AUTISM IN COMPANY - ALEXITHYMIA|Purple Ella 

Oliver Hatched yes Oliver, I do know😘

A second opinion is in order...

Me too T -T

Time to find an ASD specialist 😊

Trying to understand a loved one. That's so foreign to me. Thank you!

So how did you process Darth Vader telling Luke to "search his feelings?"

I do this. Haha. Or when I look at my partner and I KNOW I love him but I look at him and don't FEEL it. And somedays I look at him and feel it

I miss people I just may not realize it until I actually see them again that I missed them lol

Great personal training. Yes. Practice, practice, practice.

"I was unable to feel love to the same extent as others" Don't mean to be mean (or rude), but I would recommend exchanging "to..extent" by "in...way". My rationale is that everyone is "trapped" within their own being, so there is no reliable way to know exactly, if we mean the same "things" when using the same words. Your feelings are yours, and yours alone, and if you need to find a new language for them -- than that's just the way things are. If anything, that would make you more of a human, for our meaning of life is to figure out meaning. Kicking and screaming, if need be.

You say that, but it's easy to feel like you're wrong and unnatural when everything else says you are. You're never going to find a 16-year-old girl reading a book about how people feel their emotions differently, you're going to find her reading a cheesy Young Adult novel with an unnecessary romance thrown in that uses overly flowery language. When all the media you consume romanticizes emotions to the extent that it does, and you don't feel that, you feel like you're broken.

maiynnai yes yes yes, a million times yes! I can barely deal with myself...and then I have to deal with your emotions too?? 😕...and I will...deal with your emotions first (if you allow) ...friggin exhausting...so I just keep a lot to myself...

I try not to make other people's reactions a problem. Everyone is on their own journey, and we never know what is going on in other peoples lives.

I totally understand. I often have the same feeling, and it makes me think that I don’t inspire sympathy. It’s one of the most hurtful things I know to have felt,, when you don’t know how to ask for support..

It's tricky because often I find that others dont know what to say (my partner) but other people ca be really wonderful. The fact is, saying you're not fine may only be a temporary thing and otherwise you are actually a perfect awesome human being who is trying to adapt to the world

@@PurpleElla key word for me is try. That looks like masking. Can lead to shutdown or burnout if it's chronic. I'm 71 and having lived with misunderstanding and its repercussions, hearing you & Ros speak so naturally about hitherto unheard of experience feels refreshingly validating. Thank you.

I tested yesterday and my stomach wouldn't shut up

I've recently noticed feeling nauseated when identifying the presence of a physiological response to a thought. Journaling the experience using detailed description seems to be increasing my emotion capacity and the nausea leaves sooner when I acknowledge it as a signal I've received. I learned this through the practice of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Thank you for sharing your symptom of feeling physically sick. I felt sick a lot as a child and had many absences from school and work that had me feeling self-conscious and defensive and ashamed. The video and comments with the opportunity to reply is very helpful for me.

@@lindadunn8787 defensive like if someone is mad, u feel like it was you even if it has nothing to do with you?

That's an important question. Relating in ways that are mutually satisfying can seem nearly impossible and also essential. Practicing living within respectful boundaries and developing ever healthier listening skills seem like worthy goals to me. My ex-husband died a few years ago. He had two divorces after ours. Our communication difficulties continue to reverberate hurtfully through our children's and grandchildren's lives. And, so does our love. No magic solutions. Hope, gratitude, and reality.

Ok, not criticizing because I totally do it, but if you could harness all that fidgeting! You could power a generator. Personally, I'm fixated on the key inside Ros' shirt (not in a creepy way.)

What is ASC?

I had my volume up to 100 and I still can't understand!

Your mother may have developed when young a strategy of telling herself over and overigens er that she is fine, might be in reaction to a cold unresponsive environment by one or both of the parents or oeople she lived with. My mother, in hindsight was most likely on the spectrum. Her mother was not warm and kind to her most of the time, she always got a lot of negative remarks from het mother and on top of that she was the wldest of 6 chuldren and was not at all acknowledged in her feelings and emotions. She had major difficulties in expressing her love, except when you were sick. She would say very negative things straight in your face when you cane to visit, barely said hello, but say things like what did you do with your hair it looks awful, or wht the heck are you wearing now! In a very harsh and very derogatory way. I think she also had difficulty to understand her own emotions because her own mother treated her more like a servant and was very harsh and unloving towards her. She adopted a stoic attitude, take it on the chin but i know from experience with myself that that can lead to not recognising your own emotions at all, lock them in a cupboard as a copiing mechanism to not fall apart. My.mother did however have a sense of justice and of what is fair. She realised she hadnt been the good mother she really thought she was. She was linky for the last 15byears of her life because we had trouble visiting her because she scolded us from the time we were toddlers and still was doing it even when we were adults. Your mother seems to blame other people, that could be a sign of narcistic pers9nality disorder. People with this disorder are often manipulative and gaslight other people. They dont have much capacity to self reflect and think they are great and are very much entitled to manipulate and gaslight and use other people. There is a spectrum as well with that disorder, some people can be helped by psychological therapies, but often their ability to look inside themself is almost or totally non existent and that incapacity does not help with dealing with them and the increasing lonrliness and dissatisfaction with life they often experience as they grow older. It is not a common condition, not that many people have this condition. There are people whomare celf centred who do not have this condition of npd, yet non psychologically trained people often call such a person a narcisist. Same with manipulative people or people who gaslight others. Becaiuse my mother had a good heart and really cared for her children, most of the time when she was so critical in the first few minutes of my visit, i would hug her and tell her and meaning it with all my heart: yes mother i love you too. It would unnerve her because she yearned to be hugged, at least thT is what i saw in her from when i was 3, but at the same time felt awkward when someone hugged her cause she got very few cuddles when ahe was young and also because of being on the autism spectrum, even though she was never diagnosed by an autism expert. She died in 1999 so i cant tell her now face to face my connclusion of her nor ask her about her not liking to be hugged.