Intense Emotions

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Do you have intense emotions when you experience them or are you more emotionless.

When I experience having powerful emotions, I can usually keep my mask and conduct myself in a happy and normal way while around other people, In a way i camouflage how I really feel.

Nevertheless, I have experienced times when my emotions have been so strong and I've felt so unbalanced that it's hard to keep it hidden (this among close family members) then it can end up ( i guess to protect myself or to avoid showing how I really feel then having to talk about it), so I end up becoming irritable, uptight and unsociable. Those times I've acted this way, I've usually by the end of the day when I've pulled myself together tell them i am sorry about my behavior, that it was uncalled for but that i acted out that way in the end since i didn't feel to well. Don't have to explain what kind of unwell, just that one had been feeling somewhat sick, and ended up being irritable because of it.

It's strange how emotions effect's our actions sometimes. It's like your brain/heart tells you to stay calm/ strong and not act out, but somehow your emotions takes the matters into its own hands, making you say/ do stupid things anyway.

I can be the extreme of both. So for me it can be either way. It get s hard sometimes because I don't know when either will hit.

For me it's almost a binary thing.

Most of the time I'm experiencing only a light amount of emotion.

But when I do have strong feelings they can be like a tsunami To manage them I have to get the surfboard out and do my best to ride the wave rather than drowning

I feel everything too much and don't know how to moderate what affects me. I think that's one major reason as to why I am easily overwhelmed.

I think autism is a condition that limits our emotional palette to extremes. It's like an ON/OFF switch, rather than a subtle gradation from one level to the next.

I am familiar with passionate emotions, like rage and despair, but the subtler forms (aside from whimsy) are mostly alien to me - I don't think I'm capable of very many of the more understated emotions. I'm either feeling it intensely, or not feeling much of anything at all. I'm not even sure that I understand what neurotypicals mean when they talk about 'happiness.' It seems like an imaginary state that can never actually be achieved, or at least maintained, like Nirvana.

I wonder if that's one of the reasons we often have problems maintaining long term relationships - that once the initial intensity wears off, our displays of emotion drop back to their normal level of placidity, so that they seem virtually undetectable to significant others and it's easy to assume that we have stopped caring.

I find this a frustrating handicap as a writer as well. I can put my reader inside a character's POV to experience emotional extremes, which works for scenes of action or intense drama - but when it comes to things like making the reader experience a character's tender emotions while they watch a spouse and partner - I've witnessed that in others, and heard them verbalize it - I know it occurs, but it's an emotional state I can't describe from a personal point of view, because I don't ever stand around musing about other people that way. They're just there, unless and until some dramatic emotional extreme comes up that must be addressed.

I'm usually too preoccupied with my anxiety over everything else in my life to think about things like that.

I feel emotions strongly than most people and I can't hold them in. I cry a lot too.

I am starting to realize that I have very little emotional awareness. My thought patterns tell me how I am feeling unless I am depressed (not sad, but depressed), or enraged. When I get anxious, worrying and compulsive activity keep me from feeling anything until I calm down. I also give little thought to how my actions will make me feel or how they will make other people feel. Is only after I make a decision and feel the resulting emotional pain, that I realize I should have thought things through a little more.

negative emotions are unbearably intense, while positive emotions are usually so weak I can barely feel them, with some exceptions.

How can we know if we experience emotion differently from others? All we have are outward displays to go on, and they can be both controlled (supressed) and put on. We don't really know what someone else, let alone the entire NT part of the human race, feels.

Sure you can. You can know by observing what goes on around you, with other human beings (the same way you can tell you're not socializing normally).

You can know by reading, where you will find a whole array of emotions described in detail, so that you can fully comprehend what they are supposed to feel like - and yet realize that you have never had that experience in your entire life.

You can see in movies that characters have experiences that have never moved you to think, feel or behave in that way.

You can know because people close to you - especially those you become involved in romantic relationships with - will TELL you flat out that you are not responding or behaving in a manner considered normal for someone in your situation. After that happens multiple times with different partners, you have to assume they're probably right and it's YOU who are missing something.

A lot of my emotions are really intense. When I'm happy, I wanna jump and laugh and sing and hug people. When I'm angry, I want to just punch the nearest thing over and over and over and scream at it. When I feel guilty about something, I will hate myself until the issue is resolved. When I'm sad, I wont feel up to doing anything until it passes because I'm too busy wallowing in despair. And when I find something funny, I find it freaking hilarious.

All my emotions are really intense. I'm trying to learn to cope with them and not suppress them.

I can relate to that, but I can control it, and I have plenty of nuanced emotions as well. It's not all on/off at all.

Me too. I cry all the time.

Same here. The lows are incredibly low and last long, the highs aren't all that high and are pretty ephemeral.