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Biscuitman
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18 Jan 2022, 5:12 am

Do you feel connected emotionally to those closest to you?

I am not sure I do. Just interested in other people's thoughts on this too



AprilR
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18 Jan 2022, 5:34 am

I care about my parents and friends but i don't feel much connection with them emotionally. They are so vastly different from me except my dad who is probably another aspie.



Steve1963
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18 Jan 2022, 5:41 am

Biscuitman wrote:
Do you feel connected emotionally to those closest to you?

I am not sure I do. Just interested in other people's thoughts on this too

I'm not sure I do, either. It's frustrating and a little frightening.



Biscuitman
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18 Jan 2022, 6:08 am

it makes me feel pretty sad and low that I feel I don't care as much as I should about people



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18 Jan 2022, 6:19 am

I don't feel connection with many people easily, but I feel deep connections with special people. The emotions can be very strong, as I contemplate their life and being. I have a childhood friend who is probably one of the only people I've really loved. I don't mean that in a sexual or romantic way, but I would do anything for him. He's one of the only people who's really tried to understand me.



Joe90
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18 Jan 2022, 6:39 am

I am very close to my family and my boyfriend and I have natural close bonds with them. I had an inseparable bond with my mum too but she got taken away from me due to cancer. :cry:


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18 Jan 2022, 6:40 am

I’ve been wondering about that lately, too. About myself. I know I care about others, but I’m not even sure what love is.


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18 Jan 2022, 7:07 am

Got no issues here.
I got a lot to cherish, to a point that I wished I know how to give more than I'm already receiving.


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Biscuitman
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18 Jan 2022, 7:14 am

blazingstar wrote:
I’ve been wondering about that lately, too. About myself. I know I care about others, but I’m not even sure what love is.


yeah I guess that is close to my thoughts. I care about people, I would never want them to be hurt and I only want the best for them, but I am not sure I have feelings beyond that.



And So It Goes
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18 Jan 2022, 7:40 am

I sometimes wonder if the emotionally close connection to my family, friends and even myself is actually genuine or self-fabricated. And it's frightening to think that I regularly ponder this. Feels disassociative.


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Earthbound_Alien
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18 Jan 2022, 12:24 pm

no, but I can bond with them

I've never felt connected, wasn't aware I was supposed to, and don't need to.

I can still enjoy. their company and love them without a connection

its more important that I enjoy spending time with them



Caz72
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18 Jan 2022, 1:41 pm

i lack emotional connection but im glad my husband understand and loves me regardless

i do love him and i do cuddle up to him + more but i dont feel much connection but he does with me

its complicated to explain


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txfz1
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18 Jan 2022, 1:52 pm

None here for most humans, animals are a different story. I’ve shunned most of my family.



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18 Jan 2022, 5:43 pm

I tend to feel I may be rather emotionally detached from others, but I think it may be one of these things that's happening without my noticing it very much. I always used to feel I wasn't as bonded as I "should" have been with my son when he was young, but a counsellor remarked (words to the effect) that we were clearly very strongly bonded emotionally. Similarly, I've often felt rather detached from my partners but I think there's actually always been a lot there that I didn't much notice at the time.

There are a lot of different definitions of human connection out there, presumably because it's a very subjective thing that's hard to pin down. Most of the descriptions are about partners. They try to detect it with questions such as "Do you have each other's attention when it's wanted?" "Can you comfort each other when one of you is upset?" "Do you care about each other's well-being?" "Do you value each other's opinions?" "Do you boost each other's self-confidence?"

Signs and causes of lacking emotional connection are said to be such things as being too busy to pay attention to each other's feelings, being unwilling to open up emotionally, failing to communicate emotions to each other, failing to do shared activities together.

I think I score reasonably well on most of those things. One shortcoming is that I can't easily be consoled if I'm upset or anxious about something - it seems that only credible information about how to fix the cause of the upset, or about why I might be overestimating how bad it is can soothe me. AFAIK, pure "emotional support" doesn't help me, though I'm not so sure it truly doesn't help me. Sometime I've felt strangely empty and it's only by thinking that I've begun to see that it was probably because somebody I felt rather attached to had gone away, and even then it's only been a theory, I haven't known it was that. I've had conversations after which I've felt emotionally wonderful, truly nurtured. I've known it was something about those conversations but I'd have difficulty in describing it very clearly.

I can certainly feel sad when I'm separated from people I'm close to, and I suppose that's an indicator that I miss them, but it's hard for me to name it as missing them. Similarly when I learned that my father was dead, I wasn't aware of any grief about it, and wondered how I could feel so cold-hearted, but after a few minutes I suddenly felt that all the colour had gone out of the world around me. Looking back, of course it would have been emotional pain at losing somebody I'd bonded with very strongly and for many years when I'd been a child.

So maybe it's "all there" really, but with ASD there's often this alexithymia thing going on, which isn't the inability to have feelings, it's the inability to name them, to know what we're feeling.



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18 Jan 2022, 6:25 pm

I think the only things that I currently have an emotional connection/attachment to are my pets. I've gotten used to being rejected by others throughout my life, including family members, so now I find it hard to develop connections/attachments to people.