Understanding What You're Feeling-Anyone Else not able to?

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As the subject says,
Does anyone else here not know what they are feeling about something, "anger" "frustration", "annoyance", "joyful", "excited", "Anxious", Etc?

Thanks!
~Eilidh

Yes, I often feel I am not connected to my emotions. My husband has to tell me how I am. But yeah I an still feel anger, sad, happy, depression, stress, being nervous, but I don't always know how I am feeling.

To be honest yeah. I always have some sort of trouble identifing what I am feeling. I know I usually have to go back over the situation or event and then I'll be able to get a better grasp on what I'm feeling. But most the time frustration, anger, and anxious just end in the same melthing pot if that makes sense, and just lends to a meltdown faster if I don't go back and think about it.

Hang on, how can you 'feel' that you're not connected to your emotions? Just asking, please don't get hurt or anything! Maybe you too easily accept what others tell you about such things? Just an idea & I'm not claiming to be any sort of expert in the area. It doesn't seem to me that, in terms of identifying & dealing with my feelings that I do any worse than anybody else. Of course, I don't really know what they're feeling, so I don't know but there's no positive evidence that suggests I'm any less mature than most NTs of my age.
Then again, it isn't clear what is 'mature'; a lot of NT behaviour seems immature to me but it's probably the same in reverse. Anyway, hope that helps!

Mine's a bit awkward. To me, laughter and smiling just means something was funny, but the more negative emotions tend to result in physical pain because, i guess, i dont know how to express them. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people take their anger/frustration out on others (hate it to this day, and i feel terrible when it tries to hit me). To me, happiness is determined by what level of misery you are content with . . . guess ive never been optimistic, and have had little reason to be. Yes, i know my situation isnt as bad as it could be, but there is still no reason it should be this bad. I guess i am connected to my emotions, but all i really just seem to physically register are the negative ones.

I have little difficulty knowing what I am feeling. Sometimes what I am feeling makes no sense in context. I have discovered that, for me, this often means that I am not feeling my own feelings, but some one else's feelings. When this occurs, it helps me to not be bothered by this, when I discover whose they are.

Yeah. I'm feeling something, but exactly what emotion it is is harder to figure out.

I often don't know what I'm feeling and usually other people point out that I am angry or looking anxious before I even realise myself.

Me too. Putting a name to my emotions is always difficult.

I never know what I'm actually feeling... when I'm feeling things strongly, it gets very confusing because I don't deal with things very logically at the time. Then later, I am stuck analyzing why it happened, replaying what I did and trying to make sense of it, as well as trying to pin down exactly what I'm feeling.

I was watching Harry Potter with my kiddos the other day, and Hermione said something that sent me into gales of laughter... she was talking to Ron and said "Just because you have an emotional range of a teaspoon..." or something similar. I was laughing not because of what she meant, but because I thought "wow, that should be my quote!".

I can only identify maybe 4-5 emotions... I know there are more, but cannot get an accurate idea of what is what. Frustration, anger, irritated, agitated, mad; happy, excited, joy, surprised... too many of them have different names, but I do not know where the lines are when one thing crosses into another, or if they are all just simply different words you can use to describe how you are feeling about things. For example... if I'm happy about something, is there an imaginary line that can "officially" make someone "excited"? Or are they just happy still and that's the word they choose to describe it? If I'm irritated about something, how can I tell if I'm officially mad about it? Grrr... so confusing.

Doubtless, there are ways of drawing such lines, if you really want to. Depends what the purpose it - it might help, a bit, if you have some idea where others draw such arbitrary lines but I don't know, so I can't tell you. On the whole, it won't help if you're getting too wound up about it & maybe others can help with it better?

haha! I've tried... and it's odd, because others cannot define it either! Not NTs that I know at least. My boyfriend, however, will notice I'm agitated and specifically ask "are you mad?" and if I say no, he starts... fishing for other emotions I may be feeling, but the ONLY thing I can tie to it is agitated or frustrated... but they do mean two different things to me in a sense... agitated would be if I'm just feeling uneasy about something and restless for some reason (basically uncomfortable in my own skin), but frustrated is when I am actually venting about it and don't want anyone near me or I start saying mean/rude things, lol. Boyfriend actually said they can be interchangeable emotions... but I don't see how, as they have very different meanings to me... so obviously, my attempt at defining things isn't what it actually means to anyone else it seems.

I find it... oddly interesting in some way, trying to decipher this "code" of emotions in a way. Trying to figure out where one crosses over into the other, especially since no one I have found actually can tell me where those lines are, or what each means to them, or what order they go in or anything like that.

I suppose I do get a bit tied up on figuring out how I'm feeling at times, especially since people always ask things like that, and I just wind up getting frustrated while trying to do so... so even if I was happy beforehand, by the time I have it figured out, my answers are always the same... I'm always frustrated by the time I can pin a name to anything, lol. I must sound like a really negative person to others

Sometimes, yeah...
Like, I can tell when I'm feeling some of the simpler ones, like just happy or sad, but I always had trouble understanding more complex emotions like anger and love. But maybe I'm just getting confused by the wording. Like, is anger different from frustration? I don't get it. I know I've been frustrated, but I don't know what anger is supposed to be.
And when someone asks me what I'm feeling right at the moment, it's hard to tell. >_<;; I always just say I don't know. I mean, I can tell later, usually, but when I'm feeling it I can't tell because it's just an overwhelming blob of whatever emotion. Like a flavorless blob of jello. Ew.

Anger is complex!?

Okay, yeah, I can identify the simpler ones, but if it's a mix, then maybe not. Sometimes, I can identify the individual parts of the mix, though.


As for love (the romantic variety), I don't think that I've had that one. If I have, then it was unremarkable.


An interesting note: I never remember what I feel. That means that I don't have any emotions attached to any of my memories. I remember what it's like to have a certain emotion and I remember events, but I don't remember what I was feeling and when. (Unless it came up in conversation, but that's the fact, not the feeling.)
There is one exception to that statement, though. In that particular case, it was a complex negative emotion that I couldn't identify, so I committed it to memory along with its context. I can summon it up at will, but I still don't know what it is.

Unless someone tells me explicitly, I won't know.

I always had trouble describing my feelings. For as long as I remember, I hated the infamous question "how did that make you feel?". I could never answer it, and any attempts on the therapist's part to draw the answer out of me resulted in a mini meltdown on the spot, followed by feeling depressed for the rest of the day. Back when I was a teen, I thought the therapist was laughing at my misfortune by asking me that. (In a sense of: "you went through something that made you feel bad, and I didn't, ha ha ha ha ha, and I get to make you relive it".) Now I understand that the real purpose is..., well, I don't understand what it's supposed to achieve, I just know it's not meant to make fun of the patient. I learned on this site that the "sharing your feelings" therapy is called Rogerian, and know what to avoid when I pick a shrink in the future.