Processing Emotions

Thanks for sharing this, I love the colour patterns it makes but don’t feel I know how to apply it. In terms of negative emotions I really really struggle to describe them and their intensity. At times I try to describe them along the lines of a sudden unexpected head mess of chaos, a total paradox, a non compute, an oxymoron. Unfortunately this as communication generally fails and mental health clinicians pass me on to someone else, deeming me too complex and too high risk. 

Im ok today though, my wife and I went for a drive out to a village on a hill, laughed, enjoyed the spring flowers, walked. This brought positive emotions and I slept peacefully for a time on getting home. 

Darkness being - absence, nothing, null - is always and obviously the impossible coin side to describe 

all the best to you xxx

I agree this looks really useful, thank you.

I'm not sure if this is the correct post for this comment, but something I struggle with is actually 'feeling' emotions. Unless I have an extreme experience I find I generally don't feel anything. I process what's going on in a matter-of-fact way, and I acknowledge it, but rarely feel anything about it. Is this tied to alexithymia, or something else entirely?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Being wrong and making mistakes is part of being human, how you respond and deal with these things can be painful and difficult. Ultimately it should be a lesson on how to be better and how to understand yourself and why it happened.

I find the best way is to meet it head on, hiding from it only magnifies the guilt and hinders any chance of fixing what went wrong.

Admit to yourself that whatever happened, happened. If it involves someone else, admit to them that you messed up and hopefully together you can fix it.

None of this is easy.

When you throw emotional dysregulation, RSD and many other N/D things into the mix it just feels a whole lot harder.

You can do this. 

Good luck and take care.

This looks useful!

ok :-)

For the last 9 hours I have been going through negative emotions which were not my fault but caused by a difficult person. Trying to get me to see only their way.

I often look to ask whether the problem is me or whether it’s being turned onto me by another person. It’s typical that someone might want you to feel guilt or shame either to feel enabled themselves or to prolong the process. 
it’s very difficult to stop emotions dead, particularly unhelpful ones. And they can reemerge at the wrong times. 

what I like to do is get to the bottom of the cause (typically another person) if the problem is them this is usually very obvious by how they are abrupt, uncooperative and difficult. There you have found your problem. You have to disconnect then reconnect with someone else and make them aware of what you are going through. this will dissipate the negative emotion.

Hi NAS66392 

Complex question.  Well done for opening up about it.

Like Iain I found this takes work too.

For me the way into assessing the emotions I experience first came thro' identifying the "physical" aspect of it.

eg confidence - chest out, head high, tail tucked under

fear - physically shrinking away from

and how I experience thro my senses - how I see things etc from this corporeal state.

As regards guilt - I'd maybe experience this as an oppresion or a tension in my chest

shame bowing my head, or lowering my gaze

This all gets complicated when one considers how much we become conditioned to certain behaviour by previous events or expectations and internalised sense of self-worth.

Anyway if I stick my chest forward and carry my head high eventually the sense of oppression or tension in my chest eases off.  If I carry my head high i am more able to look the world in the face.

Funnily enough I see myself and perhaps others do too as less of a "professional victim" like this.  If injustices have genuinely taken place the capacity to stand up against them is physically more possible and that has a correlate in how I mentally approach things too.

Works for me - maybe you too

might be worth exploring the topic of "cognitive embodiment" - these days something like google ai etc can give a brief explanation and help explore the topic further 

If you want to chat about it more it's one of my "special interests" - partly born of necessity as you might imagine.

happy to chat about it more if you want.

best wishes

I found a good way was to start with identifying the emotions I was feeling and once I could "label" them it meant I could more easily explain them to both myself and others.

There is a diagram called the Emotion Wheel which is a simple tool to help start doing this:

click on it to enlarge it.

The processing of the emotions is possibly something that will feel more intuitive once you understand what they are, but if you struggle with this then I would recommend getting a therapist who is experienced with helping autists and work through it with them - this is something they should be trained to do and will offer confidentiality to help you avoid the shame.

It takes time - for me was a few weeks to identify emotions clearly and months to be able to articulate them. To identify and process other peoples emotions took longer still but I am much better at this now.