One emotion

Happy, sad, elated, despondent, angry. I have all the same emotions as you do. However, when it comes to experiencing these emotions, I only ever see one at a time.

When I first started researching AS, I read Tony Attwood’s book The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome. For someone with AS, this is a great book, full of insight into the subtleties of the condition. If you don’t have AS, however I doubt you’ll enjoy it, as it’s very dry and clinical.

In it, Tony quotes from a book By Temple Grandin and Sean Barron:

I was in my early twenties before I learned a simple rule of social interactions that opened the door to greater understanding of others: that people can and usually do feel more than one emotion at the same time. It was inconceivable to me, for instance, that someone could be hapy in general, yet furious with a specific incident, etc. – that two contradictory emotions could be operating at once in the same person. (Grandin and Barron Unwritten rules of social relationships, p.255)

I had to re-read this. I couldn’t quite believe it.

People are capable of more than one emotion at a time? That really was news to me. A chill went down my spine, and for a few minutes I didn’t know what to do or say. I just sat there and re-read over and over, to make sure I wasn’t mis-interpreting the words.

When I’m angry, I’m angry. My anger may have been caused by just one person, but the effects are universal – if you get in my way, I’ll be angry with you. That probably rings true for a lot of people – I don’t think it’s that uncommon for anger to get expressed universally, especially if you are enraged.

With me, however, the same goes for every other emotion as well. One at a time, all the time. It’s a bit like the blinkers that people put on race horses, I guess. I gallop off in the direction of my current emotion, but I can’t see the others that are off to the side.

The problem here, of course is that for thirty five years I’ve thought that everyone else saw the world the same way I do. But they don’t, do they?

If you feel frustrated at someone, you don’t feel the whole world is frustrating. Yet for me, that’s exactly how it is.

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