Bridging the Emotion Gap: The Myth of the Unemotional Autist

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Friends,

I am new to this forum, but I am not new to autism. In addition to being a member of our neurodiverse community, I am also a special education teacher who focuses on support and advocating for all needs, but especially those like us on the spectrum. I am working on creating a presentation I can share with parents and teachers to help them understand how important it is for them to help the autists in their lives learn how to express their emotions in a healthy way AND how important it is for them to understand that just because we are expressing ourselves in a way that is not typical does not mean that we are lacking the full range of emotions that NTs have.

But I am just one person, and I think it would be more meaningful if you all offered your insights. Thank you in advance.

Sounds great to me.
I actually think that autistic people have really intense emotions inside them. At least I do. I just can't express them in what seems to be the right way, I guess.

Exactly. Hence the title of my presentation, bridging the emotion gap. Not because there is a gap in our emotions, but rather than there is a gap in the knowledge of NTs in understanding that we have emotions.

The other gap that I'm trying to address is the gap of autists understanding our emotions. I think that a big part of the struggles that come from those intense emotions is not know how to understand them. I equate this to drinking wine. The first few times I tried wine it just tasted like rotten grapes (which it is), but it was only recently when I took a wine tasting class that gave me a vocabulary and set of procedures on what to do when tasting wine that I actually started getting the idea of why people like wine. Since then I have had opportunities to try different wines and instead of just wishing I hadn't tried them like every other time I was able to use the procedures and vocabulary I learned to sense something that I had previously not been able to detect and appreciate.