AS/Grief & Emotional Regulation

Post Reply New Topic

AS/ Grief & Emotional Regulation

I would be very interested to hear from others with AS who have difficulties with processing their grief.

The way I am wired often makes me see the world in a very fragmented way, a little like seeing the world through a tunnel, or monocular. My emotions are often experienced in this way too.

For example, I can feel with such great intensity but I am often unable to intigrate the experience because I cannot grasp the context, the underlying facts, as a result I catastrophize a lot and become flooded.......I know I have what psychologists call emotional contagion.

I often feel my autistic brain understands emotions much more easily than it does intigrate them.. Often I feel this is because I obsess about feelings rather than feel them.

How are you with having AS and processing your feelings?

I am particularly interested in hearing from those struggling with coming to terms with grief.

I'm like this, too. In fact, it's one of the things that I most identify with being autistic.

I have been divorced for 4 years, and I still am having trouble processing the grief. It's embarrassing, more than anything, as it makes me feel like less of a grown-up, less of a person capable of normal, adult emotions.

P.S. Did you mean to post this in the adolescent forum?

Thanks for responding.....no I ment it for the main section.

Hi,

I am the parent of a 13y.o. boy diagnosed with autism. I am trying to understand how he processes his emotions because he feels his emotions intensely and has difficulty regulating his responses. To neurotypical people, his responses would appear "overblown" or too intense for a particular situation.

I would appreciate any insights you may have that would help me support him to integrate his experiences and emotions. I want to be able to teach him the tools he can use to process his feelings so he doesn't get so stressed.

Thanks!

The grief of break-ups have been hard for me to process. Well, my grief of the first one took a while and this one is proving to be the same. The first one I moped a lot and expressed it by listening to depressing music etc, this time I'm just flat out ignoring the feelings and distracting myself.

The grief of death seems to affect me differently to the grief of break-ups, though. I feel so so so so guilty for admitting this, but I felt nothing when my grandfather, whom I had affection for, died. I just rationalised it that death happens, he was going to die anyway and he didn't like to see me sad, so it was just "one of those things". I don't want to be accused of not loving him, though, just because I didn't experience the typical reaction to his death.

For me, there seem to exist only two emotions: feeling good or feeling bad. It takes a lot of reasoning and thinking to sort them out. For example what has happened recently or is happening. Then I sometimes can resolve that the bad feeling is grief, or anger, or something else.