Posts tagged as:

Autism

Leading to friendship

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 15, 2011

Sometimes you have to marry two unrelated problems to solve them

First problem

I have no friends. At all.
I used to have them.

I remember from my childhood that I had 3 friends. Three boys that lived on the
same block, whom I called friend. But I don’t remember if I spend much time
doing things with them.
When I was almost 12 we moved house and I lost my friends.

In my late twenties early thirties I got a few friends again. Again three friend
but now in succession. Every one of those friendships lasted for about 2 years.
And every one of those friendships felt like a lot of work.

The first two guy visited me ones every 6 to 8 weeks. But only if I invited them.
In between visits we never talked to each other. It seemed as though it was up to
me to contact them and make the arrangements.
The third came every week. Although I liked it, it seemed a little too much.
I would have liked it better if he had come every two or three weeks.
After about 2 years he stopped visiting me and I was relieved.

It was only when I found out that I’m autistic that I learned that there is a
difference between the needs of people with autism and NT‘s.
I’ve been told that the relationships of people with autism is more shallow as
compared to NT’s.
Maybe that’s true. It’s not something I can check.
What I do know though is that I’m not interested in about 90% of what NT’s talk
about. And that I need far more “me” time then NT’s.

Two autistic friend of mine moved in together a few years ago.
To do so they bought a house containing a living room plus three bed rooms. Of
which they converted two to personal rooms.
They agreed that if one of them withdrew into his/her personal room. The other
would leave him/her alone.

In a relation I too need that amount of personal space. Which makes it difficult
to be in a relationship with an NT.
The only way I could ever get in a relationship is when I find a gay autistic guy
I like.
But what are the odds of that happening?

Second problem

In one of the episodes of Star Trek Generation Wesley Crusher is tasked with
learning to lead men. He isn’t very successful at it and the men go off and do
their own thing.
Trying to figure out how to command men he asks Commander Riker “What gives me
the right to tell people (twice my age) what they should do?”
And Riker answers “If you figure that out you’ll be able to lead men.”

I always found this kind of a strange episode because I have almost the
opposite problem.
I’ve been leading people for the last 15 years.
First in my volunteers work later in my job.
Most of the time I lead by example but some times I ask people to do something
and usually they do.

But I too don’t know the answer to the question “what gives me the right?”.
So it would seem that Riker (or the person who wrote the story) is wrong.
It is possible to lead people without knowing the answer to that question.
Or at least that’s what I’ve been thinking for years. But recently I’ve
found that isn’t entirely true.

I’ve always used my ability to lead people to reach goals that where clearly
in the best interest of everybody. Improving the way the work was organized.
Teaching people how to do their work more easily. Improving the mood at the
department. Etc.
I never used it for personal gain. Although it’s clear to me that you can
improve your own life by the way you lead people I’ve never done that.
I’ve never dared.

The marriage

A few weeks ago a colleague mentioned Paul and told a story about something
stupid he had done.
Paul is a colleague who visited me ones a few years ago. I liked the guy
and was dreaming about getting friends. But it didn’t happen.
Most of my colleagues have problems. But I was surprised and shocked by the
number of problems that he had. And the kind of problems. Stupid problems
that he should be able to fix himself. But apparently he wasn’t.
For a year I thought of inviting him for a second time. But I never did.

After hearing his name I found myself doubting my decision never to invite
him again.
He is a nice guy. Even if he needs a lot a care.

Around the same time I took a few days sick leave. My department was
planning a move. We had to leave the space we where in, but it wasn’t
clear were we where going.
I can’t deal with that kind of uncertainty. And, so I found, neither
can some of my colleagues.
One of them told me that he resented me leaving them in such a stressful
situation.

And so I found myself thinking about friendship and about leadership at
the same time. And a few things became clear.
The answer to the question “what gives me the right?” is responsibility.
People follow me because I improve their lives. I take care of them.
Which means that it is possible to lead people in a way that will improve
my life, but only if it also improves their lives.

The second thing I realized is that it is possible to get friends that
are not autistic. The only thing is that it’s up to me to make sure that
they behave in a way that I feel comfortable.
Which means that I will have to lead them and take responsibility for them.

So now I’m thinking about inviting Paul again. What kind of care does he
need. Something I can give him?
I think so.

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Not abnormal

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 15, 2011

Nobody likes to be called abnormal. Not even if it’s only implied.
So when I came out as gay, 30 years ago, I found that I had to educate people.
The opposite of gay isn’t normal but straight.

The same holds true for autism.
In autism the brain is wired differently. Of more scientifically we are neuro atypical.
The opposite of people who are autistic are people who are neuro typical. Or NT.

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Need

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday November 2, 2011

Thinking about what I can do with this blog has me rethinking my carrier and one of my most annoying habbits

For most of my youth I had no idea of what I was going to do with my life.
My parents thought that I should study.
But they didn’t seem to care what I study.
Just as long as I studied something.

I had no ideas of what to do or what to study until I reach the MAVO (some what akin to the American High school).
There I first learned about chemistry. A very interesting study about what happens when you marry two chemical substances.
What kind of substance will you get and how much of that substance.
So I decided to study chemistry at HBO level (a 4 year study some what akin to the American College).

But I soon discovered that there was a big difference between MAVO chemistry and working as a chemist.
I don’t know what chemist do now days but 30 years ago they spend most of there days doing titration. Which is the process of adding one liquid to an other and wait until the color changes.
Which is almost as interesting as watching paint dry.

So I stopped that study and joined the army of the unemployed.
But I did get one thing from that study and that was a new interest.
Computers.
The school had one of the first computers that was accessible for students. And we could play on it as much as we wanted.

Most of my school mates didn’t understand it though.
The computer had only one or two, boring, games.
But it offered something much more interesting.
Power.
With a few simple statements you could get it to do what ever you wanted.
As long as what you wanted had something to do with math.
(A little Ford: Any color you like as long as it is black )
But I understood it.

It took me a few years to get into the IT business.
For reasons I still don’t understand the Dutch government used to think that employers where interested in people who didn’t do anything and didn’t know anything.
This meant that people who where unemployed couldn’t do a study or anything else that could increase there changes of getting a job.
After five years the government finally changed their minds and I was allowed to study.
In the end it took me eight years to find a job as a computer operator.

But it was a nice job.
At first.
I learned a lot about the operation of the computers I worked with. Learned a little about myself and really enjoyed the work.
But after a few years it became very clear that although I enjoyed the work, I really didn’t like the people.

They all had “square eyes” as it was called. Meaning that they were only interested in computers and programming.
Nothing else.
If it didn’t have anything to do with computer people didn’t talk about it.
One colleague told me that he had made a computer program for the school one of his children attended. And a computer program for the school the other child attended.
So maybe he had two children.
Or maybe the school of the third child didn’t need a computer program. I’ll never know.

Around my thirtieth I decide that IT wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life and that I would switch to working at a boarding house.
So I did the first year of a four year HBO training. And found a job.
First working with abused children for a few months and then working with mentally disabled adults.

I found that the job gave me mixed feelings.
On the one hand I had to figure out what kind of problems clients had and how best to help them.
That part I enjoyed very much.
But on the other hand I had to live with them. Which meant watching “Goede tijden slechte tijden” (the Dutch “As the world turns”) which I didn’t enjoy at all. And I had play board games with them. An other thing I didn’t enjoy.
But in the end it didn’t matter because I ran into a few problems and lost my job.

After a few years of unemployment I found a job at the sheltered work place Promen.
I didn’t know then that I was autistic. But towards the end of the nineties the Dutch government decided that giving unemployed people a subsidized job would improve there changes of finding a real job.
It didn’t work. But it did give me a steady income and something to fill my days.
So I’m not complaining.

But anyway. Soon after starting at Promen I found that most of my colleagues had problems that caused a lot of sick leave while, in most cases, it should be reasonably easy to solve the problems.
So I started telling members of staff that we should teach people how to control their problems.
I’m at it for 11 years now.
At first staff didn’t believe that it would be possible but the last few years the company is really changing…
I had hoped that it would also give me a change to get a more interesting job.
But that hasn’t happened. I’m still doing unskilled labor.

All in all not much of a carrier.
I have had a job for a little over half of my life.
But it surely wasn’t the kind of carrier my parents pictured for me.

As for the annoying habit. I talk to myself.
Out loud.
Sometimes I even yell at myself.
People must think I’m crazy.

The stupid thing is I’m actually not even speaking to myself.
In my mind I’m explaining every new situation I run into to the people around me.
Sometimes even to this blog.
I’m always explaining.
Always… telling stories…

Telling stories?
I’ve never thought about it in this way. But telling stories is exactly what I do.

Suddenly I understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

Up until I was about 10 yr I hardly spoke. Maybe 10 or 20 words in a week.
I have a visual thinking process. Which means that I have a movie in my mind that shows me how the world works.
Until I was about 10 I was mostly interested in how clocks and cars work.
I wasn’t interested in knowing and interacting with people. And so I didn’t speak.
When I did became interested in interacting with people I found that a visual thinking process isn’t always well suited to understand the situations I experienced.
So by telling and retelling stories I can figure out how things work.
Which is why I can’t break with the habit.
I need this.

Now I suddenly understand why I have had such a haphazard carrier.
In my teens I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Chemistry was just my highest grade.
Getting into the IT was a good choice. Working with computers is still one of my strength.
It just was a little limiting.
Getting part of the training needed to work at a boarding house was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
It gave me the skills needed to understand the people around me.

Although I have a severe case of autism. People often tell me that they don’t recognize that in me.
Which is for a large part thanks to this training.

The next step is to find a way to tell my stories on this blog.
But that should be a breeze.
While I’m still busy writing this story I’ve already thought up two other stories I want to write and a third is in the making.

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Discovering friendship

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday March 4, 2010

Steve Pavlina revisited his idea about ordering things from the universe.
A few years ago when he talk about this subject it felt a bit out there, so I didn’t take it very serious. But this time he said something that actually meant something to me.
“What would happen is you order a meal at a restaurant and changed your mind before you have gotten it?”
His answer was that if you keep changing your mind you will never get any thing to eat.

That struck a note with me. I realized that this is something I’ve been doing the last few years. Maybe even on purpose.

For years I’ve been dreaming that I would like to have some friends in there early twenties.
I’m not quite sure why. But mostly because I can relate to them.
People my age are usually in a relatitionship or want to be in a relationship and I don’t want to be in a relationship.

Actually I would want to be in a relationship but I’ve found that being autistic means that my ideas about relationship differ from most non-autistic people. So to get a relationship I would have to find a gay guy of my age who’s also autistic.
What are the changes?

But anyway. Back to friendship with gay or straight guys in there early twenties.
15 Years ago I had three friends of that age.
One after an other, spanning about 6 years.

But after the third I stopped trying to find new friends.
It took too much out of me.
I felt as though they didn’t play by the rules and that I had to fight constantly to get them to visit me.
After six years of fighting with people who where supposed to be my friends I just gave up.

But now I’m starting to understand how the world works. And especially how I work and how autism influences the way I deal with friendship.

There are two main differences in the way I deal with friendship.
The first is that I don’t have as much need for close contact as non-autistics do. And secondly rules are far more important to me then to most non-autistics.

I like to be in a friendship where I see a friend every 6 to 8 weeks.
But of course to non-autistics once every 6 to 8 weeks means a very shallow contact. Which means that when I try to get them to visit me they sometimes have other priorities.

15 years ago I felt trapped by rules I never understood. But now I think about them I realize that those rules aren’t that important.
Are gay people allowed to befriend straight people? Of course they are.
Are people in there late forties allowed to befriend people in there early twenties? Of course they are.

The strange thing is that I actually know quite a few guys in there early that seem to be friends.
For years I’ve been wondering why it is that a guy in his twenties would want to befriend me. But I’ve concluded that it might be because I’m truly interested in them. Maybe it’s also something about needing a father figure.

Until now, though, I’ve hardly ever followed through. Mostly because I have been distracted by exactly the problem Steve Pavlina points out.
I feel like I’m in a restaurant with thousands of interesting dishes. I’m having such a hard time deciding which dish I’m going to sample that I never try any one.

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Processing abstract information

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 17, 2009

Thinking about my thinking process.

In my last post I wrote that I expected that post would be a little further apart in future. This one is taking even more time then I had expected.

On the up side I have figured out that my very annoying habit of talking to myself is actually a symptom of my autism.
Having a visual thinking process means that I can’t think about subjects I can’t visualize. Things like “feelings”, the word “goals”, “business deals” are to abstract to visualize.
I’m not able to think about them except by talking about them.

Accepting that this is a symptom of my autism means a few things.

It means that I have to accept that I will never get rid of this habit.
It means that I’ll have to accept that I can’t draw as much as I would want to. Because I can’t think visual at the same time that I’m processing abstract information.
But it also means that I need a better understanding of this process. There must be a natural boundary. A point where I’ve solved the problem I’m working on and should go back to thinking visually. That’s what I’m working on right now.

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Looking for a resolution

by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 29, 2009

A few days ago I wrote about my problems with self confidence. To solve those problems I tried something that’s completely new for me.

I always have the feeling that everything in the world is interconnected. That you can’t move one thing without moving the whole world.
I’ve been told that is something that’s typical for people who have a visual thinking process.
One of the results of that feeling is that I tend to want to solve all my problems all at ones. It never works but I keep trying.

This time I decided that I should find out what would happen if I solved my problems one at the time. At the moment I have three biggies. I started with the one that annoys me the most and work my way down.

In the last week I’ve all but solved my bowel problems. It turns out to be a paradoxical problem.
I find it very difficult to trust feelings I only partly recognize. But the moment I did it became very easy to trust my feelings.

The second problem is work related.
For the last year I’ve been filing complaints about something that is going wrong in my job and nobody listened.
Thinking about the problem as a self confidence problem I realized that there are two bold moves I can make that will solve the problem. The first one is something simple that will show that I’m not some one to mess with. The second will probably take some months to implement but will solve every problem of this type.
(I tell more about this in one of my next posts.)

The third problem has to do with drawing.
I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes this next drawing so difficult and I must say that I’ve been kind of stuck.
The drawing doesn’t seem that difficult to me. I should be able to just start with it and find which parts of the face I should practice some more.

Not being able to find a solution for the third problem I’ve spend most of my time thinking about the second problem.
While doing so I realized that I was wrong. I don’t have three big problems I have four. I’m not drawing because of the fourth problem.

I never realized it but there is a problem with being both autistic and gifted.
Most autistics are very fanatical with some type of collection or have a, often strange, subject that holds their attention for there whole life.

I’m an autistic of the last type. I need a subject that is interesting enough to spend most of my live reading and thinking about. But being gifted means that there is no subject complicated enough to keep me interested my whole life. Which means that I have to switch subject every 15 to 20 years or so.
I’m about to switch to my third subject; learning to draw as good as is humanly possible.

The problem is that I can’t make that switch without closing the second subject. Or actually without find a way of doing something with what I’ve learned.

From my 19th till my 35th I tried to understand why people consider suicide and the process they go through while they’re considering suicide and how one could save them. After about 15 years it became clear that saving some one who’s suicidal is almost impossible. Even for a psychiatrist.
Knowing that I lost interest.

But my current subject if different. There’s actually a practical use for it. Only thing is that the people who should organize it don’t seem to know. Or maybe they don’t care. In any case I don’t know those people so I’m not able to tell them.
But as I said. I can’t move on without doing something with my knowledge.

So I’ve decided to write a few articles about it on my own blog.
So the new category “odds and ends” will be about everything that interests me that’s not art related.

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Interpreting fear

by Henk ter Heide on Monday March 30, 2009

Examining some feelings that prevent me from drawing.

Eye problems

Twenty years ago I tried my hand at studying to be a programmer. I went to school for a year and got the basic papers you need to get a job. Then I went on with studying on my own to get a perspective on a better job.
It was then that I run into a strange problem with my eyes.
Every time I picked up my books to do some studying my eyes would go out of focus and the letters on the paper would get vague. At the same time I felt very tired. Although I didn’t know why I felt tired I assumed it had something to do with the eye problems.
Although I had my eyes examined I never found out what the problem was.

Examining a feeling

My involuntary holiday of, coming up to, 4 months as a result of breaking my hip gave me a lot of time to examine a few things you never get to.
So I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, a lot of time thinking about several problems we have at my job, and examining a frighting cold feeling I have in the sauna and when taking a hot shower.

I don’t know about other people with broken hips, but I found that it became very easy to take really long showers. Sitting on my shower chair. Not having a lot of interesting things to do. Not having any appointments. I found I could easily sit in the shower for two hours.
Which would have been very nice if it wasn’t for the cold feeling on my back I always have when taking a shower.
I tried making the water hotter, as I always do, but that didn’t help. It never does.

But since I didn’t have a hell of a lot to do I decided that I might as well examine what was going on. Why I would feel cold under a hot shower.
Although it was very frightening I tried to concentrate on the feeling. It took me two weeks but I finally realized that the feeling I had wasn’t cold but the feeling of water running along my skin.

I also realized how it came about that I misinterpreted the feeling.
In autistics the part of the brain that recognizes feelings doesn’t work as it should. Which makes it very hard for us to recognize our feelings.
It has happened that I only found out what I was feeling by going by the authority of other people.
Someone would tell me: “I think you feel such and so”. And since I didn’t know what I was feeling I took his word for it.

In this case I learned to interpret the feeling I was having standing on the edge of the swimming pool on a cold Saturday morning 40 years ago, by listening to what people told me.
“You must be cold”. Yes I must be.
In reality it wasn’t cold that I was feeling. It was the sensation of wind blowing along my back.

Dealing with panic

Of course this blog isn’t about recognizing feelings. It’s about drawing, what I learn while drawing and what I need to draw.
I like to draw.
But being autistic I don’t really recognize that feeling. I interpret it in the same way I interpret all my feelings. In this case by the fact that I can’t get myself to stop drawing.
I don’t draw very often so after a time I tend to think that I don’t need it any more and store my drawing stuff away.
But every time I do, I get new ideas of drawings I want to do and get my drawing stuff back out.
But then I can’t get myself to sit down and draw.

After I figured out that I misinterpreted the feeling I have in hot showers, I thought that it could very well be that I also misinterpret feelings that have something to do with drawing.
So now I’m examining several annoying and frightening feelings of which I don’t think they have very much to do with drawing.
Yesterday, for the first time in twenty years, I ran into my little I eye problem. While using Twitoria to unfollow inactive Twitter profiles I got very tired and my eyes went out of focus.
At first I though that I should stop and relax for a moment but then I recognized what was happening to me. I was experiencing some type of panic attack. So I went on with what I was doing and after a while the feeling past.

Knowing what the feeling is I now realize that it’s something I have quite a lot. While writing this kinds of entries for my blog for instants.
Translating the pictures in my mind to words is hard, sometimes even painful. Many a time I’ve stopped writing and walked away with the feeling that it would go easier when I came back. It never did.
Writing this entry I also felt the need to walk off but knowing that I was experiencing a slight panic attack helped me to go on. Although the writing process is still hard to do, the panic attack did pass.

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Accepting comments selectively

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 26, 2008

Dealing with anger by selectively listening to comments.

The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:

One of the assignment of CBT two weeks ago was to find the psychical sensations associated with feeling angry.
Seeing as how easy it was to find the psychical sensation associated with feeling fear I didn’t expect that to be very hard. But it turned out to be impossible.
Although I’ve been angry several times in the last two weeks I never noticed that I was angry until the anger passed. So I did notice that being angry causes you to raise your voice. And I noticed that I have trouble expressing myself when I’m angry. I kind of loose the ability to talk.
But I don’t know how it feels.

Talking about this with the psychiatrist, he suggested to investigate whether I have some thought or feeling just before I get angry. So if I can’t recognize my anger by the psychical sensation I might at least be able to recognize it by the thoughts I have just before.

That assignment turned out to be far more easier then I expected. You would think that if you aren’t aware of your feeling of anger you wouldn’t know what happens just before you get angry. But that turned out to be obvious.

I’m always commenting on myself. Or actually I’m always imaging people commenting on me.
Turns out that when I imagine someone talking me down, I feel scared. When I imagine someone giving me a comment in which he tells me that he didn’t listen to something I had to say, I feel anger.

After I found that, I figured I should go to the next level. Knowing what scares and angers me, I should be able to avoid getting those feelings altogether.
But I’ve tried for years to stop myself from imagining people who are commenting on me. I’ve never succeeded and I really don’t know how I could. Further more the comments I imagine that people are giving me are based on comments I really get from people. They frighten and anger me just as much when I get them for real as when I imagine it happening.

Thinking about something a Steve Pavlina says somewhere in his blog: You can decide for yourself which comments have meaning for you and which don’t.
Sometimes people are only commenting because it’s easier for them to let you do the work then to do the work themselfs.

I decided to only accept two kinds of comments:

Comments about things I can actually change.
Comments about things that are my responsibility.

This is the point I reached last wednesday. After living with these rules for two days it seemed as though all my problems were solved.

I came across several situation where my feelings about myself improved significantly after using these rules. Some of those situations only existed in my imagination while others were actually happening.
The most important one was when I told my father that I had found out that something I used to fight about with my mother really wasn’t my fault. Most autistics have this problem.
But he didn’t believe me!
That horrified me until I realized that it really didn’t matter anymore. This isn’t something I can change, whether he believes me or not. It’s not my responsibility to decide what he believes. And last but not least I been living on own for the better part of 30 years so he can’t really hurt me.

I really expected that this would be the end of my problems. That I would stop talking to myself and start drawing and writing art reviews again.
But it didn’t. The talking to myself has actually gotten worse. I can’t find the energy to draw and to write reviews. (Although I will be publishing the blog carnival next wednesday.)
But the anger and the fear are gone!
I just have to figure out what’s next.

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751

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday October 9, 2008

Recognizing the feelings that have to do with drawing enables me to draw.

The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:

Although we’re not yet there, I asked the psychiatrist whether a strong tingling feeling in your body is a happy feeling.
He was not sure. Could be. But he did say that if I enjoyed the feeling it’s probable that it has something to do with feeling happy.
I do enjoy the feeling.

Now I know that it is supposed to be happy feeling I find that I’m able to just sit down and draw. I can resist the urge to jump through the room.

I’m also trying a new technique.
After finding that my problem isn’t with drawing techniques but with recalling techniques, I’ve decided I should draw more interesting scenes the a bunch of rising squares. And since it isn’t possible to draw a lighter color on top of a darker color, as you would with paint (Or at least it is possible but it isn’t visible if you do), I’ve decided to try a new technique.

So this drawing is based on some image I imagined a few days ago. I’m starting with the lighter colors and working my way up to the darker colors.
I’m not quite sure what I must do after this but hopefully I will know by tomorrow.

751

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Strong anonymous feelings

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 1, 2008

Realizing how I deal with feelings that I don’t recognize.

The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:

Some times I feel

a kind of tingling white noise going through my body. It’s actually quite a nice feeling but I don’t know by what it is caused. Which makes it impossible to summon it.
a cold wind blowing through my body. The kind of feeling that wants me to turn on the heating. But then I look at my thermometer and find that it’s 24° C in my room. It’s a horrible feeling but since I don’t know what causes it I don’t know how to avoid it.
talkative. I shouldn’t list talking to myself as a feeling. But it is kind of a feeling. A very annoying feeling at that. It tenses me up and it paralyzes me. It makes it impossible to do the work I would like to do.
anger.
a collection of psychical sensation of which I’ve learned that it means that I’m scared. But I don’t always realize the meaning of those sensations.

I never feel sadness but I do know that when tears run from your eyes you are supposed to be sad. Or it must be the kind of orange tension I feeling when I’m crying. But I don’t think so.

At this weeks session of CBT we set the target for the therapy and talked about recognizing emotions.

Although I’ve been in therapy before this was the first time I actually got to set the goal. Which is nice because it gives my control over the therapy.
Two of the 6 therapies I had in the last 25 years had a clear cut goal that wasn’t reached. But still the psychiatrist was very pleased with himself. Once the psychiatrist set a goal with which I didn’t agree but I was told to take it or leave it. The other three times we just talked for one and a half year. I never felt that my problems were solved but apparently the psychiatrist did.

This time the goal will be two fold.
One goal will be to get a better understanding of my feeling. The second goal is to get rid of the talkativeness. To finally find a way to do the things I want to do.

Since last weeks session I do know why have been talking to myself for all those years.
It has a positive feedback loop to it.
Even though it tenses me up it does make that I don’t feel the tinkling feeling and more important it also makes that I don’t feel the cold feeling. It’s very difficult for me to deal with feelings I don’t recognize. Even when they are nice feelings.

Last week I’ve been trying not to talk to myself and to find out what kind of feeling I would be suppressing. Once I felt a little nervous, but most of the time I just didn’t recognize the feeling. Mostly I felt cold.

After setting a goal we talked about emotions and feelings.
What is the difference?
I always thought that feelings are what you have in your body, headache or pain in your leg, and that emotions were the more abstract kinds like anger and falling in love.
But apparently there is an order to feelings.
The more basic feelings that even a dog could have; anger, fear, joy and sadness are called “emotions”. The more human feelings like disappointment are called “feelings”.

My homework for this week is to think about the difference between feeling nervous, feeling fear and feeling panic.
Difference in the psychical sensations they invoke, the way you would react to them and an other thing I don’t remember.

About 15 years ago I took a few years to figure out what the psychical sensations of the most important emotions were. And to figure out in what way people would act when they had those feelings.
The main reason I wanted to know that was to be able to recognize people who where angry or fearful. But I found that it also helped my to recognize my own feelings.

But in the last few days I realized that there is a difference between feeling and knowing a list of behavioral features.
The problem is that it is to theoretical.
When I see some one dressed for cold whether while it’s 25° C I conclude that it’s quite possible that they are scared. But when I feel cold shivers going down my back while it’s 25° C I never realize that I might be scared.
I don’t think I am, but I never even thought about it.

I know the list of psychical sensations associated with feeling scared by heart:

choking feeling in your throat.
pain in your stomach.
pressure on your lungs.
feeling cold.
an ever stronger need to go to the bathroom.

But I never realized that the toilet problems I’ve been having, had anything to do with feeling panic. Even though they started with a panic attack I had a little over a year ago.

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