can a person with an ASD become emotionless?

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Ok so here's the thing. It might sound weird and like a waste of time, but I'm on this new thing where I want to rid myself of all emotions. Only problem is, I've always been a very sensitive, emotional person. I mean part of being on the spectrum for me is having huge emotional outbursts and hurting myself, or yelling at another person. I feel like if I were NT, I would be completely devoid of human emotion and totally detached. I think this because of the way I was raised. My mom even tries to say I'm the way I am (PDD) because my childhood was so traumatic. I've been through a lot, yet I'm still too sensitive. I want to detach myself from the world and just view it as a movie. Do you think this is possible?

I found an article on it

http://www.ehow.com/how_2222304_become-emotionless.html

That's not true. NTs have emotions too.
I don't think it's possible to rid yourself of emotions... I guess...
Well okay, I don't think ridding yourself of your emotions will be worth just getting rid of your emotional outbursts.

Mm, I tried that when I was a kid. It doesn't work, and ultimately as a coping mechanism for being a HSP, it does more damage than it can fix. I can be extremely detatched, usually from sensory/social overload or anxiety. It's something I'm trying to overcome.

Also, yes, NT people have a huge range of feelings, too.

I think that all of the responses and the eHow page are interesting because they all draw subjective conclusions about flat affect. I am convinced that it is just as much of an umbrella term as the word "autism" as a description is. It might do to think more broadly about the subject if you lack experience. As for a first-person perspective, it may be the only way to relay information if one recounts his or her experience with a lack of emotion, but I have not seen that kind of reply yet. I will offer one. If you don't want to be saddened by my past, I doubt that emotionlessness is such a good idea for you anyway.

I think that I started out as typical in terms of emotion. I would laugh, cry, be angry... everything that I can think of was probably there. I've been told that I knew very many people around me, and I'd like to think that I cared about them all. That's the key part, that I cared so much. At that age (five, I think), no one was ever critical of me. As someone with AS, most of my thoughts were idiosyncratic, but that got me nothing but praise for my uniqueness at the time.

Conditions changed as I aged. My non-nuclear family started to be critical of me for my ideas and actions that were "off-the-wall" (since I was old enough, I'm sure they thought). I loved attention, so this of course made me unhappy. This is when one might look to their immediate family for love and support.

Sadly, arguments, insults, yelling, violence, ect. were never uncommon in my house growing up, even when I was younger than five. My father would scream at me that I was "in his own little world" and would sometimes spank me and slap me in the face. My mother would tell me that I was a "wicked child." My older brother was violent to the point that he once beat my head against the floor by the neck... you get the idea. I'm guessing that this isn't so incredibly uncommon, but the thing is that I had nowhere to go through all of this, nowhere to retreat. My room, which I shared with my brother, was of no use; the door was simply opened when I was to be yelled at.

I had absolutely no protection bubble to speak of. All of my good friends moved away nearly in succession. Who would I talk to? Where would all of this tension go? Remember how much I liked people. I was never afraid of being violent, but I'll never want to hurt anyone. It was very involuntary that my care for anyone and everyone in the world simply broke off.

I became aware of my lack of emotion when I was, in elementary school, sent to the principal's office along another child for food-throwing. By the time we were sitting outside his office, the other kid (a tough kid, no doubt) was crying his eyes out. He turned to me: "Why aren't you crying?" Many other events have served as confirmation.

To make a long story short(er), I eventually became bored out my mind and developed some faux social skills to "connect" with people so that I would not be so incredibly bored. Yes, yes, I know that this is very AS-typical, I'm just mentioning it to point out that emotionlessness has often been a disadvantage. Of course it's enabling, but it's not a mask that you can take off when it's served its purpose. Case and point: I have disappointed women in bed when they're going crazy emotionally and I'm just kind of taking it all with indifference.

Sorry if this offends you, but you make it sound like an alternative to suicide. For me, it was more like an unintended death, to a lesser degree. The fact that you want this makes me wonder if you are even susceptible. Thoughts?

I'm not suicidal actually...I just want to be stronger. To me, when you talk about not crying when sent to the principal's office, I admire that. I was not that way at all.

You're childhood seems a lot like mine was. I was bounced back and forth between my mother and father. I changed schools 14 times before I finally graduated. I was constantly yelled at by both my mother and father and they were also trying to turn me against the other. My mom would yell into an answering machine that she hated me and never wanted to see me again, and my dad would save it and replay every time I mentioned her name. My dad got in trouble with children services when he broke my finger, after I tried to run away one day. Both of them had drug problems, both of them had a lot of issues that took precedence over me. I should be a lot stronger. Instead I'm sensitive, immature, emotionally unstable and can't maintain a relationship. I've talked to others who have gone through tough times growing up and it seems to have made them into better people. I've never quite figured out what went wrong in the coping process that I still haven't figured out.

If the person's emotions are belittled often enough, they can become emotionless.

I can't tell you why, but I'm very emotionally blunted. There are advantages yes, in many way I think it is a result of my brain saying enough is enough. It is a defence mechanism, I think. On the other hand emotions and emotional depth are quite important with various types of social interactions. It can be really restraining. I do some volunteering as a friend and mentor to a young adult on the spectrum, and he is very emotional. I find it really hard to console him, and he is pretty perceptive about these things.

I don't lack emotions completely I have bad anxiety which I manage to keep blubbing under the surface.

Ideally you would be able to turn on an off the emotional side. I have executive dysfunction (diagnosed clinically). There was a study that show people with damage to there frontal lobe particularly the emotional centres, tend to be unable to make up their mind on thing because they are logical to the nth degree. I am hyper-analytical. It kept me up all last night on something fairly trivial. Many people who think that they are logical simply think they are right (or expect there to be a concrete answer, but in fact don't analyse very well, and use logical skimming/surface logic to advice at a satisfactory answer. However you do need to know hen to get off that particular roundabout, so to speak.

I have emotions, but I can't self-monitor them.
They surge up periodically and confuse the hell out of me, and I do feel for some stretches of time like I don't have any emotions... but they're there.

NTs don't just have emotions. They will tell you all about them, in real time. I can't do that.

It's true for robots, but all humans have emotions. The fact that we have such rich emotions is one of the distinctive features of being human. The trick is to just be honest with yourself and with others about emotions.

I'm emotionless most of the time, but not as a coping mechanism or anything of that sort. I guess it's kind of like I don't bother with emotions. Some times, I get stressed out and my emotions come bubbling to the surface, but other than that, I guess I'm just not that emotionally attached to my own life.

Would you mind elaborating on this idea? I think that I agree with you halfway; trouble has never come from me being honest with myself. But my experience, any attempts to communicate honestly with NTs result in
1) them lying to me and playing along, never wanting to admit that they don't understand. Pretending to understand just kills me because of the effort that goes into speaking honestly to them.
2) hurt feelings on their part when they cannot understand why I feel that way. They always think that I'm implying something else,
3) misunderstandings that lead them to assume the worst about me, for the same reason as #2.
4) making no progress elsewhere in life because they are convinced that things cannot go on until "the matter" (my way of thinking) is resolved. They have seldom, if ever, had to deal with this situation in the past, and presumably think that it should not last long.
5) harsh interrogations where such anomaly of thought is taken as me lying to them. They will try to dig up past events and will erroneously connect the dots.
6) them subsequently knowing me for and obsessing over those few heartfelt things that I've shared with them. If it weren't for their short-sightedness, the relationship would be severed.

This all happens despite my otherwise good social appeal. Why not just play the game, then go to your IRL aspie friends when you need someone understanding to be honest to? Way too much confrontation otherwise.

I think us people with AS have a higher threshold for displaying emotions, ie having to be very happy, sad etc before we start showing the facial expressions spontaneously.

I know that when I watch comedy movies with other people, even if I do understand the joke, I'm the only person who doesn't laugh automatically while everyone else is cracking up. It doesn't come to me to smile or laugh.

So yeah, a blunted affect.