We think, they feel

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Well I am new at the aspie game being diagnosed only a month ago. The last social situation I went to was a meeting of about 20 people at church. My new approach to social situations is to simply watch people, observe them but make no effort to fit in. It is much less stressful, no more trying to figure out what the proper response should be. I am who I am and if someone does not appreciate my expressionless aspie stare, too bad.

Well, same for me, here. Except that I never really put much effort in pretending to be someone different than I really am.
Apart from that it never really works out such that you stay natural.

Of course it is to some extend possible to change oneself, but that is really different, because it changes the real I.

i do not subscribe to the term "we", and it is likewise with the word "they".

my story can not be explained by by someone else who usurps the position of my character ambassador. i do not like the word "we" specifically.

i do "think" that other people "feel", but i am not sure. i do not know what it is to "feel" (in an emotional sense), so i can not guage the accuracy of the honesty of peoples expressions that are pertinent to what they convey that outlines what they are "feeling".

Disclaimer: All the quotes on page 2 with no names on them totally confused me. If any of those quotes were mine, I do not know if I should respond or not, because I just don't know if anything was said by me, or if questions were directed at me.

That is really true. But unfortunately if you copy together texts from different places and from different pages (1,2,3) the quoting gets also quite complicated...

More important is however the content, upon which I react, mostly.

Of course I would like to know also if somebody has quoted me, but the context is more important.

And then I have another problem, which is
should I read through all the thread which can be 1000 pages.
I usually don't manage that and that prevents me from getting into it as well.

That appears to be true to a certain extend, unfortunately. I would have expected that it would be more
intuitive when communicating with other aspies.

But we are so different one to one that our feelings might be also quite different.
And such do we probably also think quite differently around things.

But generally I think it is not wrong to say that thinking is a compensation strategy that quite many of us share

i am sorry i do not know what you are trying to say. maybe you are expressing disappointment at my failure to feel even "aspies" (as they say) but in the end, i just can not keep up with emotional rapidity using objective logic.


i apologize for the fact that i have no idea about what you are trying to say. it may be my deficit in comprehension rather than your deficit of descriptive ability that results in the fact that i have no idea what the meaning of your most recent words are.

good evening.

Maybe ToM (as it is classically defined) is not knowing what other people are feeling, but assuming what other people are feeling.

I have a hard time making assumptions, my brain goes into questioning mode, and I have to weigh out all the different possibilites.

Unrelated (or distantly) but I wanted to mention that I like concept of this being excess of ToM, as opposed to deficiet- as postulated by yellowtamarin. (I will make another post and quote it)

I see it as alike to my faceblindness- if I meet someone briefly I often do not remember their face, however I can accurately draw a portrait (I have never been trained, and I could do this from quite young).
I a tend to notice details of peoples faces, and can remember them by the details. For example if I think of my face, I have one very clear crease under my eyes, it runs 3/4 of the length. The inner corners of my eyes point down. I have birthmark below my left eye, a small red dot, almost unnoticable. My nose is exactly the width of the space between my eyes. My mouth is slightly wider than my nose, the corners are lower than the center. I have a crease down the center of my lower lip, and several smaller creases along. I am not looking at my face, I am doing this from memory. At the same time, I do not have a very good conception of what I look like, in my mind I do not have a composite image, more of a collage of details.

I imagine that the majority of people, see a face and turn it into something like a pixalated image, low resolution, fuzzy on the details, but easy to store and easy to remember.
So, am I face blind? In some ways I seem t0 see faces more accurately than most people.
An eye does not look like a almond with a circle in the center to me, if someone sees an eye and draws that, than what are they seeing, are they seeing what is really there, or a symbol, a simplification of it?

I meant to give a quick explanation, but I have a hard time summarizing, all I see is details.

Ok, here is the quote of the post that I alluded to in my last post, above^.
I really like the point you are making, I feel like I have been skirting around the edges of this, thinking about it, but not knowing how to express it.

What I meant that I think that (at least some aspies) have feelings, And I would be surprised if you don't have them at all.
Maybe you should define them as what happens to you when something triggers some intuitive reaction in you. (Anxiety, anger, etc.).
They are all feelings, which you probably have.

But they are maybe different, and so different that you might not be able to share them even with us.
And because they are different you cannot feel any feelings by intuitive means if they are not your own.

And of course if you don't understand NT feelings all this eye contact thing is quite useless, if there is nothing to understand for you behind this.

For me that overlaps still quite strongly with the NT world, because my level of the spectrum is rather low
but still so high that I have sometimes really serious problems


Also what you say that



says that you are not able to intuitively understand feelings of others.

What I somehow thought and still think is that our (aspie) feelings are much closer to another than NT and aspie feelings ever will be.
I somewhat also claim by that there is some intuitive communication possible between us.

But, and that is what I meant, is,
that we are much more different in our feelings than what I thought
and this is logically much more the case
than for two different NT persons that are "trained" to have similar feelings.

I guess we don't necessary train feelings to be similar to other's feelings.

Generally about feelings:

I don't perceive me as completely rational like a robot or computer.
Voices or music for example trigger feelings in me. And also pictures, videos or quite many other things.
Also extreme NT gestures like crying or such. But I don't look them in the eyes

I think it is really like that everybody has at least his/her own feelings

well i do have primitive feelings, but they are not rich and combined like average people.
i was extensively studied when i was in my early teens by my psychiatrist and her students (she was a professor with students) . it is a very long story which i am not inclined to retell due to the fact that it is too long too retain the interest of an audience, however i will say that i was institutionalized from the age of 11 to 17 because i could not integrate with the school system, and during that period of institutionalization, i became the subject of a study concerning "autism in people with above average IQ's".

to cut the story up to yield the relevant points, my emotional development was studied, and i was told that i have 4 basic emotions. they are broadly described as "happy", "sad", "angry" and "amused".

"happiness" is a rich and complex mental condition in most people, but with me, happiness only amounts to "satisfaction". i feel no other type of happiness other than "satisfaction". i have never felt "euphoria" or "elation", and from my viewpoint, those feelings (as they have been described to me) are absurd.

"sadness" is likewise a very complex emotional recipe for most people, but for me, "sadness" is merely "dissatisfaction". i know some people suffer depression, and i understand that they have a very complex set of feelings related to many characteristic perceptions they have of the world which make them apathetic and withdrawn, but for me, if i am not satisfied with something i feel "disappointed" but i do not feel anything else.

"anger" is also very complex (even though it is a "basic" emotion). some people feel angry about being insulted, and others feel angry at wrongdoings that they have experienced, but for me, "anger" only amounts to basic frustration.
if i get every red light on my way to somewhere, i become very disgruntled. if people get in my way while i am walking to a destination, i react in a rather rude way because i am quite annoyed at the obstacle they present. i do not feel hatred in any way at all. i have never hated anything, and i do not understand how it feels to "hate".

i feel amused rather often, and i know that is not a basic emotion, but it is a core emotion of mine which is dominant in my psyche. when i am amused, i see some aspects of reality to be absurd, and they are almost like a cosmic joke, and i can not help but find something to laugh about in most situations. because the cause of my laughter is only understood by me, then it is an isolated emotion that is very rarely shareable. because i can not say why i am laughing, i go into a fit of laughter because no one else understands why i am laughing, and their faces look concerned as if they think i am going crazy, and i become convulsive with laughter (which causes much social damage) as a result.

i am a very simple mind that works very well, but i am not in possession of the richness of consciousness that most people have.

i just covered that.

well i tried.

of course i can not "feel" anyone else's feelings. i can only see them objectively.


eyes are as interesting as marbles to me. i am not interested much in marbles. they all look the same. some are colored differently, but they all have the same shape.
people's brains are not in their eyes, and i do not see eyes as the "windows to the soul" because they are just small sphere's of organic matter and i can not understand what people mean when they say " i saw it in their eyes", because if their eyes do not change shape or color, then there is nothing to be gleaned from inspecting them.

the worst thing about inspecting peoples eyes is that they mostly think you are being friendly, and they become automatically friendly to a point that i can not cope with, and i look away and curtail my association with them as soon as they become friendly which makes them feel whatever they feel, but i do not care because i just want to go home.

i do not really want friends, because they have expectations and they can be disapproving if i do not act as they think i should.



i am very much affected by autism, and i have a good enough brain to get me out of trouble, but i have no chance of ever attaining the level of consciousness that everyone else i see has attained.
you are lucky that you have found the pulse of humanity.



that is correct.


that does not compute.

that also does not compute.

i am sorry i have lost the train of your thought process. if you are not drunk then i am tired.



??

sorry.





yes i have a subjective experience, but it is convergent with very few other people. so few that it is futile to look for them.

Hei, thx for sharing this information. Really interesting. Although you said you are very simple I still somehow recognise myself in that what you write, to more or less extend.
My feelings ar generally more complex. But, when I read you text then I realise that I don't quite know what actually happiness is exactly for me.
Sadness and anger are really different.

But the last one that I have to laugh about something not funny is very well known to me.
I guess I cut out the part that would possibly trigger non positive feelings,
and just consider a situation as funny, for example.

My sense of humor is really different from NTs.