River: Seeing the fnords

[mdlbear]

Over the last month or so I've realized that most of what I thought I knew about myself is simply wrong. That's unsettling. The most recent epiphany, as of yesterday, was realizing that much of my behavior is explained as avoidance of conflict rather than embarrassment.

(This seems to explain a lot: some of my hatred of sports, lack of competitiveness, inability to ask for things where I might have to argue for them, inability to talk with Colleen about finances and some other matters, excessive apologizing,... More on this later, perhaps.)

I've also realized that I still have no idea what most of my real problems are. I know that they're mostly a set of habits I've developed to avoid things I find painful: conflict, embarrassment, thinking about my (depressed) mood... I don't yet have the tools for identifying them, much less fixing them -- it's hard to see all the fnords.

OK, new tag: fnords.

Once I see one of these problems I can start thinking about how to fix it. Or deciding whether or when it's a problem: avoiding conflict is probably a good thing, much of the time. So is avoiding embarrassment. But sometimes they get in the way of other goals; I can't make an informed decision if the avoidance maneuver is so automatic that I don't have time to think about it. It's like a kid who automatically replies "no" to every question -- I remember being that kid once, when asked whether I wanted to go to the zoo. Oops. Probably lots of other times that I don't remember.

I have enough trouble trying to figure out what my mood even is. Discovered a couple of days ago that I can't always distinguish reliably between anxiety and depression, which ought to feel different somehow. And how do I tell whether my mood has gotten better than "just OK" when I don't have anything better to calibrate it against? How, for that matter, do I distinguish between what I actually feel and what I think I ought to be feeling given my analysis of the situation?

This has gotten disjointed, and appears to be turning into a mere list of "this is hard" complaints. It is hard, but I should probably stop now.

Comments

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go back the the analogy of people hearing notes. Almost everyone does hear pitch. Many people ignore it totally, thus leading to a lack of being able to tell things like "am I singing the same pitch as everyone else". It's not that their ears lack the ability, it's that they don't know what to listen to, or how to evaluate it.

But as they pay attention, their brains learn how to use the input from their ears.

Likewise, as you pay attention, you will learn.

And if you're not sure what you're feeling, you can (if you want) describe it to someone and have them give you possible words. I've had the experience of someone asking what was bugging me, in the form of "are you feeling x?" and telling them "no, that's not right" but on thinking more about it, deciding that they were, at least partially, correct.

[mdlbear]

I often don't have either the vocabulary to describe what I'm feeling, or the (training? experience?) required to notice something describable. Does that make sense? Yeah; it's a lot like ear training, except that with listening to music there's an objective reality: you can play two notes and tell me that the interval is called a minor third, and I can try to identify that interval again the next time I hear it.

I don't have any objective reality I can refer to. That makes it harder.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's subjective. But the brain (most people's brains) are wired to express emotions with the same facial expressions, though this is modulated somewhat by culture. Brains also generally have "mirroring" circuitry--people can tell, in part, how someone else is feeling because their brains automatically imagine what they would be feeling to have that facial expression (for instance).

In some people, this mirroring is weak; I'm guessing that is true for you. But you could try looking at yourself in the mirror while thinking about different things, and then compare your facial expression to the ones other people say are associated with different feelings. There may even be some book or other resource used to teach autistic kids these things that you might find helpful.

Of course, your innate facial and body language expression may not be standard, but it's nonetheless a place to start. And facial expression, posture, and the like, are at least objective, even if they are interpreted subjectively.

Like you noticing you slowed down when you thought about making a phone call--the depression was subjective (i.e. internally experienced--the chemical state of your brain is, of course, an objective reality, even though you have no way to put a sample in a test tube to determine what it was), but the slower walking was objective, and didn't take any special training or equipment to notice.

(Most people don't realize it, or perhaps don't like to think of it in cold scientific terms, but emotions are biochemical in nature.)