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kat_ross
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27 Feb 2011, 5:56 pm

Just something I was thinking about recently...

I often don't like to let other people see that I am happy or in a good mood about something, particularly my parents.

I think with my parents, it has to do with the fact that they spent most of my childhood ignoring my problems and pretending that I was happy when I was actually depressed. And then if I ever did find something that I enjoyed (ex: I became very giggly and excited while watching a TV show or something), they would use this as evidence that I was really a happy child with no problems who was just choosing to be difficult.
I feel like whenever I let them see that I am making progress, and my mood is improving, they will get even angrier at me if I regress and slip back into a depression, feeling like I stopped trying, or I wasn't being truthful with them in the first place, etc...

When it comes to people outside my home, I am worried that if I allow myself to let my guard down and get very happy/excited about something, I will often slip into hyper mode and talk on and on, talk very loudly, etc...to the extent that I am later embarrassed. This has happened before on many occasions.

So it's like I am scared to ever let people see that I am in a good mood.

Does anyone else have this problem?



eddie82
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27 Feb 2011, 6:00 pm

You just described my relationship with my parents better than I could.


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kruger4
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27 Feb 2011, 6:37 pm

I have the same problem but I don't know for what reason I am like this, I still haven't figured it out. Maybe it's the same thing as you described I'll have to think about it.



theWanderer
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27 Feb 2011, 6:58 pm

I don't like to let my guard down and let anyone see that I'm happy, sad, vulnerable - anything. What they don't know, they can't use against you... Yes, over the years, there are people I've learned to let see what's inside, but not many and it is always work.


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kat_ross
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27 Feb 2011, 7:19 pm

Wow, it looks like I'm not the only one. Thank you for your responses. Just about the only place I'm comfortable sharing how I feel is here on WP :)



Bluefins
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27 Feb 2011, 7:53 pm

8O Your parents are horribly wrong.



just-lou
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27 Feb 2011, 10:21 pm

I'm the same way about showing any kind of emotion, which is why my mother calls me "the robot." I feel foolish expressing happiness because things might go horribly wrong and I'd feel like an idiot that I was so happy about it. Same with sadness or depression - I HATE pity and that is all anyone seems to respond with. I just go for neutral.



Titangeek
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28 Feb 2011, 12:09 am

eddie82 wrote:
You just described my relationship with my parents better than I could.

seconded


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MXH
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28 Feb 2011, 12:33 am

For me its backwards, I pretend to be happy a lot when I am the whole opposite.



jackbus01
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28 Feb 2011, 12:51 am

I totally understand. I try to be reserved because it seems that when I get overly happy, I just get goofy. People are okay with goofy for a kid, but not a smart 38 year old man. When I was younger I was called a robot a lot, because of my mannerisms. In fact, I don't like to try to smile during pictures, because I look like a complete idiot. So, I try to be serious as people treat me better that way and I feel better about myself.
You can see my preferred picture of myself, look at my avatar.



Yensid
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28 Feb 2011, 2:44 am

Yes. I don't like it when people see me happy. It makes me nervous.

When I was growing up, my father had severe anger-management problems. Looking happy was like waving a flag in front of an angry bull. If he was in a bad mood, it was pretty much guaranteed to trigger some sort of insane reaction.

In general, I found that looking happy was a bad thing. The other kids seemed to make it their mission in life to make sure that I stopped smiling as soon as possible.


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MooCow
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28 Feb 2011, 4:02 am

It's not that I don't show happiness in front of people, I don't like showing any emotions... I tend to stay very neutral, which tends lead people to believe that I'm angry with them, which causes all sorts of problems... I'm not sure why not smiling = angry, but, apparently, it does.



jackbus01
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28 Feb 2011, 4:34 am

MooCow wrote:
I'm not sure why not smiling = angry, but, apparently, it does.


Yes, people are really ignorant that way



Cornflake
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28 Feb 2011, 11:27 am

^^ +1


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YippySkippy
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28 Feb 2011, 12:33 pm

"When it comes to people outside my home, I am worried that if I allow myself to let my guard down and get very happy/excited about something, I will often slip into hyper mode and talk on and on, talk very loudly, etc...to the extent that I am later embarrassed. This has happened before on many occasions." (quoted)

Ditto. Although I'm not sure if I'm actually talking too much, or if it just seems that way to me because I'm usually so reserved.



Last edited by YippySkippy on 01 Mar 2011, 8:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

anbuend
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28 Feb 2011, 2:27 pm

I don't have that particular problem.

But when I was growing up, as a teenager, I was in the process of losing a lot of abilities. Just, they weren't coming back, period. And I knew this on some level that other people seemed to have real trouble understanding. I was being presented with two possible futures. One, where I became more and more normal (maybe even actually normal), and lived what most people call "independently" by my early twenties. That was called "hope" by most people. The other, where I either didn't "improve" or continued "regressing", and I would live in an institution the rest of my life. (I was already bouncing in and out of mental institutions and eventually didn't go home for about 9 months except on pass. A hellish nine months where someone deliberately built me a facade and forced me using physical abuse to take it on. But that's irrelevant to my main point so I'll shut up about it.)

So there were these two views. And all I knew, was that the first one was not going to happen. People were still expecting me to "improve" while everything was falling apart around me in what seemed catastrophic ways, it was a really horrible and horrifying experience given that I didn't understand what was happening to me. Other people ranged from not caring at all (including an insurance doctor who was trying to have me taken away from my parents so he could lock me up for life -- he'd never met me, he just "knew" I was "unsalvageable" in his words, a word that's terrible to apply to a human being). So... there was this tremendous pressure to "improve" at all costs while at the same time I was losing everything (both losing facades, and losing real skills, but most people couldn't tell the difference).

So the way people put pressure on me, was they basically put my every move under a microscope. It was like they were keeping a running tally. If I did something good, it was "progress". If I did something bad or couldn't do something good, it was "regression" or "setbacks". And these were not just words. I mean, these were not just neutral descriptions of what was happening in my life. Each of those carried a huge amount of weight. When people said that I was making progress, they were saying I would live "independently" as an adult. When they said I was regressing, they were saying I would be institutionalized forever. That was the weight behind those words. And that's a lot of pressure for a really bewildered autistic teenager under the best of circumstances, and these were not the best of circumstances. The ones who were "hopeful" kept saying I would take "two steps forward, one step back", but it was more like one step forward, ten steps back. And since I was the only person who could gauge my abilities from the inside, I was more aware than anyone that the ultimate "progress" would never happen.

The happy ending of course (at least to me it's happy, and I hope it stays this way despite my country's government being utterly haywire at the moment) is that despite "regressing" in many ways continually]/i] since adolescence (oh hai, autistic catatonia!), I have my own apartment, a wonderful cat, and services that allow me to stay in this apartment and get help with practically everything even though I'm living in bed. (Due to things more than just autism, but I had nearly this many problems even without some of the physical stuff.) But nobody told me this was possible and I spent my entire adolescence in terror because of that. If I hadn't bumped into the autistic community and gotten help navigating the service system from there I'd probably be homeless, institutionalized, or dead by now. I certainly qualify for both DD and physical institutions, and they could have easily interpreted these as psych issues too.

Anyway, that legacy of being under a microscope about my "progress" and "regression" has made me [i]incredibly
wary of anyone who thinks they can make me "make progress" on something. I've had many bad experiences where people teach me to basically prop a skill I'm bad at up with a few mental boards, so that it looks higher than it is, and then shower me with praise for doing it, and then of course the moment I look away the skill is gone, because my skills don't work like that. I've been through endless useless drills in skills training. One staff person was obsessed with making me able to not wear Depends, even though I was wearing them for a reason, and that reason didn't go away once she started making me wear regular underwear. So when people get really interested in making me make progress, often for reasons that have to do with their own hangups about disability, I get really nervous and find it offputting and generally want nothing to do with them anymore. I hate people being "proud" of me for using all my energy doing something that I can't possibly sustain, so that then the moment I need that energy for something else, bam, the skill disappears and they're all upset about it. Screw that.

So I don't have the thing about appearing happy in front of other people, but I'm incredibly incredibly wary of anyone praising me for "improving" on something that I know I can't possibly sustain, or something that was a one-off skill and never again, or something like that. Or people who want to get me to "imrove" in something at all costs. That stuff... it makes me twitchy. And it tells me something about how that person can't handle the realities of disability and wants to replace my reality with some kind of "overcoming" myth to make themselves feel better. Yecch.


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