So, what's the deal with emotions?

Post Reply New Topic

I've honestly really never really understood the finer points of human emotion, and oddly enough with each passing year, it seems to get even more baffling to me for some reason. I have emotions of course. Who doesn't? I do express them as well. In fact the repression of them is one thing that confuses me. I find it bizarre as well that we all have the same basic capacity for emotion and all in basically similar situations ,and yet somehow it feel almost frowned upon to really have them or show them in any public place. Of course then you get the entirely opposite end of that same situation, in which a certain emotional reaction is at times almost demanded of us. i.e, It seems to be generally considered not okay to cry at work after someone from the public barged on in and called you a moron who should be fired, and yet it;s almost required that we bawl our eyes out when someone dies. Cry at work it seems you are unprofessional and fail to at a funeral of a loved one and you are cold and unfeeling. If the emotions are our own to use in life then to me it stands to reason that we should just use them as we want or don't want. Knowing when to cry or not to, when to raise my voice and when to look all sad or shaky, seems like just another set of social protocols to worry about and get a find old headache doing it. This may be a stupid question, but don't people really have better things to worry about then whether someone has tears in their eyes and a shaky voice or not?

Serious, I have often thought in my life particularly these past few years, that since I clearly don't know how to deal with or handle my emotions and emotional behavior "properly," maybe I just shouldn't have them at all. I've thought sometimes, (mostly on particularly socially weird days, that I and others would jut do better without them. But then you say that to someone and of course you have a problem too just for that alone. So what, we are supposed to WANT and LIKE them, but not really USE them? Perhaps I should keep a butter churn and a couple of wooden wheels in the back of my truck too. They are never things I or most people really use or have much call to bring out and show off these days, but hey it's all human history right? lol.

Obviously 'm being a bit sarcastic and explaining this whole matter strangely, but that's how I feel at times when looking at this human emotion thing. Am I truly alone in my thoughts on all this?

Sometimes it seems to me my mom thinks the only time it's ever okay to cry is if you're in a physical pain or someone dies. The rest of the time you should not have negative emotions because it will bring everybody down and make them not want to be around you so don't worry be happy woo doo doo doo... uh yeah. Sometimes that drives me crazy but usually I'm glad my mom isn't a real cryer because that would actually make me uncomfortable, and I hate to say it but she's supposed to be strong 'cuz she's my mother. I, on the other hand, am weak and often quite emotional and do not react well to unpleasant things, like someone on the bus talking in a very loud voice about how bad the world is and that we're all doomed while everyone else won't shut up about how they're cutting 200 hours off the bus schedule and there will be even less chances for me to take the bus anywhere, and on Sunday there is no bus at all so I can't go anywhere that's too far to walk and a cab is too expensive and they keep moving the Sunday flea market every summer to some place I can't go to because of that and it stinks and then I get so overwhelmed that I yell at them to please be quite quiet I don't want to listen anymore and I plug my ears until I reach my stop...

But oh, your grandmother just died? Well, that happens to a lot of people when they get old, ya know.

No you are not the only one, I have had similar thoughts.

I cry very easily and it took me a long time to learn how to suppress tears. I feel like it was healthier for me to just let the tears out whenever I needed to. It is not good for me to hold them back and I resent having to do that. But crying in front of people, at the "wrong" time/place just invites all kinds of trouble.

Also I have been criticized because I did not cry or get upset at times when other people did, like when my mother had a heart attack, my grandmother accused me of being cold hearted about it. That really hurt my feelings but also that is another thing, sometimes I have a delayed reaction to things and when a person says or does something I am just stunned and don't really know how to react, so it seems like I have no feelings about it but I really do.

On the other hand I get tired of having people misread emotion into things I do that are not emotional at all, like thinking I must be nervous because I have a tremor.

The Squid can break down and cry for something as simple as having a bad day. We are squid enough to admit that. We find it really helps clean up our perspective of things somehow. Some experts say crying can have health benefits and relieve stress.

The odd thing about the Squid however, is we've dealt with the death of loved ones and not cried. We guess death isn't very stressful for us. We aren't sure if there is something wrong with that or not. Or, perhaps because we cry at other times, we may be getting out suppressed stress from those events.

Either way, We too don't understand that stigma that one MUST cry at a funeral, but mustn't cry from a stress overload. When we feel the need, we excuse ourselves, and go take care of it.

I read the title of this post as Jerry Seinfeld. "So, what's the deal with airline food?"

I only experience strong emotions. I'll be the first to admit I cry at some romantic movies and romantic scenes in movies/real life, a death that is close to me and I used to cry at very hurtful insults before I stopped caring what people thought of me.

It seems to me that if one is processing the world differently, that is experiencing sensory input differently, thinking differently, working differently to communicate, experiencing social input differently, etc., one would naturally experience or express emotions a bit differently. Even if it's only a small difference, that difference can apparently seem huge to other people.

Apparently neurotypical people most often have finer gradations of emotion than people who have ASD.

Strong negative emotion In response to social confusion is probably more an ASD thing, so there is another difference from much of the world who as adults experience only limited episodes of feeling confused and overwhelmed by others' behavior.

The confusing thing is though that there is so much commonality it is hard to understand what the big deal is about people perceiving emotions in a person with ASD as being way off. My guess is they would react the same way if they experienced negative input and confusion and had trouble organizing and communicating their thoughts about what was going on. Exactly the same way. But that's just a guess.

Human emotion cannot be 'understood' and this becomes apparent when one totally expresses the wrong one for any given situation.

What others may find sad and pathetic, I may find amusing and vice-versa. Empathy is not my 'strong suit' and I cannot cry.

I'm often accused of being 'heartless' and 'emotionless', but ever since I was a baby, I have experienced non-depressive anhedonia. I just never saw any point in experiencing a positive emotion that can be turned into a negative one within seconds.

I saw all 'happiness' all 'pleasure' as being temporary, fleeting and something that humans strive for, without understanding their true purpose and meaning in life...i.e a huge illusion.

*some say I was a Buddhist/Bodhisattva in a 'past life'....but anyway...

Since childhood, I could never laugh or smile (learning to smile and not 'grimace' was difficult)...so I was basically 'born without emotion', and that would be all well and good except for one thing - I still experience impatience, frustration and annoyance and they are the only emotions I can feel.

I have often thought how nice it would be to actually lose the rest of my remaining emotions instead of acquiring new ones (somehow), but I am working on that...

....better to feel nothing, rather than negative stuff and my grandma always said 'If you canna say nuthin' nice, just shut up'...

I'm working on that too.

Sometimes I think about when I was a kid, I would (and still can, though, in private now) express my emotions just fine. But they were MY emotions. Not what the people presenting the given situations wanted my emotions to be. So, my emotions were wrong and then I learned (like I'm sure a lot of people do) to hide my emotions and only present the dramatics of emotions that fit what I knew people wanted. Or just holding them in and expressing nothing, even if everyone around me was like, "Why do you look so sad?" "Smile!" I don't like being fake and so most of the time I show nothing. Because as a kid I was taught to not show how I was really feeling because it was too much for the people around me. So, it's too much emotion as a child. Learned that. Now, as an adult I DON'T SHOW ENOUGH EMOTION!! ! I don't go out much. I go to work and even at work people expect you to be happy or something! Sorry, I'm at work. I HAVE TO be here, why sound I be smiling?? And if someone smiles at you and you don't smile back they automatically assume that you're into yourself or that you're a super b***h or some such. Little do they know it's really cause I can't make up my mind of how to act because I've been taught that my reactions are wrong. Even though they are individual to my psyche and my body.

Tis frustrating.