Autism/Asperger and intensity of emotions and alexithymia.

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Sometimes I feel as if I am on drug or something. I mean when I perceive the world (daytime) as if all world flow into my consciousness. When I listen to music, as if I am on drug. I feel immensely deep feelings.

But I heard this from some other people with autism and Asperger syndrome. One said "I feel my emotions 2 times 3 times even 4 times intense than others. But I have no language to name them."

I am in a similar situation. I feel immensely deep feelings. But if I am asked I can not name them. This is called alexithymia. But I write poems or little paragraphs to decrease the intensity of those feelings. I even wrote a book in the past.

Is there any one who feel the same?

I also get deep feelings while listening to music. I'm always feeling deep feelings and I have very intense emotions. I work on my arts and crafts to dull those emotions.

Dysregulated and overwhelmed, yes and relatively, frustratingly, helpless about it.

But my lack of words for describing emotions are purely related to poor vocabulary in a verbal cognitive sense, and personal unwillingness to talk about it -- in which spoken or written language is either insufficient or limiting to my real expressions. That language itself is limited or oversimplifying, or even gives unequal terms/inequivalent terms and descriptions/mislabels as something else and do not have the means to describe or let it express what I feel.

Or just plain uncooperative, sometimes inappropriate to my way of expressing things my way, usually emotions itself never helps and does nothing but actually get in my way of my already poor average-at-best verbal abilities and expressions through it.

I do not have words for emotions because I simply suck at words, if not that translations between feelings to words do not translate well and is worse during more emotional states that I'm better off silent than make a fool of myself by rapidly misnaming and mispronouncing with added frustration of not recalling words well on top of that.

... It's not about poor introception awareness of it and also not/nor about the colorblindness to the spectrums of emotions that kind of alexithymia in my case.


So my way of letting things out is mostly nonverbal. Raw and untranslated into the filters of languages and words.

But the worst part isn't poor vocabulary.
It's the involuntariness of emotions itself -- that it doesn't match with how I intend to give myself away as, as opposed to the reactionary expression that is emotions.

The worst part is having emotions that do not reasonate with the idea of me.
Emotions that cannot be justified regardless (let alone explain and express in words) and want nothing more than just not exists to a point that "at least incontinence has an explanation" kind of 'excuse' in which leads to nothing but frustration and shame.

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This is where I wonder if I got the correct diagnosis of autism (done on Zoom during the pandemic so they never met me). I feel deep emotions and get easily overwhelmed but I'm learning what the emotions are and what they are called.

My problem is expressing myself quickly enough to get what I need or quickly explain what happened to me. Probably not helped by the fact I am alone at home most of the day and never get to communicate with anyone apart from my husband and daughter.

To be honest, I feel that a diagnosis of autism based upon a Zoom meeting doesn't have much basis.

I believe, in order to diagnose autism, one must meet someone face-to-face, and observe that person in his/her natural environment.

I don't believe "telemedicine" will catch on, until the technology gets more advanced.

Please don't interpret what I said as any sort of criticism of you in relation to autism. Even if somebody "self-diagnoses" themselves with autism, I feel like I shouldn't doubt that person.

I haven't noticed much that's odd about my perception of feelings or my ability to name them. I used to discount them as unimportant in the days when I thought that the important thing was logic, but I changed my mind and didn't have a lot of trouble knowing what I felt. I was probably a bit slow to notice my emotions. For example, I remember getting stressed out when a special interest project wasn't working, and I happened to notice that I was getting overheated, and I thought "I must be feeling frustrated and stressed." But perhaps I was only slow to see that because I was too focussed on the special interest to notice what I was going through.

I've no evidence that my feelings are any more or less intense than anybody else's. I don't often express them very graphically, but that doesn't mean I don't feel them.

I guess sometimes we feel stuff differently. Like I used to have great difficulty identifying when I actually wanted to do something and when I was like ‘yes this is thing I like, must do.’

It’s difficult for me personally to identify emotions a lot of the time too.

I think a lot of my inability to handle emotions is how I was brought up anyway. I wasn't allowed to show emotions, so I stopped showing them and therefore never got to understand them. So I've been masking my emotions since aged 10 or so.

Thank you all for your replies.