I am unable to regulate my emotions and I ruin everything. Please help

Hi there - I recognise that difficulty in regulating emotions. First of all though, from the language in your post you're really giving yourself a kicking and that's not fair to yourself, you're not ruining everything. You're struggling to regulate and as I'm not Bobhas wisely pointed out 5-10 minutes wouldn't be enough for most NTs to sort themselves out, you deserve to be kind to yourself. Secondly, hiding your emotions is unlikely to work as a strategy. My experience is if you push them down at some point they just bubble up a lot stronger at even less opportune moments. You might want to look into some mindfulness techniques - you'll still experience all the "feels" but you might find ways to experience them without always acting on them. It's not easy. I've been doing it for a while and I still have good days & bad days. But you're not alone.

I have anger issues, but not quite that bad

She gave you 5 - 10 minutes, I know I need two days after I've had a melt down. That sounds like so much pressure on you. I got in a terrible state shouting at my mother recently with all the windows open and doors because of the heat. I've been avoiding her because she keeps trying to bring her problems to me to listen to and I find it is too much. I'm the only available family member. Family do seem to be great at triggering in my experience. You did also write that you've been getting better - I'm trying to look for the progress I've made over time.. because imidiatly after the event I don't have any perspective and I'm hard on everyone not least myself.

I’m so sorry that you are feeling this way. I don’t have an answer but I just wanted to say that I can truly relate to what you are describing and feeling. I feel the same way about myself and my family. I don’t have an answer but I wish you better days. Take care 

If I were your mother and knew this was hard for you, I’d have you take the photos or ask you to do something in the kitchen while I take a photo so to not openly disclose a private matter. As a mother, I find this matter disturbs me a little. 

It sounds to me that for whatever reason you’re being dismissed by the one person who should understand. Now, we all have limits to what we can handle but events don’t need to be so special that this much pressure is put on everyone. It sucks the specialness out, as far as I’m concerned. 

Hiding emotions is a thing one might learn in a theatre class. Internally, we quickly improvise a different script so we can pivot externally. I don’t believe this is easy for Autistics as we can be caught off guard due to not being able to anticipate social nuance let alone make sense of it most of the time. So here’s a way to navigate:

It’s time to learn to self-care. To learn your roles and responsibilities. To learn what is reasonable to expect from others, and what’s reasonable to expect from yourself. And then what’s painful and what should hurt. 

From what I’m hearing, this is not so much a matter of feeling unattractive, but being dismissed for knowing that we are judged on our looks and if female it can affect our livelihood or chances of security in life. And a photo is no longer safe in a family book, but our worst moments can be publicly displayed without our consent- and we can even be ridiculed for protest. When I was young (growing up in the States), I learned it was a severe offence to “Steal someone’s image” in the First Nation community - you should always ask if you might take someone’s picture. All over London signs are posted reminding us that “Staring” is a crime. A photo exists to be stared at.

But I’m hearing other things in this as well. Someone told you “you ruin everything”.  And yet who has helped you learn to identify how you’re feeling and what happened to trigger this? Many of us have what’s called “Alexithymia”, an inability to identify with a term or a word what we’re feeling, which compounds already difficult emotions. And being autistic, we have a biology which doesn’t filter out impact like our Typical peers. So we feel everything far more intensely. We are slower to mature due to rarely encountering practical advice on how to create healthy Boundaries or steps to understand ourselves or to connect in real ways with the world around. Often we can experience being overlooked, treated unkindly and isolated.  One should cry this out. I feel for you, for others and even younger “me”. 

The more you understand, the more control you will have. Perspective can shift how we respond. Perhaps your mother has her own growing up to do, but you don’t have to allow yourself to be in situations that push you to a breaking point.

I’ve recommended it here before, but if you can, get a copy of The Artists Way. Xx

BigNoseGirly0 said:

I am unable to get therapy, but how can I hide my emotions so then I can finally stop ruining everything.

I would start by understanding your emotional regulation issue - a good guide to it can be found here:

https://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/autism-emotional-regulation

A few books that will help you dig deeper:

Emotion Regulation in Psychotherapy - A Practitioner's Guide - Robert L. Leahy PhD, Dennis Tirch PhD, Lisa A. Napolitano PhD (2011)
ISBN 9781609184834

The Regulation of Emotion - Pierre Philippot, Robert S. Feldman (2004)
ISBN 0805842012

The first book is aimed at therapists but should give you a good idea of how they will approach therapy since you cannot get this yourself.

From what I know of it, a lot of the treatment begins with being able to label emotions and understand what you are feeling - then understanding why you are feeling them.

I hope some of this is useful.

I am sorry for how you are feeling right now. It is awful to feel that you don't feel worthy. 

The things is, regulation of emotions is super tricky I find. And managing meltdowns even harder.

What you say about photos though brought up something for me about taking photos of my daughter. Her generation (she is 16) seems to feel very strongly about consent. I try to get her consent for photos, though am not always as good as I would like. It's a hard one.

Take care of yourself and hang in there. Families are super hard sometimes.