My therapist doesn't believe i'm autistic

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me too

a lot of the times my emotional reaction is delayed so it looks to other people that i don't care. it happens with emotions that appear in a social context, as i think i need to process them more than other people. For instance I may not understand right away that someone meant to hurt me, so my emotional reaction comes when I think about it later. And it looks like I can't defend myself and there's nothing i can do because the moment i should have done something was already gone. people take advantage of that. i wish i was more reactive.

or i should have a reaction of fear because i walked in front of a car, right away, but instead i'm just calm and the emotion hits me later.

I am very often like this as well.

A lot of times it happens that I confuse physical sensations with one another. For example I confuse an emotion that I usually feel while I listen to music with cold sometimes. I confuse hunger with stomach ache so for example there are times in which I believe I'm hungry so I consequently eat something, but then I throw up. I also confuse fear with surprise and I don't know which one is which. My therapist told me that surprise is the same feeling that we have while we're in the car and we jump because of an imperfection of the road, it's just tuned down a lot. But fear to me feels like that so I don't know which one is fear and which one is surprise. In the past I also confused fear with anger, but now I think I can distiguish them from one another.
Does that happen to you too?

I don't think I have that I have anything like that. I do have trouble with sorting through and identifying emotions in the moment. I always have to wait until after the fact. I also often will see some of my emotions and and thoughts and food textures as colors and color patterns until I have had time to sort them into words. Food textures are harder to sort into words.

why do you think you have trouble identifying emotions in the moment?

My brain processing speed is too slow. It takes me a very long time to sort through them and figure them out. They hit me very powerfully because I have no way to soften or dampen or filter any of them so I am being hit at full force every time and I can be feeling multiple emotions at once. It is just too much stimuli to be able to get through, understand, sort, and label while it is happening. I have to wait for the moment to pass before I can start the processing.

My diagnosis recorded that I receive information at a speed in the 86 or 87 percentile but I can only process information at a speed in the 35 percentile. That is a huge difference and that is why my brain can't handle things and just basically collapses and stops working when it is overloaded. I function best when life is slowed down to a ret*d snail's pace.

I understand, thank you very much for responding to my questions skibum.

Now I want to know if there's somebody else like me who confuses emotions with other bodily sensations.

You are very welcome. I am also very curious if others have a similar synesthesia as you. Synesthesia comes in so many varieties.

Skibum, how was your processing speed measured?

They used different tests where I had to respond to different kinds of stimuli and they were able to measure how accurate my responses were and how long it took for me to respond.

TY. I don't think I did that type of testing but in any case I will keep that issue in mind. There's the amount of information we sense (lots in some ways, none in others) and speed (in some ways and closer to none in others).