There are a host of reasons I find it difficult to interact with groups of people in public: pressure to dres up in uncomfortable clothes and shoes and makeup, lights and noise, smells, eating food that is the wrong taste or texture, feeling like I’m having to put on a fake face and generally give away energy to others. But one that I haven’t looked into carefully is: picking up other people’s emotions.
One of the major problems is that I’m not aware that I’m doing this. I’m 53 years old and I think this year is the first time I actually identified what was going on and tried to figure out how to tell myself to let go of emotions that weren’t mine and send them back into the universe or toward the people to whom they belonged. Most people think of autists as being unemotional and unempathetic. I am often read as unemotional because I don’t make the right faces and I don’t show the right emotional cues. For instance, I don’t cry when I’m sad—I shake a little physically. When I’m angry, I don’t shout, I hold it all in and then tend to do a very, very long run the next day.
There is a whole group of autists (often female but not always) who are over-emotional r over-empathetic. I’m still figuring out how to understand my own emotions. Since I’m a big reader and have learned most of what I know about humanity from books rather than real-life experience, I also have spent decades misreading my own emotions. I was also fooled into believing that I’m less emotional than other people. But I’ve begun to see that isn’t true, and to try to read my own emotions more correctly.
I always knew that I was empathetic, though. I’ve always struggled with people who were sad or angry. This is in part because I grew up in an abusive household and I felt like it was my responsibility to protect people from my father’s anger, so I was always on high alert to try to figure out his mood and I felt terrible when other people got abused by him. But it has extended since then into experiences outside of my family.
Sometimes it happens while watching a movie. I really do not like watching sad movies, or horror. I don’t like being scared and while I’m aware that people who like horror movies either aren’t scared by them or like the experience of being scared in some way (it makes them feel control over real-life experiences of fear). This is not my experience. The emotions come up and I don’t know what to do with them. They don’t go away easily and tend to hang on in my psyche, making it difficult for me to go about the rest of my life. Music is similarly distressing for me. I don’t listen to music very often because the emotions it evokes are so overwhelming for me.
I also find it difficult to deal with other people arguing. Once, a friend of mine was over while a couple I knew were, in my view, arguing. My friend said afterward that they were simply having a discussion, but to me, I felt scared and triggered by the conflict on display. I couldn’t fix it and the emotions transferred to me and then I was carrying them around for days afterward. If someone is angry or upset, even if it isn’t toward me at all, I still feel triggered and find myself apologizing constantly. I know this isn’t what other people do, and I’m working on seeing that I don’t have to keep doing this. It is, in fact, a relief to be able to name this habit and to remind myself that these are not my emotions and it’s not my responsibility to deal with them. I can just hand them back, to the universe, if not to the people involved.
I'm so glad you wrote about this! While empathy is an important attribute, some of us are blessed with so much of it that we are easily overwhelmed in public spaces. I think part of the reason we may seem to lack this quality is that we have to wear emotional blinders just to navigate through something as mundane as grocery shopping.