Weird issue I am embarrassed about. Can anyone relate?

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I feel really bad about this but I can't help it so I am just going to be honest.

Does anyone get sickened and grossed out by some people's physical appearance? I don't mean people who have physical disabilities or skin illnesses or anything like that. I mean just normal people who just have regular kinds of appearances that just make me react in a way that I feel nauseated and I can't look at them.

I was at a function one day and there was a little boy there. He was a wonderful child, very well behaved, very sweet, great little kid. But there was just something about the way he kept his mouth open all the time that just made me physically sick. I could not look at him without getting nauseated. There was nothing wrong or abnormal with him. It's just that he would not close his lips. He had really thick lips too. He was an African American kid. He reminded me of the kid on the old Bill Cosby cartoon, the one with big teeth and the hat that covered his face and who always kept his lips open. Even with his teeth closed this little kid would keep his lips wide open. I know that some little kids do that and just the shape his lips made because of the shape of his teeth, they were straighter and had less of a natural curve in the jaws, it just repulsed me.

I have no idea why that sort of thing makes me sick when I see it. I wonder if it's a kind of sensitivity that could be similar to a sensory sensitivity, There are certain things that when I see them they really sicken me. It's the same reaction I get when people play with their food and swirl it all around on the plate. I can't even begin to deal with that. It's like a huge visual sensory sensitivity. And I do feel bad about how I felt seeing this little boy because I don't ever want to be repulsed or sickened by someone's physical appearance. That just seems really wrong and evil to me. But I really could not help it. I tried to not feel it but it just happened. I could not stop feeling that feeling no matter how hard I tried. The only thing I could do was to not look at him. And I know that I could probably love that child as much as I could love any child if I could just stand to look at him.

Does anyone else have this issue? I feel embarrassed and ashamed to admit that I could feel that way about someone but I do. I wish I did not.

Once I was on the train and a guy was picking large pieces of skin off his face. At the time I thought he might be a leper.

Yes, I can relate to this a lot. I have a thing (sensitivity) about mouths/lips, actually, too.

Unfortunately, yes. I work in the public and I see people all day. There are a couple of women who have strange eyes that I can't help getting weirded out by -- not deformed or bugged-out or diseased, but they have a kind of "dead" look.

Bad teeth COMPLETELY freak me out! And in a rural town with lots of poverty and drug use, bad teeth are everywhere! For someone to smile at me with their toothless gums makes me want to gag.

I am so glad I am not alone in this. I don't want to offend others at all. So it's hard to have that kind of sensitivity because they are not looking like that on purpose and it makes me feel terrible that I would react to them that way. But at least I can take comfort that I am not alone in this struggle. I just hope I never treat someone badly because of this sensitivity.

I don't get grossed out, but some things do put me off, without any reasonable logic.

When I was about 19, I took a girl out to one of those church progressive dinner things. I'd always liked her and her smile was quite lovely. When it came time for desert, I watched her spoon some ice-cream into her mouth and I was immediately repulsed. She didn't do it in any way that could be considered gross or uncultured, but for some reason I had a gut reaction to it. I have had a similar reaction to a few others, something about their features or a facial expression.

There may be something in Leif Ekblad's (the rdos guy) theory, where we react to features that we're genetically predisposed to or against.

just seeing the teeth doesn't bother me, but when the gums are bared like in some peoples smiles it's kinda gross.

I sometimes get grossed out by people just eating certain foods. I even sometimes won't eat food because it would just seem gross to eat on that day.

relate too - also the mouth and teeth thing, I have never been able to eat in public and seeing other people eat makes me nauseous. Its the way the mouth seems to move all by itself - can't explain it but yuk!

I can relate to this too. In my class there was this person who was very autistic and he pretty much always had his mouth hanging open. It didn't help either that his voice was very croaky.

It didn't matter what he said and for whatever irrational reason i absolutely hated everything about him.

I think it's a human thing. I believe that all people feel something (positive/negative) about the appearance of someone/something. If you can recognize that how you feel about someone's appearance is rather negative and feel horrible about that, I think you are actually not horrible. As long as you don't let that negative feeling influence how you treat that person, that's good enough in my opinion. I guess it's kind of being internally judgmental. However, I can understand that being internally judgmental makes you feel like a shallow/horrible human being or something even if you don't show it in your behavior. I've felt that, too.

Many years ago something similar happened to me. I lost my appetite when I saw someone's appearance at McDonald's and had to throw away my burger etc. I still remember that incident because I cannot help feeling ashamed about how I felt about that person's appearance.

I am going to be inappropriate here. But I felt that way about the late Robin Williams. Not just his appearance, pretty much everything about him annoyed me. Never have I felt more seperate from the world then in the last 2 days.

I once had this reaction when I was a child, to an actor that was on TV a lot at the time. in the 1960's he showed up a lot on TV episodes and things; he wasn't super famous but he was one of those working actors that always turn up in bit parts and such. For some reason, I could not stand his face. Looking at him made me queasy though I never knew why.

There was nothing wrong with him -- he was just an ordinary man. But he had these strangely soft, squishy features and he always seemed to play a timid, ingratiating and sly character, who physically cringed a lot. I was a very small child but had a strong reaction to this guy's face.

I haven't thought about that in years until I saw your post!

I also had another weird "face thing" with someone else. This time it was someone in my real life, but it wasn't a sickened, queasy reaction -- it was odder than that. It was that somehow I couldn't focus on her face. It wasn't the typical aspie "face blindness" thing -- it was something different even from that, I think, because I didn't experience it universally, only with her. She was a friend of my mother's who would sometimes stop us to chat in the street in passing, and I would watch her face but couldn't seem to "anchor" onto any of her features. I was actually a very visual child as I had mildly "gifted" levels of artistic ability, so normally I "saw" things well. But this woman's face seemed to blur for me. It was very odd.

Reflecting now, I wonder if it was simply that perhaps she moved her head around a lot while talking? In my adult life I notice that if anyone is very animated and tends to make a lot of head movement while they speak, I find it extraordinarily distracting and annoying because their face "blurs" for me. To look into someone's eyes isn't always comfortable for me, but when their eyes and face are literally moving around constantly is also weird for me too.



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I'm sorry, skibum. I cannot understand this at all. Still glad we both think partially in shapes, though!

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An Asperger's man who has Autism Spectrum Disorder level 1- mild, with a sprinkling of Synesthesia.

Gosh. Dont relate at all.

Will see strangers and think "that guy oughta get the half dollar sized mole removed from his face" or, "that lady would be hot if she had her mustache removed". But thats about it.