Chapter Four: Delayed Emotional Responses

Now, for a much more random topic, here’s a train of thought I had one day about us Aspies and our weird emotions. And just to warn you, I’ll probably throw in the odd train of thought here and there in whatever strange order they pop into my head, so please accept my apologies in advance if some chapters come a little out of left field! It’s how my mind rolls.

Q:		Why do Aspies always seem so stoic? You look so blank when I would expect you to be crying, hugging, offering comfort, anything! Do you even have feelings the way the rest of us do?
A:		Wow. Oh dear.

Yes, I know we Aspies can seem a strange bunch when it comes to responding to drama or emotional news. I’ve had moments where I’m sure I looked blank when I know I should have been showing deep concern in response to something or where I even wanted to laugh at first until I realized something was really not funny (oops). Yet all I could muster at the time was an overwhelming self-consciousness about what my face was doing!

But I can assure you that any time we do look out of place in that heated situation, we’re not really as absent as we appear. We’re there, and we’re taking it all in. It’s just that sometimes our emotions can come to us in confusing ways and can take a little time to decipher.

I know when I have an emotional moment, I often find myself in this odd state where I’m so overwhelmed by feelings that all I could tell you on the spot is whether it’s negative or positive. I have no idea what this gut reaction actually is or how I should respond to it, just that something is overwhelming me. So I can find myself stuck like a deer in the headlights at these times, dumbfounded by the intensity of it.

Perhaps a large part of the problem is that feelings come on too strongly for me to interpret when they first hit, and I need to step back from the situation to calm down and process it clearly. To other people, I probably appear to remain a little too unmoved, but underneath, I’ll be scratching my head trying to figure out where on Earth these wild, irrational feelings are coming from. For that, I need time and peace and quiet to think.

Given enough time to ponder, however, I usually do manage to make sense of what my feelings have been. I personally have funny little ways of working through my emotions to try and force some sense out of my own brain. Do I feel more when I think about the person saying this line or that line? If this happened as a consequence, would it upset me? Oh, is that what I was worried about? Is that what was really bothering me? Until sixty-three and a half hours—and no sleep—later, I’m finally ready to respond! “Intellectual processing time complete. Please check back in now.”

But, of course, by that point, it’s far too late. Everyone else left hours ago!

And as much as it may seem odd after all my joking around the topic, often, several hours after an event, I can find myself quite distressed and badly in need of someone to talk to. My emotions—especially sadness and depression—get extremely heavy. Not heavy the way a typical person would feel, but the particularly hard-hitting Aspie version (intensity times ten).

So it’s unfortunate that people often walk away from Aspies assuming the opposite of us. They see us looking unresponsive at emotional times and make assumptions about us being cold or unsupportive. They assume we’re poor friends or partners—unfeeling, perhaps. But that’s not what’s going on at all. We do have feelings—extremely intense feelings. Sometimes it just takes time.