feeling a connection

Post Reply New Topic

I'm a 41 year old female who was diagnosed with aspergers at age 35. I have a really difficult time feeling connected to other people. Growing up, I never felt an emotional connection to members of my family. I'm married and I have a child, but I don't really feel connected to them either.
There have been (very few) times throughout my life when I think I might feel a genuine connection. Less than 10 people, for sure. That usually involves really deep conversation. The problem is - it fades for me so quickly (like a day or two). So if I feel an emotional connection to my therapist, after one week it's completely gone. He feels like he's not even real to me anymore, like hypothetical. And I can't remember what it feels like to feel connected.
Since it fades so quickly for me, it feels not it's not even a real connection at all. I can feel it fading and I panic every time. I have to keep the feeling of connection from fading on my own, without contacting the other person. If I contact people too much (therapist or other people), they inevitably get overwhelmed by me and I lose the relationship altogether. That's extremely painful - every single time...
Does this happen to anyone else? Why is this happening and is there anything I can do to make it better?
Thanks for any suggestions.

I would suggest that you try to find more people you can have deep conversations with. Perhaps, the more such people you can find, the less hunger you will, hopefully, have for the attention of any one of them, and hence you will be less likely to overwhelm them? Hopefully you might be able to find some good friends here on Wrong Planet.

What kinds of topics do you like to have deep conversations about?

I'll have more to say later about the separate question of feeling a connection.

Thanks for writing.
Another problem that I have is that I can't seem to have too many people in my life at one time. I feel like I can't juggle several relationships at the same time. I think that's also why I overwhelm people. I'm pretty sure most people are able to successfully maintain multiple relationships.
I'm not even sure that I feel like I need attention. I prefer to be alone more often than not. I just want to keep the connection alive for more than a day.
Maybe I'm not explaining myself well. I'm very sensitive & it's very painful for me.

I just hate the surface-y stuff that people usually talk about (weather, sports, etc)

Is this mainly because of the effort involved in going out to meet them in person (and getting ready to go out) and/or the effort involved in having them come over to your place for dinner, on top of all your responsibilities to your family? Or is your aversion to multiple friendships mainly for some other reason?

Would it be less hassle to have several friends with whom you could have in-depth conversations via some combination of phone calls, text messages, and/or participation in one or more online forums on some topic of common interest (e.g. Wrong Planet), and whom you met in person only maybe once a year if at all?


So do I -- except for weather, which I have to resist the temptation to discuss in too much detail (I'm a bit of a weather geek).

I think I have trouble maintaining multiple relationships because I can't handle the effort of it all. I HATE talking on the phone. It's hard for me to follow through with plans because I also have major depressive disorder and I feel unreliable about making/keeping plans.
I don't mind having one emotional connection relationship at a time. With multiple people, I'd probably just have multiple fading connections.
Maybe it just doesn't even matter. Maybe I'm just not able to keep a connection alive in my head. I've never been able to.

I feel the same way. I find it hard to feel connections as well and have trouble keeping multiple connections at once. Depression can do that to you and also have you ever heard of Alexithymia?

Here's a video about Alexithymia
https://youtu.be/Fl-aKRdzLyQ

Sadly I have no suggestions on how to remedy the problem. I haven't been able to figure out how to recognize my emotions.

Hi
I definitely think I have some degree of alexithymia. I wish I had known about it when I was young instead of believing there was something seriously wrong with me that I didn't know how I felt. Actually if I'm wishing for things, I'd wish that it wasn't an issue for me at all...
I think there is nothing I would wish for more in life than to have a genuine, SUSTAINED feeling of connection with another person. Since it seems to fade for me so quickly, I wonder if it's a real connection at all.

uhmmmm..... " dammit " .yes, yes that is emoting . disatisfaction at realization . practice practice practice......masking does give appearances of
being kinda fitting in , and that advise in the video . Was good. the word mimicry comes to mind . if no other than just survival ..but that videos advise goes beyond that i think.

I don't feel connected either, if something isn't interactive it's like it never happened. In the now with little sense of time passing.
- Met my husband in my early 20s - married in a month, in love - he/it felt so "right". When we separated it was almost like he never existed after a few weeks. I still have fond memories of how I felt, it was a good time (family mistakes this for still having feelings for him - they're so wrong).
- I just finished a 6-week training program (new career because my resume lately is crap) and this guy and I have been hanging out, going to the gym 2-3 times a week together. Classes ended last Friday and until my daughter-in-law asked how is "Chad our new dad?" the other day, I totally forgot about him. (the Chad thing is an ongoing joke at my expense for several years now).
- All evidence shows I love my kids and grandson but out of sight out of mind. When we aren't together I need reminders.

Yes! Exactly what I mean!



Again, yes!

This bothers me a lot because I can feel the connection slipping away so quickly and I panic every single time.
Right now, I'm specifically thinking about my current therapist and my previous therapist. Those are probably the closest I've ever felt to other human beings. It's difficult to feel that connection once each week and then it fades after a day or two. It happens every time I feel connected, which isn't even really every single time I see him. I have a hard time describing it to him. I feel like it doesn't make sense...

I don't entirely relate to the above posts. I have only mild alexithymia. I'm far from totally unable to identify my own feelings, but I have difficulty doing so in real time. If asked what I am feeling at any given moment, I usually have to pause and think to be able to put it into words, and I often find it easier just to make a nonverbal noise instead of naming the feeling.

Be that as it may, I doubt that anyone, even NT's, feels their connections with other people all the time.

In my formative years, I encountered strong advice against expecting to feel romantic love all the time, because emotions inevitably fluctuate. I think that was good advice. All the more so would it be true of platonic connections with friends, family, therapist, etc.

Personally I suspect that many people -- including many NT's these days -- put too much importance on their own moment-to-moment emotions about other other people. And, it seems to me, doing so de-stabilizes both their romantic relationships and their friendships.

Anyhow, if even NT's should not expect to feel their connections with other people all the time (according to the advice I received when I was young), all the more so should an alexithymic person not expect this either -- or a person who is bad at multi-tasking, as many of us are. (If I were to feel my connections with other people all the time, it would be impossible for me to get any work done!)

As I see it, while my feelings about other people are an important part of my relationships (romantic relationship or platonic friendship) with other people, the relationships consist of much more than just my feelings, and continue to exist despite any moment-to-moment fluctuations in my emotional state, and despite any "out of sight, out of mind" tendencies I or the other person might have. I have never expected to feel a deep connection with someone all the time. As long as I continue to get along with the other person, and as long as we experience at least occasional feelings of deep connection and are also bound together by larger common interests, common values, and common goals, the relationship should be considered fine, in my opinion.

So it seems to me that, instead of trying to feel your connections with other people all the time (and then worrying when the feeling inevitably fades), perhaps you might find it useful to focus on cultivating what I call the foundations of friendship? (See my recent blog post about the ingredients of friendship.)

(Or are you and others here talking about something else that I'm totally not getting?)

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 06 Mar 2020, 8:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

How well do you feel connected to Yourself?

I had real trouble connecting to people when I was all dissociation and performance, notoriously disconnected from myself.

That's an important point. I can easily imagine that someone who does heavy-duty masking all the time would have extreme difficulty making genuine connections with anyone. Personally I've managed to avoid heavy-duty masking, but I do attribute my successes at making friends (with fellow oddballs, of one kind or another) to my lack of masking. This is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about the idea of creating spaces where autistic people don't need to pretend to be NT.

I think I do spend a lot of time masking & trying to fit in. I assumed that's why I don't easily make connections with most people - how could it be genuine if I'm pretending to be something I'm not... I also have problems with dissociation and childhood neglect/abuse.
It's hard to know sometimes if your experiences are different or if you're looking at things incorrectly (or a combination of both).
I also wonder if I've spent so much time masking (my whole life really), that I'm not confident I know what it looks like if I'm not masking. It's automatic most of the time.
I don't think I feel connected to myself very much at all. I'm not even sure I know what that would look like or feel like. Can I not usually recognize how I feel because I'm not connected to myself or is it alexithymia...
I think I'm confused about a lot of this stuff... Feelings and connection are not my forte

If I were in your situation, I would panic too because you are dealing with rejection and that's never fun. Regarding your therapist, have you tried shopping around until you find someone you really connect with? I don't care for hypothetical therapists because they use a more scientific approach to things that are more solution-based. It is a very cold therapy.

In terms of connecting, find out what you are interested in and just start connecting. Also, find a support group for others who are also on the spectrum.

When I said that my therapist feels 'hypothetical' to me, I just meant that (after a week) he doesn't feel like a real person. I adore my therapist and I just wish the feeling of closeness wouldn't fade in between appts.