Your Beliefs about Emotions in Adults when You were a Child

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Aspie1
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07 Jan 2012, 3:36 pm

I was wondering if anyone else here believed what I believed. When I was a child, I used to believe that adults only experienced two emotions: happiness and anger. (By the way, back then "adults" referred to anyone 16 and older.) I, on the other hand, being a kid with AS, felt sadness, frustration, and misery at least a few times a week. In fact, the word "miserable", with the letter R pronounced wrong, was one of my first multi-syllable words. So I reconciled it as follows. Adults, parents and teachers especially, led lives of never-ending happiness: they can eat whatever they want, go to sleep whenever they want, and have fun however and whenever they want.

As a result, as kids grow into adults, they lose the ability to feel sad, after never experiencing sadness for so many years by the time they have kids of their own. Should bouts of sadness resurface, they can easily be nipped in the bud with cigarettes and alcohol, which only adults are allowed to have, even though they almost never have to feel sad. (No one in my family drinks excessively, and there were no smokers in my family before me for over 100 years; but I already knew the "real purpose" of tobacco and alcohol, from TV and personal observations.)

How did I come to that conclusion? Here's how. For most of my early and mid childhood, the only emotions I saw my parents and teachers express is happiness and anger. My parents yelled at me and punished me for any and every reason they could "come up with". They also acted happy when I brought home good grades in school. My teacher expressed happiness and anger for similar reasons. At the same time, happiness and anger were the only emotions I saw adults outwardly express until I hit my pre-teens.

So imagine my astonishment when I first saw my parents cry; I was 9 or so at the time. The direct cause was something I did, but had a lot do with the bigger picture of the financial problems my family was experiencing at the time. My reaction? I laughed! Seeing adults feeling sad looked bizarre and comical. After all, why would people with the power to punish me and make me cry, be crying themselves? Of course, I got spanked for it, and it wasn't completely undeserved, either. But the laughter in and of itself was caused by the major inconsistency between what I firmly believed and what I just saw.



CockneyRebel
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07 Jan 2012, 3:43 pm

I grew up thinking that normal adults don't cry.


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League_Girl
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07 Jan 2012, 3:49 pm

I didn't know men cried and only women did. I didn't know adults can get scared. But I don't really remember. My parents never hid their emotions. My dad yelled, he cursed and mom yelled and spanked and cried. I only thought selected adults cried or had selected emotions. I just assumed everyone was like robots or something and then I would always think "Oh, she cries too" and I even thought that of kids too.



Moog
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07 Jan 2012, 3:55 pm

Perhaps it's more that adults were taught by their parents not to show sadness, and that gets passed down. Social conditioning. A lot of the adults in my life seem to have Victorian values.

It's easier to be angry and lash out than to bare your soul and face having it rejected or trampled.

I think now that perhaps the worst thing you can do for someone is tell them 'don't cry', it's essentially saying 'I don't want to feel uncomfortable about your display of emotion'

It takes guts to be sad with someone.

There certainly was a surplus of anger in my household, sometimes expressed directly, but more often operating on a barely suppressed, just under the surface manner. The lesson I learned was that I should sit on all my troubles until they just have to explode. Glad I shook that habit.


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Mdyar
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07 Jan 2012, 8:15 pm

I don't believe I had beliefs about peoples' selves.

Whatever came out that's what came out. I didn't develop any notions or expectations.

Looking at it default wise, I didn't have the interest to decide or make a choice to do so. Probably inattentive introversion playing here. Or to term it colloquially : "mental laziness."



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07 Jan 2012, 8:25 pm

I don't think I was aware of emotions at all as a kid. Even as an adult, I often doubt I am able to feel as many emotions as normal people supposedly do. I remember as a kid, "happiness" was so rare and brief I remember envying kids with terminal illnesses and wishing to die. As I got older and people finnaly got out of my face and let me do my own thing and I didn't have to go to school and be abused on the daily basis, I started to finnaly feel comfortable in my own skin. I never really felt true happiness until I was 21 and everyone finnaly got off my back and stopped trying to change me.


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animalcrackers
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07 Jan 2012, 8:54 pm

I grew up not thinking about emotions.

I experienced them--and as long as I was looking at or listening to someone who was extremely upset (where their emotions would be obvious based on screaming/sobbing or specific physical movements) I recognized emotion for what it was in other people....but I never actually thought about emotions as a kid.


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Aspie1
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07 Jan 2012, 10:13 pm

I spent my childhood thinking that adults didn't really have emotions, only kids did. I believed that any emotions in adults, other than happiness and anger, were meticulously choreographed combinations of facial expressions and body language. In other words, that those emotions were simply acted out, rather than felt.

One time, when I brought home a nasty note from a teacher, and my parents were sad all evening, with my mother weeping, and my father walking around looking listless, I "knew" that they were just acting, even though telling them to stop being sad didn't help. Needless to say, it put me in a bad position: having my parents act sad around me and not being able to stop it. Of course, I tried to comfort them by telling them I'll do better, but they didn't feel happier. I wrote that off as an attempt to punish me by making me feel bad with their actions, but since I already lost my TV privileges for two weeks, I viewed it as punishment enough and wasn't too phased by the "sad acting".

So why do kids experience sadness, frustration, and misery, and not adults? As I said earlier, adults have so many choices and so much power in their lives (from my view at the time), that they lose the ability to feel sad over the years, because they never have to feel sad once they grow out of childhood and adolescence. Now, none of that held true for happiness and anger. Those emotions, in my eyes, were 100% real when I saw adults expressing them.