Thank you for your insight tagAught.

Emotions really are a difficult thing to understand, but to say that we don’t have them is just… wrong. We don’t tend to be great at comprehending them, and I know I can get overwhelmed by intense emotions, but we definitely have them.

My psychologist in Toronto once put it to me like this: Aspies have the same range of emotions as NTs – it’s just that for the most part, they’re pastel – not as intense – because of the hardwiring; when they do get intense, we tend to overload on them. (I’ve since figured out that he’s probably not entirely right about this – I’ve read some blogs where Aspies mention intense emotions that they don’t get overwhelmed by – but I’m the only Aspie he’d interacted with and he’s not trained in dealing with ASD, so he could only go by my experiences.) He was well aware that I had emotions.

What he taught me to do (and admittedly, I’m not great at following this instruction, but when I have – usually under his coaching – it’s worked) is: Try to find a word to describe what I’m feeling. This is usually “top-level” – the cognitive level – where you say things like “I’m upset” or “I’m happy”, and generally mean a range of emotions, rather than a specific one. Then we’d dig a little deeper, and try to figure out what were the more specific emotions that made up that “cloud”. Quite often, “upset” tended to translate as a mix of frustration and anger – but to get down to that level, I had to go through shame and embarrassment first. I’d often have to try to analyze the “why” of the emotion I felt to help define it “properly” (meaning give it a label that I could grasp and manipulate to convey information to others).

I don’t know that it would work for everyone (in fact, it probably wouldn’t, given how different we can be). I tend to be an analytical thinker doesn’t feel most things strongly (unless I’m repressing a lot more than I think I am), so that approach can work for me.

Other than that, and cat-cuddling, I don’t really have coping mechanisms for my emotions. At least not ones that would do anyone (including me) any good – I tend to repress and avoid, which I suppose are coping mechanisms of a sort, but they’re the kind that do more damage than good.

*shrugs* There you go. My 2 cents!

;) tagAught