I was reading along and thinking of my own answers to these as I went. Entranced is an interesting one. I don't think I experience this with people, but I can feel entranced by certain sights or concepts, particularly things that I am fixated on (interests and whatnot). I feel indifferent/apathetic a great deal of the time, and people tend to see that as a very negative thing. I do not. It is simply my neutral state of being, and I tend to remain in that state a great deal more than most others.
I am curious, how intensely can you (genuinely) laugh? Do you ever have the experience of laughing so hard that your abdomen begins to ache?
I think that experience is typically associated with very intense emotion, so I wonder whether that could occur in those who do not experience intense emotions at all.
That is interesting. That is usually how I hear it described, though laughing so hard that one cries is another way. Either way, I didn't know that psychopaths could experience such intense laughter. Perhaps I struggle to separate it from intense emotion in my mind.
Personally I don't think neurotypicals understand emotions. To be honest, I don't either, but I feel like their views of them are extremely biased and anecdotal. I've been handed out this same feelings wheel in various groups and never understood it. I'm not very adept at identifying my own emotions; I only know when I have too much or too little of an emotion's expression based on outsiders' feedback.
An inability to express care very accurately is why I appreciate that my closest friend is autistic too - her dad just passed unexpectedly and she appreciated me sitting on the phone not having a damn clue what to say except "I'm sorry, that sounds really sad," while she worked through processing it.
In contrast, a few years ago, someone I considered a friend's cat died. "How old was she?" "20." "Wow, you got a lot of mileage out of her, that's super old for a cat." She called me a psychopath for making an observation and that's how I realized that must not have been socially appropriate.
I have always felt like neurotypicals expressing what they perceive as emotional empathy towards my various situations is quite literally the equivalent of being a deer in headlights. It blinds me, it's confusing, and I can never dodge quite in time before the impact.
hey Indigo: my friend's dog went to dog heaven this past week. A really close dog that we all loved.
Of course, I felt the same way as you, knowing any comment could go astray fast. He couldn't really remember exactly how old she was and we pieced together that she must be well over 15 years.
there I was venturing out that is 105 in dog years... complete silence...
and then he said "oh that is right".
Your friend responded badly to you. On the plus side, she calls you a psychopath!!
See? There is good in everyone!! Hehehe. Best wishes always
As an NT, emotions are as fundamental to my reality as my sense of sight, taste, touch, etc. There are also like, "meta" emotions...the way I feel about the way I feel. (ie "is it reasonable to feel this way?" - if I decide the answer is no, I might feel contempt toward myself, or ridicule myself inwardly).
The ability to assess emotions on different cognitive levels and draw useful, practical conclusions from them is a skill. You learn to apply it to yourself and others as well. Like "if I do X, it will most likely make him feel Y, so in order to spare him from having to deal with that, I'll modify my behavior and do Z instead." Some people never really develop this skill.
What's really amazing to me is YOUR ability to perform this kind of complex emotional labor even without ever having experienced the emotions themselves. Unlike the basic experience of emotions, there is nothing fundamental or primitive about this. It is a highly complex, cognitively demanding social task. It requires the ability to accurately model other people's emotional states at a high level and behave accordingly. I can't imagine being able to develop this skill without having your own internal emotional experience as a reference to guide you.
I mean obviously, it's possible to model people's emotions accurately and respond correctly without necessarily feeling every single thing that person is going through at that moment. But I can't imagine learning this skill more or less blindly, especially considering a lot of NTs never come anywhere near mastering it or even learning it well enough to get by. How do you learn to recognize and accurately model in others something that you have no personal concept of? Emotions can be highly nuanced and subtle. People often have incentives to hide the way they feel in social situations, and many people are quite good at it. So it really is fascinating that psychopaths can nevertheless develop a highly calibrated understanding of what specific emotions look like in others and distinguish genuine emotions from faked or forced ones.
I suppose it is like cooking. If you understand the ingredients, and can read the recipe, most of the time, it will turn out well. The rest of it comes down to skill and practice, it seems,
I wonder if you being female corresponds to higher cognitive emotional intelligence than male psychopaths may have. Many studies have shown women tend to be naturally better than men at social cognition, reading body language and facial expressions, subconsciously picking up on very subtle social cues, etc. Of course, this is not a scientific consensus and may be totally separate from your cognitive social skills altogether. But I wonder if there's a correlation.
By the way, I disagree with you that apathy is not an emotional state. I experience it as an unpleasant detachment from high-stakes situations over which I can exert no influence at all. It's like being stuck in a sleepwalking state in your real life, unable to rouse yourself enough to even panic as things go terribly wrong all around you. But although it isn't pleasant, it also does not rise to a level that would qualify as suffering, to me.
Anxiety feels like...the best way I can describe it is to think of those moments in your life when you have been startled. That jolt of adrenaline...only it doesn't go away. Your internal equilibrium doesn't restore itself. You are maximally alert, but it feels very bad. Like if you were on an airplane and it caught on fire and you were certain your life would end within the next few minutes and you have just that short space of time to process that news. Not pleasant. It's so difficult to convey the experience of terror. It's such a distinct emotion.
Out of curiosity, how WOULD you feel if you were in an airplane and it was going down in flames and you knew for certain your life would end in the next 10 minutes? Would you be calm, do you think? Like, your blood pressure wouldn't rise at all? I'm trying to wrap my head around what it would be like to LACK existential terror. Would you be like "well, goddamn it. This took an inconvenient turn." And then just quietly go back to whatever you were reading?
Hmm, for that to be true, my Significant Other wouldn't have been the one to teach me how to understand, given that he is male.
Perhaps I do not understand apathy.
No idea. I wouldn't know until I was there, but in situations in the past, it simply is what it is. I see if I can do anything, and after I have done all I can, deal with what comes next.
It is not that all women are better at it than all men, but that high number of women exceed high number of men. One in fifty or hundred or two hundred men can of course exceed those average women together with their average male peers. And the higher intelligence the better resources to comprehend different perspectives than one's own. Of course, intelligence can be also very very instrumental so even if high, it won't build models in this area, but it just is more promising than low intelligence in understanding something outside.
Apathy - I think that if you cannot be overwhelmed, you cannot be apathetic either. You experience indifference by default, but that is heat-resistance, whereas apathy has more to do with burn-out.
I think that words are at different times used with a different meaning and sometimes convey disinterest of "meh, I don't want to" and at other times state that is a symptom of being at one's wits' end. Apathy in that other sense often accompanies depression. Audrey described the experience of knowing she should be regrouping, but experiencing lack of genuine internal motivation that should be there, so I followed up on that.
Maybe the best and most informative thing to do here is to visit wiki article, compete with how Stoics used the word next to how Christians used the word, next to how psychologists characterized shell-shocked peple with the word and all the other concepts and observation of its manifestation.
As an emotional person... This wheel seems off-kilter.
I kinda dislike that attention axis of interest vs surprise. Like yes, if you weren't paying attention and then something smacks you in the face and is harshly demanding that you process a lot, ok, you got surprised. Interest in balanced, surprise is when you are suddenly unbalanced and are trying to get your footing again. But... Surprise is also result of things developing differently then you expected even when you were paying attention. And what about surprises being pleasant and unpleasant? But back to terms... Astonished you would be about unexpected development, whereas distracted sounds more like state which causes, that something surprises you. Which might be caused by boredom, when mind tries to entertain itself by its own thoughts or some different sensor input, or by being very much not bored by preoccupied by some internal tormoil to the point it has no resources to spare for processing the outside. Yeah, yu are distarcted and likely to be surprised by something. Once something suprises you, you are no longer distracted, but paying rapt attention to something. Ok, susprising discovery at the end of intentional attentive process is also a thing. Hmm, mabe they mean surprising element as distracting from the initial target of attention inwhich case it is deemed a distraction rather than rnewed attention? Oh well. We gotta look at the physical experience. It is jolting, it is arousal, tension, the pressure to compute quickly, which might either go well morphing into joy, or not well, which could lead to fear (oh, shit what do i do, what do i do, what do i do) or irritation and/or disapointment (this does not make sense, so stupid, why do i have to deal with this...). Overwhelment can be result disliking the evaluated surprise, or of unsuccesful processing of a surprise or too intense arousal (especially if one was already under pressure of something else, you know, dam breaking, camel's back breaking). I'd say startle can be seen as initial short version and astonishment would be when after initial startling you start processing and whoah whoah that stufff in front of your eyes is staggering so instead of arousal going down, it remains at high level onwards or even goes higher, either way something is exceptional. Dog suddenly barking would be startling, dog speaking in human lunguage would be astonishing.
Apathy/numbness isn't really an emotion, but it is a state characterized by muting of emotions that are otherwise loud and present and colourful and it can be experienced just as emotions can be experienced. Yeah, this wheel should be labeled experiences rather than emotions. Aaand... It is in disgust group? Hmm... Maybe it is mean as this reserved indifference in the ssense of ircuitry closing off to keep that thing out and stop it from affecting us? Non-receptivity withdrawing rather than non-receptivity due to being beyond ability to process or just not finding things important. Still feels like wrong choice. Like... Someone beaing treated with apathy feels rejected and thus files it as disgust response, but apathy as internal state is really not being affeted or being beyond affected. I dislike this wheel.
Loving would be something warm radiating outside and flowing towards something, this desire to give out of yourself. All else is just less important than paying attention to that object and pouring yourself out for it, into it. But the other side of coin is desire to take in and if one would take without consideration then plenty people would say it ain't love.
Maybe I'll comment on the rest later, but for now I am done.
I don't really see her in terms of her hair: but that she is delicate and cute.
As I go through your post, the various sub-sections, Proud-Self Acceptance, Joyful Gain, Intrigued-Attentive, I find myself agreeing with your reactions.
You have flashes of anger. Me too.
You mention "apathetic", a bit: don't feel emotions. I think that is what I am.
When I first posted, this morning, I asked myself if I had experienced "emotion" since I got up: I don't think I did.
I don't think I have since either (experienced emotion beyond a joke or laughter)
As far as I can tell, I am some of those things, confident, self assured, etc. But not as feelings that change up and down depending on the day.
BTW: I asked my friend about trust as a feeling: She said trust is a feeling to her and her husband! His trust in her, relative to her cheating on him, is based on his feelings!!
LOL- what a gruesome way to live, enslaved by "feelings".
I experience some of the things you do: Just now, I went into town shopping. As I plastic wrap my veggies, a worker comes up and starts talking to me. He remembers my name, the state I am from, where I live, you name it. I talked to him once: 6 or 7 months ago.
Before he finishes, this other guy trots up and asks if I remember him: From three years ago when he sold me something in a bookstore where he works. They both talk so long, I think the store is closing.
As I am driving home, I remember several other times, recently, where I am just going in my day, and people call my name, come up and want to talk.
This is Ivy, a female with an interest in pathophysiology.
Please heal, empower, enfranchise, emancipate and protect me from the narcissistic mother-child, narcissistic family dynamic wherein my narcissistic Negro mother acts dour, submissive, a pushover, a doormat for people to walk all over (partly motivated by the fact that I am 34 and unmarried and in Africa, assertive mothers are sen to have extremely difficult daughters nobody wants to marry. Thus her being submissive and a doormat is to make people see me and my sister as wife material and for us to come across as appealing to others.)
As well as to attempt dominating, oppressing, power over, making deferential to them, docile to them if in any event I appear Westernized and dominant in my personality type.
So that we don't ever gravitate toward such pushovers like my narcissistic Mom who attempt being incredibly domineering and who huff and puff in a bid to subdue and subjugate us and so that others recognize and accept that it's impossible to attempt using such pushovers like my Narcissistic Mom to attempt controlling, dominating, oppressing or subjugating us.
This was quite interesting.
I was reading along and thinking of my own answers to these as I went. Entranced is an interesting one. I don't think I experience this with people, but I can feel entranced by certain sights or concepts, particularly things that I am fixated on (interests and whatnot). I feel indifferent/apathetic a great deal of the time, and people tend to see that as a very negative thing. I do not. It is simply my neutral state of being, and I tend to remain in that state a great deal more than most others.
I am curious, how intensely can you (genuinely) laugh? Do you ever have the experience of laughing so hard that your abdomen begins to ache?
I think that experience is typically associated with very intense emotion, so I wonder whether that could occur in those who do not experience intense emotions at all.
I've laughed so hard I've cried, I don't know about the stomach part, though.
That is interesting. That is usually how I hear it described, though laughing so hard that one cries is another way. Either way, I didn't know that psychopaths could experience such intense laughter. Perhaps I struggle to separate it from intense emotion in my mind.
It's never been anything past finding something funny for me
great post. I thought the same of Athena Laughing. Imagine her YouTube just laughing!!
Personally I don't think neurotypicals understand emotions. To be honest, I don't either, but I feel like their views of them are extremely biased and anecdotal. I've been handed out this same feelings wheel in various groups and never understood it. I'm not very adept at identifying my own emotions; I only know when I have too much or too little of an emotion's expression based on outsiders' feedback.
An inability to express care very accurately is why I appreciate that my closest friend is autistic too - her dad just passed unexpectedly and she appreciated me sitting on the phone not having a damn clue what to say except "I'm sorry, that sounds really sad," while she worked through processing it.
In contrast, a few years ago, someone I considered a friend's cat died. "How old was she?" "20." "Wow, you got a lot of mileage out of her, that's super old for a cat." She called me a psychopath for making an observation and that's how I realized that must not have been socially appropriate.
I have always felt like neurotypicals expressing what they perceive as emotional empathy towards my various situations is quite literally the equivalent of being a deer in headlights. It blinds me, it's confusing, and I can never dodge quite in time before the impact.
Good post!
I mean... that's pretty old for a cat though
that was my thought exactly, like that's some mileage man. but i guess it was 'insensitive' or whatever, ha
hey Indigo: my friend's dog went to dog heaven this past week. A really close dog that we all loved.
Of course, I felt the same way as you, knowing any comment could go astray fast. He couldn't really remember exactly how old she was and we pieced together that she must be well over 15 years.
there I was venturing out that is 105 in dog years... complete silence...
and then he said "oh that is right".
Your friend responded badly to you. On the plus side, she calls you a psychopath!!
See? There is good in everyone!! Hehehe. Best wishes always
As an NT, emotions are as fundamental to my reality as my sense of sight, taste, touch, etc. There are also like, "meta" emotions...the way I feel about the way I feel. (ie "is it reasonable to feel this way?" - if I decide the answer is no, I might feel contempt toward myself, or ridicule myself inwardly).
The ability to assess emotions on different cognitive levels and draw useful, practical conclusions from them is a skill. You learn to apply it to yourself and others as well. Like "if I do X, it will most likely make him feel Y, so in order to spare him from having to deal with that, I'll modify my behavior and do Z instead." Some people never really develop this skill.
What's really amazing to me is YOUR ability to perform this kind of complex emotional labor even without ever having experienced the emotions themselves. Unlike the basic experience of emotions, there is nothing fundamental or primitive about this. It is a highly complex, cognitively demanding social task. It requires the ability to accurately model other people's emotional states at a high level and behave accordingly. I can't imagine being able to develop this skill without having your own internal emotional experience as a reference to guide you.
I mean obviously, it's possible to model people's emotions accurately and respond correctly without necessarily feeling every single thing that person is going through at that moment. But I can't imagine learning this skill more or less blindly, especially considering a lot of NTs never come anywhere near mastering it or even learning it well enough to get by. How do you learn to recognize and accurately model in others something that you have no personal concept of? Emotions can be highly nuanced and subtle. People often have incentives to hide the way they feel in social situations, and many people are quite good at it. So it really is fascinating that psychopaths can nevertheless develop a highly calibrated understanding of what specific emotions look like in others and distinguish genuine emotions from faked or forced ones.
I suppose it is like cooking. If you understand the ingredients, and can read the recipe, most of the time, it will turn out well. The rest of it comes down to skill and practice, it seems,
I wonder if you being female corresponds to higher cognitive emotional intelligence than male psychopaths may have. Many studies have shown women tend to be naturally better than men at social cognition, reading body language and facial expressions, subconsciously picking up on very subtle social cues, etc. Of course, this is not a scientific consensus and may be totally separate from your cognitive social skills altogether. But I wonder if there's a correlation.
By the way, I disagree with you that apathy is not an emotional state. I experience it as an unpleasant detachment from high-stakes situations over which I can exert no influence at all. It's like being stuck in a sleepwalking state in your real life, unable to rouse yourself enough to even panic as things go terribly wrong all around you. But although it isn't pleasant, it also does not rise to a level that would qualify as suffering, to me.
Anxiety feels like...the best way I can describe it is to think of those moments in your life when you have been startled. That jolt of adrenaline...only it doesn't go away. Your internal equilibrium doesn't restore itself. You are maximally alert, but it feels very bad. Like if you were on an airplane and it caught on fire and you were certain your life would end within the next few minutes and you have just that short space of time to process that news. Not pleasant. It's so difficult to convey the experience of terror. It's such a distinct emotion.
Out of curiosity, how WOULD you feel if you were in an airplane and it was going down in flames and you knew for certain your life would end in the next 10 minutes? Would you be calm, do you think? Like, your blood pressure wouldn't rise at all? I'm trying to wrap my head around what it would be like to LACK existential terror. Would you be like "well, goddamn it. This took an inconvenient turn." And then just quietly go back to whatever you were reading?
Hmm, for that to be true, my Significant Other wouldn't have been the one to teach me how to understand, given that he is male.
Perhaps I do not understand apathy.
No idea. I wouldn't know until I was there, but in situations in the past, it simply is what it is. I see if I can do anything, and after I have done all I can, deal with what comes next.
It is not that all women are better at it than all men, but that high number of women exceed high number of men. One in fifty or hundred or two hundred men can of course exceed those average women together with their average male peers. And the higher intelligence the better resources to comprehend different perspectives than one's own. Of course, intelligence can be also very very instrumental so even if high, it won't build models in this area, but it just is more promising than low intelligence in understanding something outside.
Apathy - I think that if you cannot be overwhelmed, you cannot be apathetic either. You experience indifference by default, but that is heat-resistance, whereas apathy has more to do with burn-out.
Hmm, that's interesting. So, apathetic does not mean, "meh, I don't want to?, then.
I think that words are at different times used with a different meaning and sometimes convey disinterest of "meh, I don't want to" and at other times state that is a symptom of being at one's wits' end. Apathy in that other sense often accompanies depression. Audrey described the experience of knowing she should be regrouping, but experiencing lack of genuine internal motivation that should be there, so I followed up on that.
Maybe the best and most informative thing to do here is to visit wiki article, compete with how Stoics used the word next to how Christians used the word, next to how psychologists characterized shell-shocked peple with the word and all the other concepts and observation of its manifestation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apathy
This wheel is very confusing. It's mixing emotions and feelings which, as far as I know, are two different things.
I agree, it isn't very clear to me either.
I havent choosen this theme,the theme has choosen me hahah.Good post
As an emotional person... This wheel seems off-kilter.
I kinda dislike that attention axis of interest vs surprise. Like yes, if you weren't paying attention and then something smacks you in the face and is harshly demanding that you process a lot, ok, you got surprised. Interest in balanced, surprise is when you are suddenly unbalanced and are trying to get your footing again. But... Surprise is also result of things developing differently then you expected even when you were paying attention. And what about surprises being pleasant and unpleasant? But back to terms... Astonished you would be about unexpected development, whereas distracted sounds more like state which causes, that something surprises you. Which might be caused by boredom, when mind tries to entertain itself by its own thoughts or some different sensor input, or by being very much not bored by preoccupied by some internal tormoil to the point it has no resources to spare for processing the outside. Yeah, yu are distarcted and likely to be surprised by something. Once something suprises you, you are no longer distracted, but paying rapt attention to something. Ok, susprising discovery at the end of intentional attentive process is also a thing. Hmm, mabe they mean surprising element as distracting from the initial target of attention inwhich case it is deemed a distraction rather than rnewed attention? Oh well. We gotta look at the physical experience. It is jolting, it is arousal, tension, the pressure to compute quickly, which might either go well morphing into joy, or not well, which could lead to fear (oh, shit what do i do, what do i do, what do i do) or irritation and/or disapointment (this does not make sense, so stupid, why do i have to deal with this...). Overwhelment can be result disliking the evaluated surprise, or of unsuccesful processing of a surprise or too intense arousal (especially if one was already under pressure of something else, you know, dam breaking, camel's back breaking). I'd say startle can be seen as initial short version and astonishment would be when after initial startling you start processing and whoah whoah that stufff in front of your eyes is staggering so instead of arousal going down, it remains at high level onwards or even goes higher, either way something is exceptional. Dog suddenly barking would be startling, dog speaking in human lunguage would be astonishing.
Apathy/numbness isn't really an emotion, but it is a state characterized by muting of emotions that are otherwise loud and present and colourful and it can be experienced just as emotions can be experienced. Yeah, this wheel should be labeled experiences rather than emotions. Aaand... It is in disgust group? Hmm... Maybe it is mean as this reserved indifference in the ssense of ircuitry closing off to keep that thing out and stop it from affecting us? Non-receptivity withdrawing rather than non-receptivity due to being beyond ability to process or just not finding things important. Still feels like wrong choice. Like... Someone beaing treated with apathy feels rejected and thus files it as disgust response, but apathy as internal state is really not being affeted or being beyond affected. I dislike this wheel.
Loving would be something warm radiating outside and flowing towards something, this desire to give out of yourself. All else is just less important than paying attention to that object and pouring yourself out for it, into it. But the other side of coin is desire to take in and if one would take without consideration then plenty people would say it ain't love.
Maybe I'll comment on the rest later, but for now I am done.
I didn't think apathy was an emotion either, but I may well be that I simply don't understand it.
I like the title!! And your work! Thanks again for all you do.
PS: The Hair Girl is really cute.
I agree, she is
I don't really see her in terms of her hair: but that she is delicate and cute.
As I go through your post, the various sub-sections, Proud-Self Acceptance, Joyful Gain, Intrigued-Attentive, I find myself agreeing with your reactions.
You have flashes of anger. Me too.
You mention "apathetic", a bit: don't feel emotions. I think that is what I am.
When I first posted, this morning, I asked myself if I had experienced "emotion" since I got up: I don't think I did.
I don't think I have since either (experienced emotion beyond a joke or laughter)
As far as I can tell, I am some of those things, confident, self assured, etc. But not as feelings that change up and down depending on the day.
BTW: I asked my friend about trust as a feeling: She said trust is a feeling to her and her husband! His trust in her, relative to her cheating on him, is based on his feelings!!
LOL- what a gruesome way to live, enslaved by "feelings".
It was well said in Royals:
Life is great without a care
We aren't caught up in your love affair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pes4P3T0PA
LOL. Can I call you Queen Bee?
I experience some of the things you do: Just now, I went into town shopping. As I plastic wrap my veggies, a worker comes up and starts talking to me. He remembers my name, the state I am from, where I live, you name it. I talked to him once: 6 or 7 months ago.
Before he finishes, this other guy trots up and asks if I remember him: From three years ago when he sold me something in a bookstore where he works. They both talk so long, I think the store is closing.
As I am driving home, I remember several other times, recently, where I am just going in my day, and people call my name, come up and want to talk.
I have no interest in being queen. Far too much responsibility.
As for people wanting to talk, I get that as well, and do not prefer it.
This is Ivy, a female with an interest in pathophysiology.
Please heal, empower, enfranchise, emancipate and protect me from the narcissistic mother-child, narcissistic family dynamic wherein my narcissistic Negro mother acts dour, submissive, a pushover, a doormat for people to walk all over (partly motivated by the fact that I am 34 and unmarried and in Africa, assertive mothers are sen to have extremely difficult daughters nobody wants to marry. Thus her being submissive and a doormat is to make people see me and my sister as wife material and for us to come across as appealing to others.)
As well as to attempt dominating, oppressing, power over, making deferential to them, docile to them if in any event I appear Westernized and dominant in my personality type.
So that we don't ever gravitate toward such pushovers like my narcissistic Mom who attempt being incredibly domineering and who huff and puff in a bid to subdue and subjugate us and so that others recognize and accept that it's impossible to attempt using such pushovers like my Narcissistic Mom to attempt controlling, dominating, oppressing or subjugating us.
Also do this for Diana, Ross and Franca too.
Thank you!
This does raise some questions. Like, when did you stop wanting what other people had, and what made you change?
I said in the post I never want what other people have.
I'm sure you said in other articles that you used to steal a lot as a child. Am I wrong?
Stealing had nothing to do with wanting what other people had. It had to do with wanting something.
Something that was of others. Why didn't you take it from the store or anything else?
I did. All the time
I see. Thanks for clearing this out!