How do you process emotions?

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How do you process emotions? Do you feel your emotions, or do they manifest in other ways?

I'm just wondering, because I tend to not feel my emotions, but if something intense is happening I will still have a stress/emotional reaction even though I don't really feel the emotions.

For example, I moved into a new house and the change and the housemates set off some of my past abuse issues. I was a mess for a while, but looking back on it, I wasn't really feeling anything, I was just reacting as if I was feeling something. But my memory of the past few months doesn't involve an emotion at all.

I can tell when I am overloaded, but even that isn't linked to an emotion.

Since I don't remember any feelings of emotion when I look back on my reaction to moving into a new house, even though I know I was very briefly suicidal at one point (that passed quickly) and my sleep was all messed up and I was leaning on my only friend at the time for support, I told my therapist that I didn't need to make such a big deal out of moving. She told me I was minimizing.

Does anyone else not feel emotion? Or feel disconnected from emotion?

I think I usually feel my emotions....but sometimes I just have a dim awareness that I feel something--I couldn't tell you what it was. It's like my emotions are somewhere in the background. I don't always think about them. (I'll think about why I feel a certain way, but it seems like I don't conceptualize my emotions.)

So you're saying that emotions are present, but they aren't impinging on your awareness?

Are you aware of your physical body, or is that also kinda distant?

In the technical parlance, it's called alexithymia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia

Giving a lot of attention to your physical and emotional experience can train your brain to be more sensitive to both.

Try the body sweeping exercise in this guided meditation for starters:

http://www.audiodharma.org/teacher/24/t ... _sweep.mp3

Other kinds of meditation activity could be of use, too.

Alexithymia sounds very much like what I experience. I'll try the meditation exercise, thanks.

But is being disconnected from your body and emotions a bad thing? My therapist thinks it is.

But for example, I used to be completely socially disconnected. Didn't need friends, spent most of my time alone, was completely self-satisfied. In my mid 20's I made good friends for the first time. All of the sudden it wrenched me into the social world, and now I need people. I cannot spend a lot of time alone or I get depressed. I don't necessarily need social interaction, but I do need to be around people.

I wish I could go back to the way I was before, completely self-satisfied. It was so much easier then.

I wonder if I would eventually regret learning to feel my body and my emotions and wish I could go back to the way it was before?

Then again, I do seem to react to these unfelt emotions, so maybe it's not so great the way it is now.

I used to be like that & never really felt strong emotions except for certain negative 1s; I had a Schizoid Personality till I got close to & fell in love with a girl when I was 19. Then I became very overly emotional & had a mental breakdown when things feel apart; I kind of had a Borderline Personality for a bit & I spent the next 5 years seeing psychs & taking meds.
I don't have much advice for you OP except to maybe try to work on analyzing situations & your actions. & it may help you better understand your feelings. I worked on that a lot after my breakdown & even thou I can be kind of highly emotional & sensitive now; there are some situations where I don't really feel emotions when I'm tired or overwhelmed or stressed or something & I find my analytical ability to be quit helpful

Last edited by nick007 on 06 Oct 2011, 8:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, because emotions are information. They keep you informed about what's going on.

Basically, if you can't work out what's going on for you emotionally, it's like you aren't privy to an entire dimension of information that everyone else is. Walking to the beat of a different drummer. You can't hear the same music everyone else is dancing to.

It might be part of the reason that aspies are seen as logical/rational... they aren't in touch with their feelings and so can't draw on that information to make informed decisions in the world. Either there's nothing coming in, or what is being received is confusing, or vague, and may even seem to get in the way of making good choices.

Being keyed into emotions will help you socially, as you'll be able to experientially understand what other people are responding to.

I'm not even sure it's possible for aspies to develop better emotional understanding 'skills'. I myself don't know if I have autism. Also, I'm not a professional therapist. I believe it is possible.



I think I went through something similar. It's like coming out of depression; in some ways, being depressed was comfortable, and didn't challenge me. I could stay in it and I'd be 'safe' in some way, even though I was depressed. Coming out of it was kinda terrifying, because I knew I had to be more responsible, and I'd have to actually face challenges now.

I've also been at that stage where I'm not yet okay to be a social creature, but no longer able to exist completely alone.

And that's where you are now, facing a lot of challenges.

It will be hard, but I think you probably know that you have to make changes, so I advise you to go for it, don't be afraid of failure (failure is simply a cue to try something different), and use WP to gather any advice and support you might need.



Rampant emotions going undetected can be like a fox running around in your chicken shed. Ideally you want to know the fox is there so you can deal with it before too much damage is done.

I'll try. I would like to have better understanding of social situations, so if learning to feel my emotions will help me understand those of others, I'll definitely give it a try.

A fox in a chicken shed hurts the chickens, and you don't always know the fox is in there. So if you're referring to my emotions hurting me and I don't even know they're there, that makes sense. If I know what the emotions are I can deal with them before they get too overwhelming/potentially harmful. Correct?

I'm not diagnosed with an ASD either, though I strongly suspect I am on the spectrum. I've told my therapist this, and she doesn't know anything about ASDs. She said she's willing to refer me to the school psychiatrist, but I think if I'm going to go for a diagnosis, I'll go to someone who knows ASDs in adults. Preferably someone who has enough knowledge to sort through my other psych diagnoses, PTSD and Bipolar.

Yes.

Knowing you feel something doesn't mean you always instantly know what to do about it. But it's a good start.



Good luck with whatever you chose to do.

I almost always experience my emotions intellectually and not viscerally.

I agree that it's good to recognise your feelings......especially the negative ones. Anger, for example, often needs to be managed. If I don't know I'm angry, I can do all kinds of nasty things without realising it. I might still do nasty things even though I know I'm angry, but at least I'm more acting out of my own free will.

I too find it difficult to recognise my feelings. I'm getting quite good at noticing when I'm getting hot, and if there isn't a good physical explanation for it then I assume it's emotional stress of some kind. Acute anxiety is very easy to spot. I think a lot of it is about spotting the mood I'm in, which will tell me the main emotions that are currently in the mix.

I'm not so sure recognising emotions is always necessary. As far as I know, the idea of recognising feelings and thinking about them is a comparatively recent, Western trend. Freud and others felt that emotions had historically been neglected in favour of intellect, and that this was the source of much unhappiness. I was quite surprised to read a later book which said that even if he was right about (for example) the Oedipus complex, in the average family it gets dealt with quite reasonably without anybody doing any introspection or psychoanalysis. Perhaps emotions only need examining when they're going wrong? I guess it deends on how you view the condition of the human race - stuffed full of horrible neuroses, or more or less OK as it is.

But I see the conscious identification of emotions as very useful in friendships, particularly close ones. Perhaps that's because most of my close associations with others seem to go wrong. Certainly the Relate people would say that you'd usually need to understand your feelings and those of your partner in order to make a relationship work.

I've been told both that I wear my feelings on my sleeve, and that I do not process my feelings at all. It depends on who the person telling me is and what they have seen. I'm old enough now to understand why I get both responses. It's because the truth is that I do not "feel" most emotions at all, and those that I do feel are few, and not often felt in the first place.

I have no idea or concept of how one could "process" something I don't even feel to begin with. I have lots of opinions that I'm usually willing to share when people ask me how I "feel" about certain things, but I don't really "feel" anything about them.

I "feel" happiness as contentment. I feel anger. I feel sadness and regret. Beyond that, I do not "feel" all the subtler emotions.

That which I do feel, I do not process in any way I would call "processing." If I feel sad, I show it. People know when I feel sad or angry, or regret, because it shows in obvious ways. I don't hide what I do feel, because it doesn't bother me to admit what I feel. The thing is, displaying what I do feel, doesn't feel like "processing." It just feels like letting it go.

I don't understand what "processing" emotions means.

Can I make sausage out of them?

I can sorta relate. I was mute and friendless till I was 17, 18. While I was mute, in the back of my head I always kinda wanted friends but it was never a nessecity, I was perfectly fine without them. Once I started making friends, my need to people and social contact grew. Now I cant do without friends, sure I dont see them that often but I cant go back to being friendless even if my I mostly keep in contact via IM facebook.

I can sorta relate. I was mute and friendless till I was 17, 18. While I was mute, in the back of my head I always kinda wanted friends but it was never a nessecity, I was perfectly fine without them. Once I started making friends, my need to people and social contact grew. Now I cant do without friends, sure I dont see them that often but I cant go back to being friendless even if my I mostly keep in contact via IM facebook.

I don't know how I got through those two years before I met my online friends. Just floated through the ether, I suppose...

Anyway... I experience most of my emotions intellectually. That's what makes it so hard for me to express them, because I have no physical push.
I feel anxiety in my midsection, however.

For me, I was diagnosed NVLD, they kinda said I was borderline Aspergers. I also got schizoid personality type, too, but this was during a really really tough time in my life where I was almost literally dealing with life and death, and my future and stuff. But yeah, I ended up being able to turn off all my real emotions. Then, when things cooled down and got easier, I crashed, and I guess the schizoid thing was lost. Now I got no idea what to do with my emotions, and I guess my real self is quite "aspie." My family just thinks I'm crazy, as I'll hit doors and stuff for seemingly no reason. I went from being able to not be mad/very happy about anything, to just being pissed off at the smallest things all the time.

For me, it's odd, I don't get immediately mad, at say, someone cutting me off or something like that, usually. It's more I get mad when I small thing that doesn't make normal people too angry happens, but it reminds me of my past experiences, then I just am in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

Sucks when you find out you're human afterall.

I did the alexithymia test and apparently I have it. But it really just gives me a word for something I knew anyway. I think I probably experience the same range of emotions that everyone else does but I lack the ability to properly recognise exactly which one (or which combination) I am feeling at a given time or to express them in a meaningful way.