How do you learn to recognize your own emotions?
I'm a pretty introspective person. I grew up with an emotionally abusive parent, struggled with my mental health from teenagerhood, and been to more therapy than I can remember since the time of my parents' divorce when I was eight. My siblings and I have done a lot of deconstructing over the years to figure out what the heck happened to us (the abuse was pretty insidious and, of course, we normalized it) and how it affected us internally. I'm also most likely autistic and have always struggled to socialize correctly, which led to a LOT of observation and imitation that was both conscious and unconscious.
Despite all this practice at introspection though, in the past few years, I've come to realize I am wildly out of touch with my own emotions. I am tempted to blame much of this on the fact that I was always collecting social "scripts" to follow, so that I could react appropriately to jokes, or good/bad news, or whatever. If you're acting, you don't actually need to know how you feel. And if you feel something different from standard, it's irrelevant because it's "wrong" to feel that way, so you ignore it. So it took me a long time to realize that my display for other people was actually pretty disconnected from whether I was actually feeling anything. I don't feel it was dishonest, though, because I still would have wanted to show sympathy, excitement, etc. for the people I care about. It just takes me so long to process things that I wouldn't have been able to do it within the same conversation if I didn't have a ready script.
I know that some autistic people experience alexithymia/emotional blindness, but it doesn't look terribly well understood. I know I should probably get back on the therapy horse, for a number of reasons including this one, but I'm pretty leery. I never felt like it helped me much. (Although most of it, at the time, was to help me with "depression". Which I certainly had, but there was no understanding from either my end or theirs that the cause was likely rooted in ADHD/autism.) And I did try to start up again last year; I found a psychologist who specialized in ADHD and autism, and although she seemed understanding at first, I felt like I couldn't establish any clear communication and we just kept talking past each other. At this time, I super don't have the energy to keep trying new therapists, and waste weeks or months on each one before I figure out we won't click.
So I ask: have any of you folks ever dealt with emotional blindness? If so, how have you learned to identify your emotions? Do you keep a feelings journal, and how do you even know what to put in at first? Any advice is welcome!
A fellow au/adhd person here.
I have to just hang out with myself sometimes. Spend time organizing my closet, cleaning my car, taking a long bath, deep cleaning the bathroom, self care activities that take a long time and don’t involve anyone or anything else.
I cant meditate, so I find this is the next best thing. I get to unpack everything thats happened to me since the last time I cleaned.
I try to do one of these tasks once a month, and rotate them such that they all get done about once a year.
Autism might change things, but for the neurotypical person I would say that you do already know your emotions, but you don’t know what to do with them. How you are feeling is something that can possibly be on the autism spectrum, but it can also be the result of growing up with an abusive parent. I went through the latter and so what you are describing doesn’t sound too different from how I felt when I was young.
To answer your question about what to do with it, I’m afraid there is no easy answer. You kind of just need to grow as a person and it will happen naturally. Introspection can be useful but do not do it at the expense of socializing, because that is the most important way to build emotional intelligence. It’s kind of the same as immersion for learning languages.
But once again, this advice might not work for those on the spectrum.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) literally teaches recognizing emotions as a skill. You can find a PDF workbook here
Some additional handouts that groups will give out for emotion recognition and management are here
I didn't struggle too badly with this, but I did appreciate the section on recognizing when my emotions fit the facts and when they didn't
I'm also a very introspective person, and I also mask my actual feelings/emotions with an 'alternate' persona. I know I play 'chameleon' when I interact with other people. I get along with everyone on a surface level because I match others' emotions or expressions. The upside is that I have never really had any issues with anyone because I have never been one to be confrontational. The downside is I don't actually have any real friends (except for a couple of online ones, whom I've never met). I've had work acquaintances over the years but right now, if I had to call someone to save me from some dire situation, I genuinely don't know who I'd call. Frankly, I probably wouldn't call anyone, but I'll get into that in a moment.
I also struggle with my mental health but in kind of the opposite that you have. My upbringing was, for the most part, fine. I didn't have abusive parents. They're still together. I had no real issues in school (a lot to do with my sentiment above), I wasn't ever left hungry. We were by no means well-off, financial issues were the one crux for my parents that still haunts them now, but overall, I had it ok. I had it pretty good by most standards. Now that I'm grown, I have a house, 2 kids, wonderful wife, good job. Basically about what you'd want out of a life.
Having said all that, I've been (non-clinically) depressed for as long as I can remember. I have never been to therapy, and I do not ask for help because frankly, I feel like it is not for me. I had it better than most people, why am I sad? Why should I be allowed to complain when there are so many others out there that have it so much worse than I do? I feel ashamed that I am not happy. I think about this all the time. My own wife doesn't even know this about me, at least in full - she knows just by her own intuition. She tries to bring it up sometimes but I always mask and pretend everything is fine. She's recently been through cancer treatments, a host of auto-immune disorders, she has struggles with her family, and I just don't want to pile my self-loathing onto her. I want to be her rock, but I don't want to make her sink.
Now, to tie back to 'I don't ask for help' from the previous couple of references to that subject, I think one of the key reasons I have never been able to create strong friendships is because I have an overwhelming need to stay out of other peoples' ways. I think I've mentioned this on another thread a while back, but as an example, if I'm making a left-hand turn into traffic and someone comes up behind me, I will instead turn right (so as not to take as long waiting for traffic both ways) and just make the block instead of waiting my turn. I get very uneasy about 'holding people up' and I just do not ask favors or help. I will offer it to others, but I can't ask for it in return. I feel indebted to them if I do, and I just don't like feeling like a leech or like I'm putting someone out.
However, if you read about what makes long lasting relationships with people, a large part of it is trust and showing that they are needed and that you appreciate them for their help. I have heard "just call me if you need anything" an untold number of times and I have never picked up the phone to do so. If I really need help, I may call my brothers, but it's extremely rare. We aren't very close.
Regarding specifically recognizing my emotions, I feel like I do that fairly well. For example, I had a conversation really recently with my boss where, long story short, he told me the reason I'm working too much is because I'm a people-pleaser and don't know how to say no. My initial reaction was kind of shock, because the people I'm doing work for currently aren't people I have the ability to say no to... they're C-level execs.. my boss is my manager, and he's the one who's brought me these projects so immediately I was taken aback because I don't think it's my place to say whether I am working on a project, he is there to manage me and my time. Afterwards, I felt uneasy. I didn't know what it was, I wasn't angry or nervous or worried, just... off.
I thought about it for the next several hours on and off because I needed to understand what I was feeling, and I determined it was mostly just blind-sidedness and realizing that my boss was referring to a meeting earlier that day where I was meant to take notes on what was needed for the project, but I never brought up timing. I just said yes, yes, yes, I'll look into it, sounds good, etc. I know we're busy and it should have been great priority to understand their expectations on timing and to formalize our availability. After this realization, I felt better. I understood that I made a mistake and I better understand my role and how I should approach this type of thing.
All that to basically say that I feel like I'm rather in tune with my feelings. When I get mad, I really focus on why I am mad, why the event that made me mad happened, if there was any true ill-will or maybe just ignorance or an accident or some other ultimately non-vitriolic reason that it happened, and that typically calms me.
Now, handling or processing those feelings is another expedition entirely. I am the breadwinner of my household, so if I have money problems, I cannot look to anyone but myself to fix them. At work, I'm the lead dev - if there is a difficult problem to fix, there's no one to punt it to - I'm it. I have to do it, period. So if I'm nervous or upset or mad or whatever, all my negative emotions typically sail down 1 river and it arrives at inevitability. My only answer to that inevitability is to just get over it. There's no amount of crying or punching walls or whatever that will make my todo list smaller, it's just me so I just have to keep forging ahead. So instead of processing those emotions, I just ignore them. I put on the mask. I pretend I'm fine. Eventually, I am. I have a quote that pops up every time I go to unlock my phone by Robert Frost that is quite famous - "the best way out is always through" - it helps to ground me in tough times.
So, do I have emotional blindness? Maybe in a forced way. I know that's not healthy. I know I should talk to someone. I do, somewhat, in posts like these - anonymously on the internet, and that is therapeutic to me. This is my version of journaling, I suppose. Therapy just seems fake to me (and I know that's not valid, but it's just how I feel about it). I feel like I'm being profited from for not being better than I am. Ultimately, if the goal is to talk things out until some resolution or understanding appears from introspection (we call this 'rubber ducky debugging' in the tech world), then I will do that on my own. I'm ok, and even when I'm not, that's ok too. I have learned to live with my shortcomings and I've made it this far. Do I have advice? Sorry, none that I would consider healthy or perhaps mature enough to recommend.
If I'm feeling 'jumbled up', I literally sit down with a notebook and interrogate myself:
How do you feel?
Why do you feel this way?
Then just iterate over every item bit by bit, "to the atoms", as my kids are fond of saying when Mom and I give too many details.
If I'm feeling particularly proactive, I'll append with " what can you do about it"