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10:00pm February 17, 2012

➸ Icky Harry: bittergrapes: ickyharry: antidexterous replied to your post: I just...

missdorotheabrooke:

bittergrapes:

ickyharry:

antidexterous replied to your post: I just cannot it with allistic people anymore.

um, i’m bad at tone so please know that this isn’t meant in an angry way! but there ARE some people with “random feelings leaking all over.” depression,…

As an interested student as to the workings of the human condition, and an experienced doubter:

I feel like you’re really not accounting for sampling bias when you discuss what we’re talking about. It seems plausible to me that some people (and perhaps most/all autistic people, though I obviously am a bit skeptical of the validity of your sampling efforts) have a less randomly reactive emotional system than others, and so tracing the lineage of cause is more straightforward. I speak from my own experience that my mood sways too rapidly, and according to too many random stimuli, to be able to accurately account for all of it.

I also find it interesting that you describe autistic people as having such orderly emotional systems. In my general experience, people can be fantastically deceiving of themselves regarding their own emotions. I think a lot of being unable to explain one’s emotional responses to things emerges from one’s feelings clashing with one’s self-concept, especially when they have conditioned emotional responses to certain emotional responses: shame at having feelings of anger, or one of my favorite quotes from Infinite Jest, ‘a fear that is disguised as contempt that he disguises in gentleness’ or something like that.

I’m intrigued as to whether you’re implying that autistic people don’t lie to themselves about their feelings, don’t have self-conscious emotional responses regarding their emotional responses, or what. I feel like the process of self-conscious emotional responses to one’s emotional responses necessarily leads to the possibility of self-deception and obfuscation, so I feel like saying that you’re always right about what causes your feelings is like saying you don’t have those sorts of responses.

To quote a book I love,

“What does being wrong feel like? Not realizing that one was wrong. But being wrong. Once we realize we are wrong, we stop being wrong. We can’t know we are wrong and be wrong simultaneously. So then, being wrong very much feels like something: it feels like being right.” 

I never thought it was much worth mentioning before. Because it was just a thing I noticed, and not much more than that.  But I’ve seen kind of a few different clumps of autistic people here who, probably just because they happened to know each other and discuss this stuff, seemed to make some generalizations about autistic people based on their shared experiences. And it was stuff about logic and feelings. 

I was paying so little attention, and it’s hard for me to remember who is who online, that I don’t really know who it was. Or if it’s the same people.  But I definitely noticed some stuff that looked like people not noticing how many autistic people differ in regard to this kind of stuff. 

I’m autistic and I don’t have the kind of overdeveloped logical side some autistic people end up with.  I can push myself into a logical overdrive mode, but I can’t keep it up and most of the time my logical side seems pretty underdeveloped.  I can sort of “sprint” logically – go a long ways fast then drop off painfully. 

Note though:  I don’t consider logic and emotion opposites. I’m talking about both of them. But not as opposites. 

I feel a lot of emotions a lot of the time. Not because of mental illness.  In fact when my PTSD was more severe it made me suppress my emotions besides rage and terror. But in my more natural state, I have a lot more emotions than I have words for. Not because of alexithymia, but because there are a lot of very specific ones that go with very specific situations.  It would take an above average emotional vocabulary to even begin to put words on them.  And they blend into each other and stuff. 

I’m certain that there’s reasons for all of them. As in, there’s got to be some perception, experience, thought, random neurons firing, ruts, feedback loops, socialization, physiological stuff, etc.  (I have temporal lobe epilepsy. Random neurons firing is sometimes quite literal.)  But I can only see those reasons for some of them.  And often I’m wrong and it takes someone else to see the real reason. And sometimes even though there’s got to be a reason, I just don’t know it. 

But my experience of emotions, when they’re not being artificially suppressed and when my perceptions aren’t being diverted to something else… it’s pretty continuous. And there’s so many there are probably literally not names for all of the variations and blendings and so forth.  I’m far more aware of variation in my emotions than I am of language and that leaves me at a disadvantage in fully explaining my experiences.  But they’re there, and I can’t always explain them by a long shot.  It’s much easier for me to do a painting, or automatically express it through subtle variation in body movements.  (And yes other autistic people configured similarly to me, can usually read me pretty well.)

As far as leakage is concerned, I’d have to know what was meant. When I use the term leak when talking about emotions, it’s a non-derogatory thing that applies to everyone at times. Like when someone gets mad and starts slamming plates down, and everyone in the room can feel it even if that person doesn’t notice.  I do that sometimes and not others, like most people.  I think I did more of it when my emotions used to be either tightly compressed or explosive.  But I get the sense that’s not what the OP meant. 

Generally though I don’t analyze my emotions unless they’re giving me (or other people) trouble in some way.  Mostly I just experience them, the same as other sensory experiences.  When I do analyze them, it’s not always easy to find a cause on my own, and sometimes not possible at all. 

I’ve known a wide enough assortment of autistic people, to know that the way I experience the world is neither universal nor as rare as I once thought.

There’s sort of a stereotype of autism that’s cropped up online and other places where language use is prominent.  I think it’s probably actually a composite of several kinds of autistic people. But a common factor is extreme rationality.  That helps even people who have trouble in some aspects of language, gain the ability to use language well enough to be online a lot.  And such people have been finding each other for ages, and together figuring out what being autistic means to them.  And there’s several ways they can experience emotion that can make it be (or feel) fairly rational and orderly most of the time.  I’m aware of most of the emotional experiences in question, but I’m having trouble accessing the language to explain all the variations.  I’m afraid to even try for fear of leaving some out. 

(Understand I’ve had a really long time to get to know a lot of autistic people of various sorts and most of this is from people’s own words about themselves.  I’ve also got a large collection of books by autistic people.)

Also there’s lots of autistic people who are configured like the above who never make it online.  Often because of motor or perceptual issues preventing speech or typing.  Sometimes due to being in group homes that don’t have Internet.   It’s just that having that extreme rational configuration tends to help a lot in the kind of communication required to be online, if those other issues are absent. 

It’s getting harder to put one word in front of the other so apologies if I’m getting things wrong or too simple. I know how complex it is in real life. I’m having real trouble here.

So I’m configured in a very different way. There are lots of different ways besides the ones I mentioned, and besides mine. I just don’t have words right now. 

My way tends to being more sensory/perceptual/experiential in thinking, rather than rational.  I mean everyone’s a blend but for me idea-based thinking is hard, sort of a secondary backup mode, which is one reason I’m straining so hard right now to write.  My dominant is kind of concrete-sensory-intuitive, although that’s a horrible shorthand for a way of thinking most people don’t know is even possible.  Sort of a layer or more beneath the level where ideas form.  From what I can tell people like me aren’t the extreme minority I often think of based on online. We are just less likely to make it online – those that do have found ways to compensate well enough to use language.  There are often giant holes in surprising areas of our language skills even if we have superficially good language, and a single person may vary from no language to really good language and back in the course of the day.  But those of us who get online, at minimum can fake it well enough to get here. 

And from what I’ve seen, people like me are more likely to have very different emotional experiences than the dominant online stereotype of an autistic person.  Often we experience emotions that are always there, intense, and overwhelming, and have trouble mustering the capacity to analyze it.  Many of us also experience the really wide number of emotions I’ve tried to describe above, with emotion blending into our experiences of the world. 

I’ve also met many autistic people who… they lack a good language based means of communication, so I will not speak for them, but we can read each other (both ways) well enough for me to strongly suspect similarities.  And they’re not going to be online discussing their feelings unless they later on acquire the means to write about them. 

I’m only talking about people like me because I’m one of us so I know more of the specifics. I’m aware of many other sorts of people who don’t fall into the stereotype either. I just don’t feel qualified to talk about them at the moment, especially since I’m sick and not up to imagining other people’s kind of mind at the moment.  I just think those most frequently equipped to describe their emotional lives tend to be extremely logical and rational and that skews things, despite a huge number of exceptions.  So yeah… my emotional life is very different than any generalization about autistic people I’ve ever seen on tumblr, and than most generalizations I have seen elsewhere.  And I’m not the only one.