Emotions (or lack of).

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Happiness and interest are good emotions. But I
like to keep my emotions to the bare minimum.
However having OCD means that I do get
emotions related to anxiety. I think that 80% of all
emotions get in the way of Logical Thinking.

I am currently in the process of mentally deleting
emotions one by one, but it is very difficult. I do
not plan to rid of all emotions, but I just want to
keep it to the bare minimum.

What are your thoughts on emotions? Do you
have a broad range or a narrow range (like me)?

is it actualy even possible to do that? is it even safe?
am not judging,its just something am not able to understand the idea of well,what have the support staff said or any pyschs?
from own limited understanding of them-feelings are there so people can rid their body of it.
for a person with feelings to deliberately reprogramme themself into being feelingless is extremely limiting the ways of expressing the inside stuff,it is part of why so many of us on the spectrum are also labeled with severe challenging behavior.

have personaly known one other person on a hacking forum try to reprogramme feelings by removing them, but no idea how far along he got if at all.

am unable to recognise,feel or understand any feelings,mine is due to both autism and learning disability [US-ID].
staff say have got a very simple set of feelings and these are very extreme,such as raging,self biting/attacking,head banging etc when its a bad sort of feeling or bursting out in laughter at anything,speed rocking,spinning,interaction, etc when good sort of feeling.
am only able to see good or bad due to the years have spent having specialist support with it,have repetitively copied it all down in rote memory but it still makes no feeling or sense to self,am sent into an information overload if was to start thinking of what is called a feeling,it is like a concept from another planet.

You might ke this small read on similar things .
I was researching my own condition which limits my emotional expereince; Alexithymia, and it mentions Stoicism which seems to be what you are describing yourself.
I have a friend who tries to limit his emotions too.
As long as you're not ignoring them I think it can be done in a fairly healthy way. For example, desensitising yourself to emotions by reasoning them out, so that when they come about you can explain them with logical words to dissipate the feeling. This is the sort of thing people seem to try to do with OCD. In that they go 'ok this bad thing MIGHT happen. It also might not. I can control some things, but some aspects of this are just going to happen as they will.'
A Buddhist way would be accepting that there are not good or bad things, and that everything just 'is' and as such emotions are more like a sort of colouring or flavour to seeing things, but we could probably dilute them and just observe them objectively. Or still them, although I think Buddhists wouldn't aim to still emotions, they do tend to have a way of thinking that neutralises everything, such as personality, emotions, good and bad, to the point you may be able to dilute your emotional responses to things significantly.

I think simply trying to get rid of them all together is problematic, because any slip up or regurgitation of an emotion you felt you'd gotten rid of could cause further emotional responses, probably unpleasant ones, and it's not good to self-punish with such difficult tasks.

You may not be doing it in a harmful way, but it's a possibility so I thought I'd mention that.

I think it'd be better to instead change how you see your emotions, and how your thoughts link with them, then work on changing the thoughts that go with the emotions to the point you can neutralize and weaken their strong hold on you. This can help ease anxiety from them and cause such problems as behavioural difficulties like compulsions.

All processes would be long and difficult, but I think there are some therapeutic methods you could employ to aid you in your goal and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, its more about how you go about it.

I don't exactly know how to describe my emotions. They are not stable.
Sometimes they look non-existing and other times they are extremely visible.
I have no control over my emotions, and often have mood swings.

The one I feel the most is anger. I often am angry, and it is very visible, since I can't control it.
I hardly ever feel sad, and it's never deep sadness, so it's an emotion I hardly ever feel.
My happiness is most of the times shallow, unless I was made really really happy by something that is important to me.
I also feel anxiety and sometimes fear.

When I'm not angry, sad, happy, anxious or scared I just feel nothing, as at the moment.

Those emotions seem easier to recognise for me because they're more powerful and common. Maybe that's why you recognise those but not often others. I often feel emotionally empty but I now know this isn't the case its just me not being able to translate them.
If I'm anxious I often get the urge to rearrange, a manifestation of ocd.
If I'm irritable I get an itchy forehead and scalp.
I sometimes get the feeling in my stomach that I'm going to explode if I'm angry.
I also get weird emotional feelings in the belly and chest but can't figure out what emotions those are, they just feel like emotional noise. There seem to be more than one and I can't tell which ones are more prominent and what they mean.

No, you're repressing emotions. They're still there, but now you aren't aware when you're feeling them, and therefore can't compensate. What you're doing is deleting your conscious awareness of your emotions, not the emotions themselves.

If you want to be logical, don't try to get rid of emotion - it's impossible, and you'll just throw away your best tool for handling emotions. Acknowledge it. Be aware of when a reaction comes from emotion rather than logic, so you can counter it.

For example, many people, when they find something disgusting, they declare it morally wrong. To the point where researchers can often predict your viewpoints on certain issues by how prone you are to feeling disgust. However, I'm high in disgust-proneness, but I know the difference between something being disgusting and it being wrong. (Probably lessons learnt from being a picky eater with family members who were fine with me refusing foods but did not tolerate any criticism from me if they ate the same foods.)

I think emotions happen for a reason -- that they are a part of ensuring survival and well-being. For me they are more a part of my thought process than something that gets in the way of it.



I have a broad range of emotions.

In sharp contrast to the stereotype of aspies being like Spock, I am a highly emotional person. My emotions are very volatile and intense. It's only gotten worse since I have been put on birth control in order to regulate my menstrual cycle. I can go from being perfectly content to crying in about 5 minutes or less. It's pretty miserable. If I had the choice, I'd rather not feel anything at all. I'd give an arm and a leg to be able to have a rational mind that ran on logic rather than my current emotional, highly irrational one. I want to attempt what SteelMaiden is doing and "delete" my emotions...

Why do people think that being emotionless is a good thing? Why is it such a virtue? It's like logic and rationality are the Autistic 'super foods'. Everybody's hyped up about them without knowing the whole story.

Why would you do anything without emotion? Why would you eat healthy or eat at all for that matter? You'll probably answer that by saying you need to eat to live. If you're emotionless why do you care whether you live or die? You're not afraid of death because you don't feel fear. There is no logical reason why living is better than dying.

Emotions are like water. They assume different forms at different times and differently for different people. Like water, they comprise a large portion of the human engine. They can be unstable, dialectical. That said, repressing them is not advised. Like oceans, you shouldn't turn your back on them.

I realize there are good and bad emotions. My emotions seem to be more on the negative side. As a child, my parents' emotions were very unpleasant.