Autism related emotions

Post Reply New Topic

What are some situations where a lot of autistic people would have a different emotional reaction than NTs? I'm thinking overload, change in routine, what else?

Somebody passing away. I tend to have a "colder" reaction to this than most NTs.

I think the experience of being overloaded is the same for autistic people as it is for NTs. I think that we just get overloaded by different things than NTs do, there are probably a greater number of things that we will run into on a daily basis that stress us in a big way (versus a little way or not being stressful at all), and for some of us we get overloaded faster (i.e. our stress tolerance/ability to manage our emotions is lower so it takes less equivalent "units" of stress to get us to the point of overload than it would for the average NT, and fewer equivalent "units" of emotion to get us to the point where we cannot cope).

For specific situations, change in environment is one that affects me differently/more than your average NT.

I would not know. I think what I react to is the same as NT'S the difference may be in how I react. For instance, I have changed jobs three times this year and I have been very overwhelmed by this. The first job I worked at for 15 yrs and was laid off in January. The second job I was fired from because I could not adjust to the change. The 3rd one I left because I reacted incorrectly to a customer taking a yogurt before breakfast at the motel. I called the cops and asked to go home. At my recent job as a Digital Pro I find it hard to get along with certain people because they are rude. Such as coming into my workspace and going through my printed work. I don't like that. I also don't like people banging on the bathroom door when I'm in there. So rude, it is obvious that someone is in the bathroom and knocking to see is just rude. When these things happen I can't focus on my job for the remainder of my shift. It is now my days off and I can't go anywhere and have shutdown and I'm in my room away from the world! Just me and my dog is all I can handle. Completly meltdown....

Gosh there are so many for me… I will list what I can remember off hand;
Death; I don’t cry or seem sad to others/on the outside. Of course I miss the person who dies, and I feel it is unfair and often that there was not enough time to say goodbye; but none of this manifests itself outwardly. I (on the outside) appear to others as cold and calloused or even void of reaction.
Stressful situations at the workplace or at home (eg loss of customers/contracts, or news of pending eviction); I don’t get angry, or hysterical with fret. I appear to others as calm and collected, when really in my head I am frantic, as I work through all possible options to rectify the situation. Some people find this horribly irritating and assume I am uncaring of the situation or daft, others think me admirable, and that I am somehow brilliantly calm under pressure.
End of relationships/getting dumped; This reaction pisses people off the most, as again, I don’t get angry, or hysterical I appear to others as calm and collected, when really in my head I am frantic, and heartbroken. I silently work through the process in my head, calming myself with the process of mentally preparing my possessions and assets.
When I get angry, I cry. Big, sobbing, wrenching alligator tears. Uncontrollably, they flood out of me. All my words get stuck, and I shut down.
When I get crowded I shut down, I yell and try to run away.

What is it with the death thing? I also have a different reaction to death than most people. Its like, the drama is over. I miss the person who passed. Don't get me wrong. Its important to me. But I find that I just don't have it in me to cry at funerals or the like. And when people to whom I'm not close die, I'm down right calm about the whole thing. I was really worried about myself when my grandfather died because I was very aware that I was supposed to be more upset than I was.

I wonder how many of us share this, and if there is some under-laying cause.

I would guess that most of my emotions are just like a much younger person. My mom and her friends backed me into a corner the other day, and I yelled that I had had enough, and stormed out of the house. So, basically, I acted like your typical 13 year old. But I'm 41. And normally, I'm more on the emotionally mature end of things, but as I said, they had me cornered and stared talking politics, which elicited a sense of hopelessness that I couldn't deal with.

I suppose one area in which I'm different, not just immature, is in my reaction to noises. Especially when I am tired, a minor noise irritant can bring up a tantrum in me. My next door neighbor running her fan 24/7, for example, will eventually lead me to tears. I can feel my whole body relax when she finally turns it off.

As far as I can tell, we have the same basic emotional responses as anybody else, but we're more resilient to some stimuli and more vulnerable to others, e.g. the overload thing that has already been mentioned, and I think sometimes there's a time delay, and we can also express them in different ways.

With the death thing, I was told of my father's sudden death via telephone at work. My first reaction was "why are they telling me this?" I wasn't aware of any feelings at all for a few minutes, and I wondered whether I might be a very heartless person, but then as I went back to my job I suddenly felt as if the world had lost all its colour and I felt extremely negative. I couldn't feel any connection between the knowledge of his death and those feelings, but it was pretty obvious to me that it must have been a reaction to the news. I was kind of relieved to realise that.

I've noticed over the past few years that singing certain lines of songs can very easily move me to tears, particularly in the presence of my partner. The lines are often sad, but for most of my life I could sing almost any lyrics without crying, and some of the words that invoke this response these days aren't the kind of thing I have any experience of. So I'm rather mystified as to what it's all about. One guess is that it's to do with repressed sorrow that wells up in me when certain words act as a trigger. I'm not at all convinced that it has anything to do with autism.

For me the death thing works in 2 ways. When I lose someone I love (close family member or pets), I am devastated. I cry a lot for a long time, and the grief apparently lasts a lot longer than it does for most people. I think I am more attached to the ones I truly am attached to, they are my world. I can easily be temporarily stricken with fresh grief over someone who died many years ago, because they suddenly cross my mind, or I dreamt of them and forgot they were gone just as I woke up, or I see something that reminds me of them.

On the other hand, when anyone else dies, I have a very hard time feeling anything at all, unless it's something major like a terror attack, then I feel very sorry for those directly involved and furious at the responsible party behind it, the same with accidents where someone truly is to blame, like inebriated driving or speeding.
I have had people die who I knew for years, but it didn't honestly affect me, because I didn't love them. At most we're talking very temporary melancholy.

I'm the same with death of loved ones as Skilpadde; if I attach at all to someone, human or animal, then the loss is devastating to me and it hits me hard and deep. I now can also feel terrible for someone else's loss. But oddly, all this wasn't there when I was a child, at least not for humans, though I was genuinely distraught when my first kitten died when I was 5. But, for humans, I felt more of the "cold/disconnected" reaction as a child. It wasn't that I didn't care or truly felt cold, it was just that I somehow couldn't feel any connection to any of it or why someone was upset.

With pets dying though, the full stuff was always there. Then, it started to grow for humans too when my first super-close, super-attached death happened, when my mother died. I was genuinely torn into pieces emotionally and it was from this point that I started feeling more and more genuine connection to the sadness and loss in further human losses of both my own and other people's.

So, it's been something that had to grow, for me.

Agh, edited twice for content then typos!

^^
I don't usually feel much when I hear of the death of somebody I didn't know. But I don't think that's particularly abnormal. Even when I do feel something, it's usually down to some kind of projection, e.g. when my son was young, if I heard about a child of his age being bullied, I'd feel hurt and angry. And if I personally witness somebody getting hurt, that distresses me. If it's somebody I love, it upsets me a lot more though.

For years I have been insulted, yelled at, bullied, and scolded for being *too* emotional. Usually these "outbursts" were due to all the stress, pressure, and frustration of having to constantly be around people who were bullies, jerks, or just had severe mental health problems that made being around them difficult. Or being forced into to act more social, being told when to get up, do chores, eat, take a shower and go to bed like a child when I was an adult, and being put in a home for severely mentally challenged people where everyone wanted to touch and grope me.

I knew back then that I shouldn't be rude or nasty or overemotional to the people with OCD or schizophrenia that I had to live with because they couldn't help it, but deep down I didn't care. I hated having to live with such people and so wanted to act as hatefully as I could get away with.

Of course people don't want you to show negative feelings or emotions ever. Especially if you're female. They want you to be happy happy happy, even when something has happened to you the would turn Pollyanna into Eeyore. They want you to be so cheerful and optimistic it would give sugar diabetes. Well, forget it!