Do you feel pain?

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Everyone feels pain. But what I mean is that do you recognize pain in a cognitive or emotional way? In my own case, I have difficulties in recognizing other peoples emotions, as well as my own. So when I am doing something physical, like jogging, I do not realize if I have hurt myself or gone too far. Nerves are reactive, and whether I am aware of it or not, my nervous system does register excessive stress. The result is either exhaustion, where I will collapse or be forced to stop. The other result is a meltdown, where I am overcome by the stress and frustration and can become verbally hostile and unstable. With rest, my body settles down, but the damage is already done. Personal embarrasment or unnecessary exhaustion. I wonder, does anyone else have something similar to this happen to them?

I feel pain and notice it, but I am very odd. Tickling and light touches hurt me more than touches with a lot of pressure or force. I'm also very aware of my limits in regards to physical activities, but I kind of understand what you mean. I draw my limit when my asthma starts to kick in, but pain wise I don't know if i have pushed my body too far or if it's okay to keep going if my asthma is under control.

I feel more emotional pain, than most of the grown people, that I know. If I feel that I've been wronged, I take it to heart. Most of the people, I know would just shrug it off. I also feel a great deal of pain, when one of my idols, or family members pass away. The rest of my family members seem to be able, to take it, very well. I remember, whe Princess Diana passed away. My mum saw me crying, as I was putting my sheets, on my bed. My mum thought, that I didn't want to go back to work. Wrong! I really wanted to go back to the factory, to make money. My mum told me to get over it. I turned the tables, on her and said, “You didn't cry, when you saw the news, on TV, did you?” She told me, that she cried a tear. I feel more pain, than she did. I'm just glad that I'm living on my own, after her emotionless response, to me telling her, about the passing of the original basist of my favourite band.

I think that I may recieve a bit more emotional pain than physical pain. When people joke about me, or make fun of me, they tell me to "take it lightly", because I MAY answer by hitting them if they make me angry, or with frustration. However, I don't know my physical limits, which have ended in some injuries I didn't even felt until hours after they happened, and in collapsing. My father once said that it was because I grew too passionate with what I did, but I never understood what he meant by that. I have lots of difficulty recognizing mine or other people's emotions.

I have been told I have an unusual threshold for physical pain. I've been told that whilst being tattooed, sutured, beaten, etc. Apparently I just don't register physical pain like others do. Maybe that's an aspie thing, maybe not.

I accidentally jammed a soldering iron into my finger above the nail the other day... After the initial sting, there was nothing. Definitely a sign that I need to quit chewing my fingers up.

Overall, though, I do have a higher than average tolerance. I've been to the doctor with things that they said should have hurt like hell, and to me were only a discomfort.

I use to pick up hot metal parts barehanded at work and hand them to a co-worker to watch how they reacted. It was my form of an IQ test. The other co-workers were freaked out by the amount of pain I could take. They would get back at me by trying to hug me. I would rather pick up a hot part than be hugged.

I have a very high pain tolerance. I feel pain, but it doesn't seem to affect me as much as it affects other people. I've managed to go my whole life without a really serious injury (this is somewhat miraculous, given how clumsy I am), but sometimes I worry that one day I will get an injury that requires medical attention, but I won't realize it because it doesn't hurt that much.

I don't connect pain to "bad" when it's cuts and bruises--surface things, injuries to the skin or muscle. Add that to clumsiness, and I'll often hurt myself, forget that I hurt myself immediately, and discover the injury later in the shower.

I can be completely overwhelmed by other kinds of pain, though. A headache or menstrual cramps both drastically reduce my ability to cope with life (odd, because a headache is mostly muscle tension and you'd think that bruising a muscle shouldn't be too much different from muscle tension in the neck and head... but no.) I think I just have a weird sensory system.

Wow, weird; I feel pain completely normally. Or at least, I think I do. The only kind of pain I can't feel is grief over losing a human.

For some kinds of pain it seems perfectly normal, but for others it is a little weird. It's as if my brain on some low level is noticing the pain, but it's only vaguely communicating to my consciousness.

I.e. There was a med I was on for some years, and about 25% of the time I took it I'd end up curled up on my side in bed for 4-6 hours. I'd feel "bad," but could never pin it down to pain anywhere (and it took a while to figure out it was the med). All I knew is that I couldn't think (or listen to radio, or watch TV) and felt generically bad. Then one day, for unrelated reasons, I took something that relieves stomach pain, and the bad feeling rapidly went away and I was functioning again. For some reason stomach pain just doesn't register as conscious pain.

And also I never get headaches, but sometimes I get spells where I get nauseous and hot/cold, and feel ill (but not like a flu), and Tylenol relieves it. Minor migraine, maybe? Wrapping my head up or putting on a knit cap seems to help also. -- But again, I have CFS, so that could be a CFS thing.

I remember someone writing a blog post about a doctor asking "so, does it hurt here?" -- man, I hate that. It usually takes a lot of thought, and at the rate they go, I get the impression that people can usually give an answer immediately.

OTOH, when I tore a muscle in my shoulder I felt that really clearly, and then fell over and writhed around on the floor for a long while.

I'm having trouble understanding it since English isn't my first language. xD

Emotions? i remember that i cried for someone out of sympathy because some ret*d insulted this kid's mom. I'm a pretty sweet guy. xD

And yea, i can feel pain,

I actually feel quite a bit of pain, but there are times when I can shrug something off. However, high pain tolerance is very common among those of us on the spectrum.

I have a very low tolerance for pain, which I am not happy about because whenever I feel pain that is supposed to be benign such as a needle or stubbing my toe, I treat it as if I've been shot (which I imagine must be excruciating in reality). Well, getting vaccine is not excurciating for me, but it is VERY painful. It's not the single reason why I am afraid of needles, but it doesn't make anything easier.

Oddly enough, I can stand pain a lot better if I am aware that I am about to feel pain or if I am the one in control of the situation (such as using tweezers to pluck out some glass that I've accidentally stepped on). I really don't trust people with pointy objects (which is probably the main reason why I am afraid of needles).

As for emotional pain, well I don't cry whenever I see that something sad has happened in the world. In fact, I can usually emotionally distance myself from stuff on TV (unless I am outraged about some kind of political issue. ). I've had vegans and vegetarians dare me to eat meat after watching an animal in a sluaghter house die on one of peta's proganda videos and I'd still want a cheese burger ( well, at least they wouldn't have to die in vain, heheh).

Also, (when I was a child) whenever a fictional character did something in a movie or a TV show, etc, that was irresponsible, selfish and/or dangerous when you really wanted the character to do the right thing (like Woody in Toy Story), I used to get VERY angry at the character's choices. I guess that shows good storytelling if you can get someone to be that involved in your characters mistakes. I wouldn't say that was "emotional paib" per say, but it shows that I can be quite emotional at times. However, it's complicated - I'm either very unemotional or very emotional about something.

Hey Scotty,

I'm not entirely getting your question, but from what I think you're getting at, you want to know if anyone has a strange relationship to pain.

For me, my high threshold is notorious. When I was five years old I grabbed a cereal box off a high shelf and knocked a stack of glass ashtrays onto my foot, cut it to the bone. I walked around the house eating out of the box and leaving bloody footprints on the carpet, looking to tell my mom some glass broke - never knew until she looked at my foot and screamed.

For me it fits into a larger pattern of not realizing how bad I'm hurt and paying the price later, be it urgent care clinics or physical therapy. Pretty good at ignoring fatigue as well, same result. When I was younger this was an occasional advantage, be it powering through a thick grad school assignment, or outlasting more skilled opponents in boxing and martial arts. But when I got older and my regenerative powers declined, it was just pure damage to body and mind, damage I'm still trying to heal.

As for emotionally, still trying to understand. In the past, I would show pain when I thought that was what was expected of me - convenient when I read the situation right, embarrassing when I got it wrong. But I don't think I really felt it, whatever real pain made it into the display was probably the agony of frustration borne of not understanding what the hell I'm supposed to be doing. These days I still try and display pain when expected, but keep it super-low key so there's no big fallout if I'm wrong. But that emotional pain of frustration - that the interpersonal bonds that everyone else takes for granted is a puzzle I can never solve, that's real.

I've thought about this a lot. My strongest conclusion is that physical and emotional pain exist to communicate to us (whether NT or otherwise) that something's not right and is causing us deficiency or harm. Take a few breaths, feel your pain, listen to what it tells you, and ask yourself: Is this pain real, imagined, or real but exaggerated? Knowing that difference, distinguishing the injury from the hurt, helps me keep this in perspective and enhances my self-preservation.

I should help clarify the point. What I meant is, How hogh is your pain tolerance? It is known that people with ASD can have very high tolerance to pain and may not react to painful stimuli in appropriate ways.