Just heard that my aunt died.....

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..... and I feel nothing about it. As soon as I got off the phone with my dad, I went right back to watching TV and laughed at a really funny part.

Now that I think about it, I feel bad that I didn't feel bad about my aunt dying! I felt the same way when I heard that my uncle had a stroke. When my mom said that he had a stroke and it was taking him half an hour to say one word, my first thought was "Why doesn't he just write or type????"

I feel really bad that I'm not upset about her dying. It makes me wonder if I can care at all about people that are not in my everyday life. I'm pretty sure if anyone in my immediate family or my close friends died, I would definitely feel bad....

Anyone experience this?

All the time.

I always get a "delayed" reaction to any bad thing which happens to someone else.

I even get this reaction to any bad thing which happens to me.

It's a case of "it hasn't sunk in yet."

I'm sorry for you aunt's passing away.

It must be very delayed with me..... Several years ago, I went through both my grandmas dying and someone I knew committing suicide. I don't miss them. I never "grieved" for them. I never felt a loss. Them dying doesn't impact my life.

I feel horrible for being so apathetic!

I bet you feel these events so intensely that it renders you cold.

Have you discuss this in any therapy session?

I am similar with human deaths but become completely heart broken at the loss of a pet.
I had severe crushing chest pain for weeks after my last cat had to be put to sleep, I cried too which I don't normally do.

I don't think your reaction to your aunt's passing is unusual.

I'm not in therapy, yet. I'm currently working on getting an appt for my ASD assessment.

If I'm feeling this so intensely that I just emotionally shut down, I'm not realizing it at all.

No one in my family tells me when someone dies, but they did tell me when my parents died and I took it harder than I expected to although I kept it to myself and didn't talk about it or cry.
When I found out about relatives dying years after their death I felt shocked.
I just can't imagine someone who was alive not being there any more.
Sometimes when I think about my parents it seems like they're still alive. If my brothers died I think I would cry, even though I haven't seen them in many years.
It's funny but I can feel close to people even if I haven't seen them or contacted them in a long time, I just don't need to be in contact with them to feel they are a part of my life.

It happens to me too. It took me a long time to really feel the loss of my relatives and when I did it hit me like an avalanche. I will also continue to have these feelings hit me in very raw and fresh ways at the most unexpected moments for decades to come. It can take me decades to process an emotional event. I always feel these types of things way after the fact because it always takes me so long to process the emotions because they are so intense and so deeply rooted.

But I think that even if you feel nothing at the announcement of the loss it does not mean that you did not love the person or that you did not care about her. We express love and feel love in so many different ways and perhaps you just feel it and express it differently. But if you loved your relatives than you loved them no matter what you feel or don't feel at that moment. So you don't have to question that part and don't ever let anyone tell you that you don't love them because you did not respond in a way that is typical for other people.

That's pretty much how I am. It took my dog dying to personally understand grief.

Is it possibly an autistic thing to not feel as upset as NT's would?

For some reason, I think I may feel a bit better if I knew that that was the reason.

I think it is. I really do. And I think a lot of it has to do with the timing of how our feelings show themselves. I also think that with me I don't always know what I feel or why. Like even now I have been crying almost uncontrollably and I have been for a couple of days even screaming like a little child and I don't know why or what it is that I feel. I want to be around one of my favorite horses and cuddle next to him and that is all I can figure. And I am super hyper emotionally sensitive right now. It's probably that a lot of emotional stuff that has happened this year, we have had four deaths of loved ones in the past seven months, is just starting to really process now. And that processing can years to run its course. Unfortunately I can't see the horse because he lives too far away for me to drive to see him. But sometimes when something tragic happens I feel absolutely nothing. Then months or years later I start to feel and I don't always know what event I am feeling the feelings from.

It is also possible that you process grief in a way that others don't. Maybe your way of processing grief is through humor or maybe you process it by simply understanding that the person is just no longer in your sphere of being. But whatever you do when you grieve is fine. And it is not an indicator of how much or how little you loved the person. It's just how you process and express that emotion.

I know the feeling. I have often been told I'm cold-hearted and insensitive because I don't get upset about relatives dying. Which doesn't really help because I am bothered that I can't get upset like I know I'm supposed to, but I don't, so I don't need people rubbing it in my face and making me feel like I'm a bad person.

The most specific example I have is when my grandfather died when I was 12. I was very close to him, we were very similar personalities, he lived with us and I did a lot of things with him all the time and I still think of him a lot even now nearly 20 years later and I really wish he were still alive. But when my mom told me he had passed at the time and she was sobbing I couldn't feel anything at all. I just couldn't be upset and I didn't cry about it if not once, weeks later, for a few minutes when I was in bed on my own and nobody ever saw. It took weeks for me to process things in order to get a little upset. If I couldn't get upset about him, let alone with other relatives who were nowhere near as close to me as he was. I wasn't upset at all when my grandmother died or when my uncle died recently. And it's the same when I get news about someone close potentially having some worrying disease, which has happened frequently in recent times. My knee-jerk reaction is not to get upset at all, it's to find out all that I can about that disease and try to "fix it". I get more upset about things that are way more minor (for example the one thing that distresses me the most is if my mother is upset, and also fights really really upset me) or downright stupid (I was devastated over my favorite TV show ending).

It's very weird, it's like I have this weird disconnection from death and illness and to this day when I get told people died it never quite registers in my head. Maybe it would be different if one of my parents passed away, but I hope I won't find out for a long long long time about that one.

I suspect some NT copy unintentionally other people's grief reactions, or they fake it to fit in. I've seen people start crying over someone they HAD NEVER MET(and not a idol either) and it seemed odd.

The first death to hit me like a ton of bricks was my dad's, I did cry not only due to the death but due to how he was treated.

As the others have posted I do have delayed negative emotions and have gotten negative feedback for it. I also have delayed positive emotional reactions.

What happens to me a lot is that when a traumatic event occurs and people are ready to "move on" or have "moved on" from it, I am just starting to get emotionally into it.

Also my emotions are duller then most. This has changed a lot since my diagnosis but I am still far from "normal" in this regard.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 03 Jul 2014, 4:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

Same for me. I didn't cry at all when my grandpa died (I actually realized it a few weeks later when I visited my grandma and found that grandpa bed disappeared. Then I got sad he is not there anymore. Delayed reaction.) but I was totally shaked when my favorite cat was put to sleep. I couldn't deal with it for a few weeks and I would just sit in a corner and cry. It was almost 2 years ago and I still feel sad when I think about it.

My parents were surprised when they seen my reaction then - and they congratulated me .
After they seen my reactions to all the previous death informations (family members deaths, other pets deaths, accidents) they were thinking I don't have feelings at all so it was a relieve for them even though they were also sad for the cat dieing.

YEah. I just don't care.

Sorry.

Friends... don't care. Coworker... nope. Grandpa... nope. Grandma.... nope. Uncle... not really. Aunt... just some guilt, no grief there. PEts? Depends on the pet. When I do grieve a pet it's an appropriate amount. The only death that has ever kicked my butt was my mom. That hit me really hard and it took me years to get over it.

Once I noticed my some what "1" "0" response to deaths I started looking at my whole extended family to try to determine who I'll need to fake tears for. In retrospect, I should have faked them for my aunt. Even my husband was like "S%$# bi%$# heart of ice!"... because he asked and I was brutally honest that I didn't really care and was annoyed that I had to travel so far for the funeral. She knew too... hence the guilt.. she called me the day before she passed away. She could tell. So she proceeded to just lay out what she wanted, very business like. I felt guilty given the fact that I'm her closest family and when she told me what was going on I just said "oh... sorry?" . But it was too late, I'd tipped my hand and she'd seen it, too late to bluff.

Unlike the other posters... I'm not claiming delayed feelings. Or misidentified feelings. I'm going to call a spade a spade here and say in these cases I just don't have them. It's ok. I'm ok with who I am.