Do I lack emotions?
Sometimes I've got the feeling that emotions can merely be experienced while reading a book, watching a film or listening to music.
Of course this attitude could be the result of an exaggerated sense of romance. Films and books try to construct a world of exaggerated emotions. But they trigger feelings that I didn't know before I began to watch/read them.
I've got the impression that I mostly lack basic feelings like sadness or even happiness (maybe also the symptom of a depression?). They can only be activated when I watch films and read books. When others are sad, I often just calculate the consequences of the specific situation and evaluate it.
[added] I've inserted this topic into the "Love" forum, because "love" or compassion is the most conspicuous one of these feelings.
(Please excuse my language mistakes, English is not my mother tongue.)
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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - Albert Einstein
t0
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I find that my emotions are more frequently triggered by these things. In fact, I try to use music to change my emotions through repetitive play of a song that usually triggers my desired emotion.
Other things that have recently triggered my emotions:
- Getting into arguments with my wife or when she gets emotional about something else.
- The Virginia Tech shootings (I am an alumnus)
I know I have emotions, but I just don't recognize them anymore. Over the many years of being mistreated, I got so good at blocking them out, I don't even know what they're supposed to feel like. So even when I am experiencing an emotion one way or another, I have no idea what it is.
I have trouble experiencing emotions when they're appropriate. With me I never know if what I'm feeling is the right feeling or the wrong feeling making it harder to emulate what the other person is expressing out of a thought. So on one hand I think when I listen to music or read a book, I know that the book or the music isn't going to judge me when it starts to hit a nerve or an emotion. On the other, this is what makes social life or relationships harder. Expressioning emotions to another are what help a relationship of some sort get started. Not that I don't express some emotion to a person but to a point where I feel immobile or trapped to recognize what another is feeling and to mimic that of which they're feeling. I think this is what most NTs take for granted that people with AS have trouble in.
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I live as I choose or I will not live at all.
~Delores O’Riordan
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