I don’t mean that I don’t feel any emotions, but more so that I can’t tell I’m feeling them, unless I trace my behaviours and reactions back to the emotion that probably caused them.

In most cases, if I know I’m feeling something, it’s because I noticed my behaviour changing or my body reacting (which is sometimes hard to assign to certain emotions).

What I mean by that is, for example:

• I know I’m happy because I’m smiling (it rarely happens) and just have nothing to complain about. I’m also noticing being more social and having more motivation to just do things.

• I know I’m sad if I get this weird feeling in my chest. Or cry, but it doesn’t happen often. I also don’t want to talk to people and things like that. When things get to the “feeling depressed” territory, I can also recognise the signs/symptoms.

• Being stressed out and anxious is the easiest to decipher, because it gives me extreme body reactions, stomach pains, elevated heart rate, sleeping problems, nausea, my noise sensitivity gets worse (to the point of headaches if someone talks a bit loud) etc. I also overthink way more, but idk if it is a result of stress, the reason for it, or an endless cycle of both. I also lose any patience, mostly for other people.

• I know I’m angry when I notice raising my voice, having no patience for people (again), I have to fight the urge to throw/punch something or someone.

You get the point. Unless I analyse my behaviours closely to notice any patterns or have emotions strong enough to give me body reactions or to affect my behaviour very noticeably at the moment, I just don’t know.

I thought it was normal, like just concept of just knowing how you feel, without any “evidence”, feels so abstract to me. But apparently it’s not the case for most people to not recognise their emotions, I also learned it’s something more common for autistic people to be this way.

The hardest question on therapy is “How does that make you feel?”, I almost never can find a good answer and start guessing if “I don’t know” doesn’t cut it.

edit: something weird just occurred to me, how does empathy/sympathy fit into this situation? I would say that I have (or at least used to have) higher empathy than average person. I would feel sorry for people and animals (or even inanimate objects like toys) that were mistreated, I mean like strong sense of justice, feeling guilty as if I was responsible for all the suffering, making sure my plushies feel equally loved, the fact I would even consider something like if the pencil I lost feels lonely, followed by guilt that I abandoned it. Feelings of secondhand embarrassment were so strong that embarrassing/awkward moments (especially misunderstandings and miscommunication led to those) in fictional works were too much for me to handle without breaks to calm down. I would sympathise with people sharing their problems without experiencing them myself, even if I couldn’t express it that well besides “being a good listener”. But are those emotions in the same sense as my own emotions that I feel? If they are, how ridiculous is that, I can feel clearly for others, but not for myself?