which suits survival but doesn’t suit development, in order to gain even a 1% chance of positivity development you need to take chances. Perhaps your behaviour was built for a reason, and was the best means at the time, but it may not be optimal now. Perhaps you will find that you can either withstand it or supplement it this time..
So to round of the whole thought into an action, the next time you take an interest in a thing, pursuit it. If nothing happens then your fear is no longer 100% warranted, it is 50% warranted, and so on.. you don’t need to be able to read the room with that, you only need to read the stats, autistic people tend to be great with procedural learning..:)
Beautiful reply: thank you so much. You have been extremely helpful. Your words are part of that benevolence and they feed my trust in All.
You just have to learn more about yourself and your autism, and not beat yourself up over it. If you read a situation and automatically go into the most paranoid interpretation, at least you are aware of that now, and then instead of punishing yourself over it and spending your energy doing that, just verify if those paranoid interpretations are true or not, which would still require a lot of energy to do, but at least you'll get an answer for it, which is that often times the paranoid interpretations are not true. It is just hypersensitivity most of the time, which means the environment you're in is not comfortable for you, and then do what you must do to take care of yourself the best you can.