Regulating Emotions

 One autistic trait that has been a constant for me throughout my life has been the struggle to regulate my emotions.

 It’s very difficult to describe this. As with all sensory issues , I feel emotions at an extreme level. When I feel joy it is euphoria . Love, it’s a wonderfully fulfilling feeling for me. Sadness , well that becomes a Greek tragedy in short order. Anger, it takes me to an inner defcon 1  where it feels like pure hatred towards the situation or person/persons I feel responsible for what ever has made me angry.

When I was young , early teen years and before, when experiencing emotions in the extreme I would feel compelled to act on them. Acting on the feelings of love and joy would just be to allow the feelings to manifest themselves and enjoy the ride.

Acting on feelings of sadness would leave me in a state of contemplating all of the sorrows I percieved in the world around me as if they were my own. I would feel doom and gloom for days.

Anger, well that’s the worst. As a child I was incapable of controlling my anger. I would lash out physically because in that state I could not use any of my higher cortex’s reasoning ability. I would often fight with my siblings and peers.

Ofcourse life is difficult ,to say the least, when you have little to no control over any of your emotions. I learned as a young teenager to hide my emotions as to not make myself a target of ridicule or abuse.

I would and still do mask all of my emotional reactions so that others would not be aware of the extreme nature of my existence. This has allowed me to participate in society but always having to keep my distance from issues or things I care about that might invoke emotion.

Having my eyes tear up when discussing sad things with professional colleagues is so very embarrassing. Having to choose to be mute instead of engaging in a reasonable conversation when suppressing anger has always left me at the mercy of those I may be engaging with. 

Suppressing my negative emotions has always been a leading reason for my autistic meltdowns. Meltdowns are a subject unto themselves that I will attempt to describe in another post.

Allowing pleasant emotions to run their coarse has always been what I can only describe as bliss. It’s rare that I am able to share that feeling with anyone and there have been times when I can feel resentment from others at having the ability to have such mundane seeming experiences give me such satisfaction.

It’s a trade off I guess. I can have the most wonderful sense of happiness but I can also have the deepest of sorrows and furious rage. All at the drop of a hat. 

I have melancholy . It can feel extreme too, as odd as that must sound. In that state I feel as if no emotions can touch me. I’m not above , I’m not below, extra medium is how it feels. 

When I am amongst people and I feel the onset of an  emotion that I don’t feel is appropriate for that setting I will immediately try to create a barrier between my emotions and my outward appearance. Opposite of that there are times I overshare emotional information with colleagues when I don’t recognize the emotion as being too personal for communal sharing . Knowing when others may be made to feel akward by me sharing emotions has always been a struggle as well. I spend so much time attempting to regulate my own emotions that I rarely take into consideration the emotions of others.

I’m not sure if empathy is an emotion but it is rarely my 1st reaction. I feel sympathy in spades. If I recognize the suffering of another I feel their pain as if it’s my own.

Difficulty with regulating my emotions has truly been the bane of my existence. If I could just not care or put the proper amount of concern on any particular situation I think life would be much more simple.