Am i the only one, and can i get better at it?

Post Reply New Topic

Im a 16 year old male, and i recently had a blow up episode in my therapist office, where i complained that i dont understand emotions, and i dont, i have AS and Severe Anxiety/Depression. Now i never said that before but i did and it got me thinking i really dont understand emotions, thats probably why i make my mom so angry sometimes when we're talking. Off of your personal experiences, have you had this happen to you and did you ever start to understand emotions, because im up a creek without a paddle in that feild.

I didn't used to understand emotions at all. As near as two years ago I told my therapist that I didn't have them. I was wrong. I do understand emotions better now. My major tool in observing emotions is Vipassana meditation. In a way it's all about correlating feelings with thoughts. I'd recommend doing some reading on the various emotions as well. You can also try and measure other people's emotions. If they are behaving in a way you don't understand, try asking them how they are feeling. Eventually you can build a kind of 'library' that you can refer to.

I was like that and still am. But around last year to early this year I could perceive emotions better, and now exams are coming, my empathy mode is switched off. Actually a significant other is useful to encourage empathy. I myself am writing a book and I make myself muster up the empathy to portray it convincingly.

I've had to learn how to decode my emotions, to become aware of progressively more subtle emotions.

Like another poster, I use meditation, in my case Zen. I also study and talk with others.

It's very helpful, especially in avoiding the big meltdowns/blow ups. I have found that there are usually much more subtle feelings before the big blow that if I pay attention to them and address whatever is bugging me, I can not loose it.

If you are capable of experiencing anxiety and depression, you understand very well what emotions are. I don't see what it is you feel you're missing.

I understand emotions. All of the positive ones and many, though not all of the negative ones.

Of the negative ones I don't understand, I understand the concept of them but I don't really understand the logic behind many of them in practice.

I just don't always pick up on certain tones or non-verbal gestures very well, that might be conveying a certain emotion.

Just the other day I was witnessed to what I thought was just a slightly heated exchange but apparently, according to my mother, it was a "big argument" *shrug*.

I actually read a blog with an excerpt of an example of impaired of central coherence (a prevailing theory in autism), where a husband and wife recanted entirely different perspectives of the same thanksgiving dinner. The wife found it stressful apparently and detailed everything that had to be done to have it, and never wanted to do it again, and the husband thought it was great, detailed everything he ate and all the fun he had, and couldn't wait for next Thanksgiving to come around.

The husband in the example was pegged as having a central coherence issue, but I'm of the opinion that the wife just needed to learn how to enjoy things.

Anyway, I attribute a good portion of my development of social understanding to creative writing.

Also, I always try to ask how I would feel if someone treated me a particular way, or acted a particular way around me.

I doubt you are devoid of emotions. Possibly you just have trouble grasping that others aren't either.

Hi NomadicAssassin,

There's a big difference in feeling emotions and understanding them. In trying to understand emotions, the first step psychologists take is to attempt to validly and objectively label them. In terms of science, the attempt was next to a total failure. One of a large number of attempts involved labeling emotion by using pupil dilation (supposedly SO IMPORTANT in eye-contact theories), and the emotion of "Love" couldn't be distinguished from a migraine headache, and was nearly indistinguishable from the emotion of "fear". One study is at: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/co ... 18/12/2729

The Limbic System in the brain has next to absolute control over the visceral sensations of emotions, and the labels given to the visceral sensations are very vague and generally range from joy to depression to hatred and to fear. Which side of the Limbic System is active (left or right) has more control than the human intellect in the visceral sensations and their activations. The finer labeling of emotions is more of a cultural phenomenon than any firm science (i.e., in some cultures, eye-contact is a sign of disrespect, while in others, it is a sign of respect). In Western cultures, severe anxiety is usually grouped with "fear", but sometimes confounded at the neurological level with the pleasant excitement of "joy" (being left-handed or right-handed can confound the neurological measurement). The label "Depression" also applies to psychological constructs unrelated to the emotion of "Depression", hence, much confusion, and a vast array of labels and a large level frequencies. Being melancholy used to be regarded as a good emotion, so cultural judgments are also involved. The Limbic System, with the temporal lobes, are subject to manipulation by EMFs, and much info/videos are at: http://www.shaktitechnology.com/

The most popular fad of "understanding" emotions is now focused on Daniel Goleman, who wrote the two books, "Emotional Intelligence" (1995) and "Social Intelligence" (2006). From my experiences with Limbic epilepsy and university studies of psychological measurements with multiphasic inventory testing, the books reflect intrinsic cultural discrimination against people with neurological impairments, from epilepsy to across the austism spectrum.

Depending on whether Asperger's Syndrome is taken more as nature or nuture, nuture gives more faith in social conditioning therapies, while nature gives more weight to societal accommodations and at best, patchwork masks, such as training or trying to perform as an actor in a scene matching the social situation, while hoping for the correct matches. Most of the more firm scientific evidence points toward nature instead of nuture, so most of the advice about the individual changing the "inner-self" is probably costly hot air.

Tadzio

Hi DonkeyBuster,

I've read articles by B. Alan Wallace, and one chapter out of his same titled cited book at: http://www.alanwallace.org/hdch4.pdf
Between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, I like Popper's stance that science has the attribute that it has to be subject to available empirical falsification to be a scientific method. Many people regard "falsification" as stopping many sciences, while making witchcraft a science, since it can be falsified. Richard Feynman seems a bit too skeptical at times, but his frequent contempt for many things I would call Catch-22's is entertaining, but does his attitude of "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" result in much really practical advantage in daily living with required social interactions?

There isn't a valid and objective definition of consciousness, and that makes me stick to B. F. Skinner's Behaviourism as much as possible with psychology. I like the "blank slate" model of the developing brain best, but genetics is more popular now, with the works of Steven Pinker leading on one front. He really abuses the notion of "normal." That's why I like pupil dilation/eye-contact measurements, because at times "experts" claim they can identify future autism in newborns (Goleman cites claims that genetic eye-contact problems of autism can somewhat be overridden with very early intense training), but well documented studies with precision measurements cite statistical measurements that list the claimed "defective eye responses" as the statistical "normal" for the general population. Then "eye-contact" became the fad after the publication of the book "Body Language" by Julius Fast in the early 1970's.

In a book of conversations with the Dalai Lama, autism is claimed by Lewis Judd to be a structual defect in the brain, with no possible recovery, and very little slightly effective medical intervention to limit behaviors, all verified by modern imaging techniques. Frequent claims of such evidence is made with modern technology, the latest being with pathological criminals, but most all the evidence disappears with stricter standards of analysis.

Emotions, and labeling emotions, is interesting to me because I have very frequent simple partial seizures with often the only effect being in emotional sensations, and experts with modern equipment can't even verify them, let alone give them a correct qualitative label, nor even verify them as seizures until they spread well into secondary tonic-clonic seizures. Another confusion involved is bouts of Synesthesia during "bland" partial seizures. Other than very vague hints about the sensations of synesthesia, effective communication of an expanded universe makes NTs the ones with severely impaired emotional limitations, using prejudicial labeling.

Another conflict about what's science is at: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text ... n-wallace/
and
http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?o ... 0&Itemid=0

Tadzio

I'm almost 42 years old and when someone asks how I am feeling, I never know how to answer. I think I have gotten it down to two feelings. I am either angry or not angry. Those are the two I experience.