Do you have to make effort to connect to your emotions?

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I do. In most cases, anyway. A lot of the time, I'm in a sort of plain mode where, even if something that usually makes me happy happens, I just don't show it and don't really feel it properly. Only when I make a conscious effort can I show and feel it, and even then I'm not even sure if they're my real emotions or the emotions I'm forcing myself to feel because people think I should.

My real emotion or opinion towards something might not be worked out until months later. I'll often be sitting somewhere idly lost in my own world thinking random things over when I'll suddenly work this stuff out.

Does anyone else get this? Or at least feel something similar?

I don't know. If I actually care about something I'll show it. If my true feeling is "meh" I'm gonna have a hard time coming up with a fake answer just because other people think I "should" feel a certain way about something.

Depends on the emotion. Fear and joy have no problem connecting with this brain of mine but sympathy has a hard time of it.

Vanilla_Slice

Yes, I have to put forth a lot of effort to figure out my emotions on things. Sometimes they just arise on their own and I'm confused about them. When I try to sort them out or find any logic in them I get confused and frustrated. Luckily, my feelings seem to be pretty neutral most of the time, so I don't usually have to contend with them.

Emotions are confusing and the stronger they are, the more frustrated I become. I usually give up trying to deal with them and get absorbed in other things. They go away.

I think I have plenty of sympathy. "Pride" is something I have trouble connecting with.

I remember at my college graduation ceremony sitting there bored out of my mind thinking "what is all this BS?". I remember all my friends and relatives telling me "you should be proud of yourself" and me not knowing what to think. I don't get how some silly pageantry is supposed to invoke feelings of pride.

I feel the same way about weddings, you know, bored out of my mind. I bet I'd feel the same way even at my own wedding. Ceremonies just don't do anything for me. Always seems like a bunch of NT BS. I'd feel much more emotion being somewhere else, like out in a natural setting sharing quiet reflections with someone.

Maybe I'm off topic. Oh well. Always staying on topic is boring to me. I apologise to the OP for my irrelevant ranting.

Anyways, I don't think I'm really out of touch with my emotions. I just get emotions from different sources than the majority.

Last edited by marshall on 15 Jun 2010, 9:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, exactly the same here! Whenever I'm told I should be proud for myself I just don't know what to think, and yes wedding ceremonies bore me too, to no end. Last one I was at I was concentrating on the fact that someone taking photos was doing it on a first generation iPhone

Not usually, however sympathy and empathy are two that I've the most diffuculty with.

I used to feel nothing except anger and sadness for years, now I feel everything. Sometimes emotions aren't as wonderful to have as some would like to say.

Ugh! Yeah weddings suck!! ! And I felt the same about my own. It was pretty, but I don't understand what all the fuss is about (I had nothing to do with the planning of my own wedding). I went to a wedding recently and people were crying which really confused me. When I talked with my therapist about it she explained it perfectly. She said that some people might be crying because there's just an over-abundance of emotion so tears come out, even though they're happy and that it's kind of like when I flap my hands because I do that when I'm excited or anxious or something and can't contain all the energy. This was SUCH a revelation to me. Now I get it.

Feelings are often still quite woolly things for me, and I often have a hard time knowing what I'm feeling until some time after the event.

I remember trying to do some clever stuff with a computer and some electronic parts, a few years ago. It started going wrong, and I happened to notice that I was feeling hot.....only then did it dawn on me that I was stressed out because of the frustration, and that was causing the overheating. I felt like I'd really discovered something.

Another time I was emailing a friend and I noticed I'd typed some pretty negative stuff.....I thought for a minute and added "but maybe I'm just pissed off right now." Just as well - that was exactly what I was feeling.

Counsellors often used to tell me that I needed to get in touch with my feeling better. But they didn't know I had AS, so I thought I must be full of Freudian repression For years all I could do was to guess what my feelings might be, but I'm sure a lot of the time I really was guessing - all I'd really figured out was the feelings the average guy might reasonably have been expected to have had. But little by little I got a bit more accurate.

Anyway, I'm a great believer in tracking feelings. I think they're a much stronger motivating force than logic is. If you know how you're feeling, you can do a lot more to make yourself happier. If you know how your friends are feeling, you can be a great comfort to them. I really should pay more attention to feelings, but somehow I keep drifting back into logic, which cannot do the same job at all.

I don't understand how it's helpful to be in touch with negative emotions. Either psychotherapy is complete nonsense or my brain is profoundly different.

It doesn't help me because often I'm so chemically depressed that there's nothing I can do about it. It's just like being hung over in that there's nothing you can do but wait for it to pass. In the mean time it would be easier for me if I wasn't so freaking aware of my own misery. Being too self-aware takes away all your psychological defenses.

True. It's often hard for people to emotionally blackmail me because I need to make that effort and I'm not gonna do that if the emotions are being used against me.

I try to regularly write down my thoughts, which helps me realise how I'm feeling. It's like I have to put things into words to properly process them.

It would be difficult for someone to emotionally blackmail me because I'm extremely cautious. Unless I really like someone I don't open up for people. Most people either annoy me, make me nervous, or just make me instinctively dislike them. The downside is I'm a loner, but it's not completely by choice. The right people are hard to find.

At times.

I tend to discount my emotions as subjective nonsense.

ruveyn

How? Does discounting them make them go away? I've never had much success with that. I wish I had that talent.

It's a heck of a lot easier to for me to dismiss other people's emotions as subjective nonsense.

Actually it's not really other people's emotions that I have a problem with. I only have a problem with other people project their subjective emotional understandings on me, like telling me how I should feel about something. That's one thing that can make people irritating as crap.