Emotions... and Logic

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So I was on facebook and I saw a post, "There's a missing teen last seen on 1st street in Onetown..... please contact local police if you know anything."

My first reaction, "poor thing, hope they find him...move on."

Wait, second reaction, "I should copy and repost to help."

Someone comments, "yeah, I live on 1st street and it's crazy over here."

My first reaction, "I bet it is. Probably driving you crazy being around all those lights. So what is going on exactly?"

Wait, don't post that. I dont' want to think about this. Forget about it.

Wait,

Second reaction, "Let me know if they find him. This is so scary." Thinking, "This could happen to my kids any day."

Wow, I feel so much better now that I let that out. Little less anxious and a little less worry. Maybe this is why people are addicted to expressing their feelings on the subject.

Try it. Next time you see a subject, focus on your feelings and emotions. It's really weird at first, but you'll see what I'm talking about. And when I say that, you can't be superficial. Find your real feelings.

My logical calculations masquerade as emotional responses, more or less. It saves me time that way.

Good advice... thanks!
I can sound impersonal a lot, because my logic is to be polite and ask people questions about themselves or how they feel. But sometimes it can be hard, because I'll want to say something and I'll have emotions about it, but I'm not sure what they are exactly. Like, it can feel like existing words aren't close enough to what I'm feeling so I'll think for awhile, then give up and not say anything. Have you had that problem since you've been trying to give more emotional responses??

Do you mean that your second responses were better because they took on board the main issue (i.e. that somebody was in danger) ?

I still have a hard time with recognising my feelings, though I agree it's important to try. I've also been through the stage where I thought I'd got a handle on them but it turned out to be guesswork based on what I expected myself to feel, according to my understanding of general psychology.

Before diagnosis I was always being encouraged by counsellors to discover my feelings. But Aspies have a hard time doing that........the counsellors, not knowing that, would usually assume that I was blocking/repressing, and I spent a long time looking for those mechanisms, but I found nothing. Now the heat's off and I see my poor grasp of my own feelings as a brain wiring thing. But if digigng around for repression isn't going to work, what do I do?

My job isn't made any easier when I read stuff from autism "experts" who think that Aspies might not even have the full range of emotions. I dispute that because for every known emotion, I can remember situations in which I felt it. I can often work out my feelings retrospectively but not as they happen. And if I'm expecting to have a particular (negative) feeling in a particular situation that's about to happen, it's usually the last thing I feel.

So I'm really struggling to work properly with my feelings. It's particularly important in relationships......I'm sure that if couples would just tell each other exactly how they felt, without marshalling logical arguments and talking right through each other, they'd resolve problems a lot better.

It's also very useful to be able to divine the feelings of others. I've been amazed how a bit of weird or confusing dialogue can become clear once I look at it in terms of emotion.

When I'm in the right mood, I can often see the emotional content of what others are saying to me, and it always feels like I've been blind and just got my sight back for a couple of seconds.....the emotional world is strange and almost supernatural to me, and very elusive most of the time, but the very idea of looking at feelings fascinates me.

Toughdiamond: Thank you for sharing your experiences, meanwhile i think the same about feelings

Before, i didn't take feelings serious and also didn't try to understand the others by that.

bye,
anton

Yes, I have. I usually do.

And I think what ToughDiamond explained (like the name by the way) is pretty much how a lot of us feel.

My theory is with the spectrum, it's not that we don't feel, it's that we feel so much it causes like a sensory overload. I just think a lot of things about us are like sensory overload. Meltdowns are a result of too much emotion, confusion, chaos, or something. Have you ever had excitement overload? It's like when you are so happy you can't control yourself? With me, it was always around boys I like. With my 4 year old daughter, Walmart...LOL. I notice my nephew gets that way around girls he likes. Anyway, I think we sometimes "shut down" emotionally for a second just to let the brain have a second (or month) to process the information. I also think it's why many of us in emergency situations can emotionally detach ourselves from the situation long enough to deal with it, but what those empathy tests forget to ask is after everything calms down and the emergency is square, how do you feel about it? That's when we often get the emotional shock and emotional cycle normal people felt while we were saving the day, then of course we carry on our Poker Face nobody knows we are feeling.

I do think this can be like a superpower if harnessed properly. It's like we have a gift to better control our emotions if we take advantage of some re-wiring aspects. My first step was recognizing emotion in people's arguments. Like my sister and I will argue about the silliest things. She's very emotional, like no logic all emotion whereas I'm the exact opposite. Some topics get her going, like racism. We always end up fighting, like not talking for days on that topic. Finally I realized her thing was it was about her emotions. Racism bothers her so much she starts to think irrational on the subject and of course none of that is going to make logical sense. So once I made that distinction, now I better talk to my sister by appealing to her emotions. I rarely use logic anymore as much as logic of other people's emotions. She, has since then, read up on Aspergers and has totally understood that I tend to emotionally detach myself from the topic, which riled her up to think I didn't care. So now our communication has greatly improved.

But, then, as I've been using facebook to try to work out my Aspie kinks (some of which I decided later to keep, lol, nobody is worth changing for if I don't have to), but I'm learning how some people are more emotional than others. I'm finding out it's rude to not at least fake the emotion. Many people fake it. Like they pretend to care about the guy in the wheelchair when really they don't care. Support our Troops, yeah that's one most people will claim they do until you ask them for a dollar donation to the girl scouts sending cookies overseas to our soldiers.... My favorite, support a cure for cancer. LOL, who wouldn't? Some of that is the facade or an ego building saint like fantasy people get about themselves. But, some are sincerely balls of emotional energy, and they do think it's insulting when you act like you don't care.

So I can't fake being someone I'm not. If I'm going to have to care about things, then I'm going to at least be sincere with it. But now I'm at where I'm not sure how I feel. Some things are easier to identify than others. Some take hours for me to figure out, swear I got it, and then days later change my mind and decide it's something else. For instance, in my example about a missing child, I would easily just label my emotion with, "that's sad." But when I caught myself not wanting to think about it, rushing through posting on it, not really having anything to say on the subject anymore...that's when I realized I had a fear going. Then it hit me, I don't want to be that parent who can't find their child. Just stating that made me feel better. In fact, I later went and hugged my kids and tucked them in and said a prayer, and it was just so neat to be in tune for once with an emotion. I guess the best thing is to just keep trying. I think writing has helped me find my emotions in some circumstances.

Sometimes, like when talking with my husband, I make the conscious effort to say, "STOP, you are just mad because I made you stop playing your video game, and I'm still mad because the kids woke me up earlier than I wanted to wake up this morning...." usually once we identify our real anger, the argument stops without apology and we move on like we never argued or were angry. It's weird.

One thing I do want to point out that I learned about emotion, in marketing they focus their slogans on emotion because you can't argue it. Logic is designed for debate. Emotions are not. If you really want to look into the different types of dialogue people use... Socrates Dialectic vs Plato's and Aristotle's Rhetoric. I think we on the spectrum are naturally dialectic thinkers where we argue and debate in order to find truth. Most people are rhetoric (like politics) where they argue and debate to win, and losing is an insult.

But at this point, I'm not an expert. I'm still working through some of this stuff. I probably need to sit down with my sister and discuss different emotions she feels. It's something I need to learn more about anyway. I added emotion identification to my daughter's IEP at her school, but I really can't count on the system. This is something I'm going to have to work on teaching her eventually. She's doing really good at recognizing other people's emotions lately, but she still can't recognize her own.

Whoa, you just hit me with some information there, hahaha. I completely agree. Sometimes I'll consciously choose not to react emotionally to something, because I know my emotions (even though they are hard to name oftentimes) can be so overwhelming, and I don't want to expend the energy.

I was really confused, at first I thought "With my 4 year old daughter, Walmart..." I thought your daughter's name was Walmart and I was seriously wondering why someone would name their daughter Walmart, or maybe you made a typo, and I started laughing at the idea of a kid named Walmart Then I suddenly made sense of it so it was funnier... haha, anyway...

Yes! In emergencies it's so much better to be calm, it's such a great benefit. I try not to get upset with people who freak out when they need to be calm. If you're worried someone is going to get hurt, then stay calm so you can help and possibly prevent it! It's so strange how people get upset right at the moments they need to be calm so they can help stop their fear from happening. Last time there was a fire scare in my apartment building, I woke all my roommates, got their jackets and shoes, put everyone's laptops in my backpack and got my betta fish. I woke the old, half-deaf neighbors across the hall and we all got downstairs in less than five minutes. The apartment across the hall and around the corner was actually on fire, and had somehow caught into the garbage chute as well, so it was scary even though it ended up having very minimal damage. The first time we had a fire alarm... there was no fire, but I gathered just my own things and yelled to wake everyone, and I ended up leaving them behind because they took over ten minutes to get out, which makes no sense if there really is a fire. If you want to live, hurry the hell up! But yeah, in any kind of emergency situation it's like being on a nice, smooth auto-pilot. Once the danger is over I get really jittery and the reality of a situation as it relates to me gets clearer.

My mom, like your sister, is almost completely emotional. I find it really hard to deal with, because she can be selfish and short-sighted. It's good that you and your sister can learn to communicate better in each other's different styles.

Oh god, rhetoric, just the thought makes my head hurt a little... I understand it and it can make for beautiful writing and duality in meaning, but as it relates to debate and argument, I wish rhetoric would freaking die.

You've given me a lot to ponder!

I have always had difficulty in identifying my own emotions. I tend to physicalize the emotion. What I mean is that I feel nervousness as a queasy and upset stomach. I have at times thought I was genuinely ill upon waking up in the morning. I felt so sick that I stayed home from school/work. At the point in time where it is impossible to change my mind and still leave on time is when I would begin to feel better. In a few hours I would feel pretty much fine.

Looking back it is pretty obvious that I was feeling nervous and afraid of not knowing the details of things happening that day, but at the time I did not identify an emotional feeling. I felt sick like I was going to vomit.

The more subtle feelings are nearly impossible for me to detect. Usually I notice something is up when I find myself twitching or fiddling with things.

Not so much these days, but when my first serious girlfriend told me for the first time that she loved me, my emotions went into hyperdrive, and I couldn't tell whether I was laughing or crying. Never had anything like that before or since. It was so intense that she took pains to explain that she herself always took news very calmly whether it was very good or very bad. I suppose she was feeling guilty about not reciprocating the intense feelings, though frankly at the time I was so over the moon that I hardly noticed, and couldn't understand why she was telling me that.


I've been there....though I'm not sure it's just an Aspie thing. I've heard people remark that it's amazing how a person can become "supercharged" in an emergency and then suffer for it when the danger is over. But maybe we do it more than NTs.


Only the other night on the phone, my wife was proudly telling me that she'd realised her workplace was only an economic transaction, and that as long as she viewed it that way then she'd be immune form getting upset over "office politics." She's been getting into conflict with a colleague. Now I've recently been reading that one of the biggest problems in workplaces is that it's often consciously seen as an economic transaction when as far as the human brain is concerned it's first and foremost a social environment. So my impulse was to contradict her, but then I felt that the context made that inappropriate, so I didn't. I'm glad I managed to avoid raining on her parade, as I'm sure she'd have just become upset if I'd unpicked and invalidated her idea. But I still feel uneasy about it, because I think she was setting herself up for a fall by denying the emotional aspect of her situation and assuming herself to be a steel robot. I suppose the situation is more complex than your example, because of the element of danger......I can't assess the risk accurately because her account is all I have, and she's almost entirely rhetorical and competitive when she tells the tale, which leaves me wondering "what's REALLY going on?" So if she makes a mess of resolving the problem, and suffers for it, I'm going to be thinking "I saw that coming and I did nothing to stop it" Though perhaps the key point is that I'm almost certain she wouldn't have listened anyway.


I still haven't got over discovering that empty platitudes make the world go round. I can (and do) hand them out, but it always makes me feel like a con man, and I feel distant from the people I lie to. It's helped slightly that I no longer expect to be discovered and ostracised for it, though it would be just my luck to give a load of flannel to an Aspie who would then hate me for it. I'd have no defense, because deepdown I'd feel that they were right.


Yes it's a great buzz sometimes. And I think writing about it really helps. Often I've no idea what I feel about a thing until I've written it down. My latest role model is a lady who was interviewed on the radio about a problem she was having with some corporate entity - "I'm crying because they've hurt me, and I want to hurt them like they hurt me, and I can't!" I've been there a few times. Traditionally, pride would have stopped me from admitting, even to myself, that the enemy had scored a point at my expense, but until I'd cleared that hurdle, I was never going to know how I really felt. But her emotive outburst cut through all the distortions, and without a trace of "playing the victim," she won my complete sympathy.


The only thing I can remember that's similar is when my wife and I used to argue about religion....one day, just as we were getting into our stride, I had an insight, and said "you know, the problem here is that every time you insinuate that there is a god, I feel threatened, and every time I insinuate that there isn't, you feel threatened. I think we need to accept that we don't agree, and stop insinuating that either of us is right or wrong." We haven't had an argument about religion since. It's so easy to get sucked into these harmful games, and it always feels deeply frustrating to avoid "correcting" what seems absurd. But as long as there's no clear need to resolve the belief difference, it's much better to just let it go. Counsellors have suggested to me that arguing the toss is just a crafty way of bashing each other, but I think it's more accident than design.


Yep......my son is always complaining that people on the Web aren't interested in finding out the truth but prefer to compete and win the argument....he's clearly a chip off the old block. I tend to take rhetoric as an insult to my intelligence. But I've read that the reason rhetoric is losing respect these days is because politicians don't own the fact that they use it, whereas the ancients made no bones about it.

Yes you're wise not to expect too much from the school. Some years back, in a lucid moment, I asked my son's class teacher how his social confidence was going - she couldn't even think of an answer! If you want a job doing right....... Sorry to give you such a lot to read - I get carried away sometimes.

Hmmm....I once read that feelings are called feelings because you feel them, physically. When you feel an emotion, you're feeling the results of your endocrine glands squirting hormones into your body, and those results are the signposts to the state of mind that told the glands to get pumping. But I'm not saying I find those signposts easy to read. Overheating when I haven't exercised and the room isn't too hot, is usually a stress marker for me, but that's about all I've got.

I'm more of an emotional thinker than I am a logical thinker. I think in terms of feelings and emotions. Most people use their brains. I take things to heart.

ToughDiamond,

Don't worry about long posts. I have a little autism going, so I can handle it. LOL I really enjoyed reading it.

CockneyRebel

Would you care to go into some detail about your take on understanding and feeling emotions? I think a lot of us don't realize an emotion until it's too heavy to handle. Like I often get an emotional overload, but I think it's a result of ignoring the emotions building. On a metaphorical level... like sometimes it's easy for me to get caught up in a hyperfocus, I don't notice I have to use the bathroom until I'm almost peeing myself.

I personally use logic a lot when speaking to people, and it has had mostly positive results. I look at my rare perspective as a gift, and it seems like a lot of people appreciate the way I talk to them. Here are a few things I try to do:

-Find a way to make whoever you are talking to feel smart, strong, loyal, virtuous, important, or something along those lines. Try to avoid making them feel stupid. You have to do this indirectly (like asking them questions about a subject you know they are well versed in). This isn't always an option but it makes people LOVE you.

-Look at every conversation like a competition to find out more information than you give up. Obviously you need to use some tact when doing this. This may seem silly but I have noticed mostly bad results when I have a conversation and I give out more information than I receive. Turning it into a contest gives me a genuine interest in what most people are saying.

-Try to disarm people with humor before you start shooting logic at them. Don't go overboard though.

-Thank your close friends and lovers for being what they are to you if you think they are feeling down. Keep this simple. "Thank you for being my friend" It seems like this makes people feel better.

-If you are trying to explain something to somebody who is really upset about something, put it in the SIMPLEST POSSIBLE TERMS.

-If somebody is really upset at you say one or two nice things to them and leave them alone till they burn themselves out.

This is my advice to anybody who has a brain that works like mine. It's not for everybody but it seems to help me.

Hmm. That is a good point. I guess when I find myself with shaky hands I find that I have to do a physical rundown.
1. Have I eaten recently? I get really shaky with low blood sugar.
2. Am I doing something new for me?
3. Am I prepared for what I am doing?
and so on.

I then apply a best guess to what emotion I am feeling based on what other people have said they felt in similar situations.
I guess it is like not knowing how to distinguish different emotions by using the physical state I am in.
If I have an accelerated heart beat and flushed face and sweaty palms. Am I feeling ill, scared, or attracted to someone? I don't know how I feel. It seems more like an educated guess by going through a list of questions like I started above. This seldom works in the moment so I end up trying to understand what I felt hours or days later.