Emotional memory

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Does everyone else have emotional memory? That is, when you remember something very happy or traumatic, you feel a bit like you did then?

I was watching a video explaining EMDR and showing a session. The client had to think of a traumatic memory and was explaining how it made her feel. It made me realise I don't really feel anything when I think of any memory. There are some that I know I must have been sad at the time, but I can't feel anything of the sadness I must have felt at the time. I remember the sequence of events but there is no emotion attached.

I did some reading about emotional memory and this doesn't seem normal. I searched for lack of emotional memory in regards to autism and nothing really came up, just things about memory in general with autism and things about emotion in general with autism. The only conditions that it came up for were schizophrenia and depression! Neither of which I have.

Wondering if it is the same for any of you? Do you have a lack of emotional memory?

I have a very strong emotional memory. When I hear a parent yelling at a child for things they can't control yet, I feel the same way I felt when I was being yelled at for the same thing as a child. I almost took my own life because of it when I was in high school.

The emotional memory can range from merely a hint of how it felt back then to just as intense as if it is happening right now.

And there is another variable where I can remember the details of any given event from the level of fully to barely.

Those 2 variables can be mixed in different proportions.

That sounds like it might be alexithymia.

I don't think my emotional memory is particularly impaired. I've felt for a long time that the things that are hard to remember are usually the things that have little or no emotional component, i.e. if something doesn't arouse my feelings of attraction, repulsion, pleasure, pain, fascination, etc., then I'll probably have more trouble remembering it than I otherwise would. OTOH I do tend to retain quite a bit of apparently indifferent material as well, so emotional charge probably isn't the only factor involved.

As for being able to recall the emotions themselves, I've not noticed any great problem there. I once had a counsellor who reckoned that strong emotions were usually a lot more accurately recalled than material details. He didn't know what ASD was, and neither did I at the time, and some of the things he believed turned out to be rather misleading, but that one never stood out as seeming very far off the mark whenever I've compared it to my own experiences.

Most of my basic memories are sensory-based rather than episodic or visual. They have the emotion of whatever the sensory memory is. For example, lots of my memories are related to the smell of boating on open water when I was young. The smell is calming so my emotional response is calm. I don't remember much of what we did or where we went to affix any type of emotion to that, apart from nostalgia. I only feel the emotions of my sensory-memories.

I have Complex Trauma and PTSD. Those give me very sharp sensory and emotional flashbacks even though I can't name the feelings because of Alexithymia. If I experience more than one emotion at a time in regular life or in one of these trauma-trigger emotional flashbacks, I "flood". That means I get overwhelmed by too much emotional input and I either have a meltdown or I shut down.

Thank you guys. Hmm. Interesting. I hope it is just alexythmia as mentioned by DanielW and not an indication of something else.

I have some traumatic memories that have a lot of feelings/emotion attached. I also have some that have almost no feelings attached to them. Its hard to explain, but I don't think that I can FEEL and THINK at the same time. In some of the emotionless traumatic memories I have, I was too busy thinking about what to do and then doing things to get out of the situation. Basically REACTING rather than FEELING it.

In both cases, I have very detailed, specific memories. Most have either a lot of emotion or a lot of detail, but the emotionless memories have WAY more detail of the physical things (down to very minute, even irrelevant, details (like the date written on the corner of a newspaper, or a drop of water on the floor or a crumb on a table etc.). But I never have both the emotion and the granular level of detail at the same time.