chronicle

A recent conversation about emotional processing with my neurodiverse community got me thinking about putting language to my experience of my emotional ecosystem. I have realized for a long time that my emotions work differently from many people that I interact with, and it’s only recently that I have had language to describe what’s going on with me. I’ll take a stab at sharing my language around that.

I love language, and I love the nuances of emotional language when I read it in literature, but I’ve found that trying to apply emotional language, especially nuanced emotional language, to my emotional processing is not very helpful. I have big feelings, and my emotional process is more like the digestion process than a responsive system. It’s more of a background process, and it can be glacially slow.

Trying to apply nuanced emotion words to my experience usually results in rumination. Is this sadness? Is it ennui? Is it longing, or despair, or grief, or disappointment, or disconnection?
Thinkthinkthinkthink.
Stewstewstewstewstew.
The thinking and stewing end up becoming more prominent than the emotion I am trying to parse. So I’ve learned not to go there.

I work with children, and they teach me everything about different processing styles.

There are some children who encounter a difficulty, they experience frustration, and may erupt in tears about it. The tears last for a couple of minutes, and then they move on to the next thing. They are able to quickly engage in another way. I will refrain from saying that this is a healthy emotional processing style, because we are de-pathologizing the language of neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is human diversity, and different processing styles are just that: different. Not divergent, not disordered, just different, and the many ways are useful in many ways.

There are other children who present differently. They may appear to be engaged in parallel play–not actually going along with the program that most folks are going along with, but engaged in their own program, in the same space, but on a different time frame. Being attuned to their own frequencies, they may not respond in ways that one might expect. And then, they will appear to be responding to something that others are not aware of. They may appear to not be troubled by a situation that seems troubling in the moment that it presents itself–they may not cry when frustrated, like many kids will. But then, at another moment, they may appear agitated, dysregulated, and the cause may not be clear.

That’s us–the attentional disengagement family of predispositions. We are literally built different, and in our ideal environments, we rock the house. But we can seem odd to others, and others may apply their own calculus to what’s going on with us, or project their insecurities onto the blank canvases that their misunderstanding presents. We often don’t have language for what’s going on, so we often get caught up in others’ descriptions of what they think is going on. I’ll try to say something about what’s going on for me, and maybe this will apply to others with processing differences.

Side note: my language is emergent, evolving. When I notice a pattern, and notice that I am dissatisfied with a word, term, phrase, label, or cognitive frame, my problem-solving mind tries to find a better alternative. I’m noticing all of these references to “differences,” as if there is a set of “sames” that is juxtaposed nearby. I’m dissatisfied with this juxtaposition, and as my language emerges, I will be trying to reframe this, to speak of specialties, and specificities, and a range of possibilities, rather than a set of norms and a set of differences. We are all needed, and valid, and part of the great human body. Because the eyes don’t hear, they are not seen as deficient, and their range of understanding is not a difference. I’m processing stuff like this in the background all the time. Such is my process.

Back to my processing specialties, particularities, specificities. I have found that my emotional processing is much slower than the child who tries, and fails, and cries, and recovers, and tries again, and laughs, and falls asleep. That’s just not me. My emotional processing is much more like my digestive processing. An event or engagement invokes a set of responses, and a range of possible resolutions to return to equilibrium. Emotions are kind of a way to return to equilibrium from an engagement with certain types of energy. And mine work very, very slowly, like the rest of me. So whereas someone else might encounter a situation that would invoke an emotion that might arise and quickly pass, that encounter, for me, might happen much more slowly.

An engagement is kind of like a piece of emotional food, and when it enters my nervous system, it will have a long way to go before it is digested. Emotional processing is kind of a background process in this way, and applying nuanced emotion words to this process is counter-productive. Similar to the digestive process, my emotional process is getting vitamins from the emotional encounter, but this process of getting vitamins is slow and in the background.

It’s like my nervous system is engaging in all of the nuances and possibilities for how the emotional problem that was presented could be resolved, and it is resolving them in all of the ways. My nervous system seems to be concerned with resolution, and the process of resolution is very much like the process of turning food into poop, and in my case, I eat emotional problems and I poop out resolutions in the form of words. Maybe that’s why my words sometimes appear stinky to people. (That’s just a silly side note).

What I’ve found much more helpful in the realm of emotional processing is to focus on sensory responses, and have simple and specific names for these responses. It’s a little vulnerable, because these responses can reach deep into my nervous system, but these responses pass much more quickly than emotional arcs, which can be glacial in their movements. A loud sound might provoke an [ouch], which might be accompanied by a [grr] or even a [buhu]. These responses might pass quickly, or they might provoke a longer background process as my nervous system attempts to process it. But focusing on the foreground responses has shown itself to be much more helpful than focusing on the background processes, which kind of seem to work better when they are not named. Just as I don’t really know if the burrito I ate is being processed by my stomach or my liver at any given time, I don’t really know at what point in the process my emotions are being processed. It’s a whole process, and baffling to those with different processing styles from mine.

But when I focus on the responses, I can see more clearly what’s being responded to, and often, this results in the response passing quickly, rather than turning into a whole digestive process.

A conversation is an engagement [engage]. It might result in a [wow] or a [yes] or a [nope] or a [grr] or a [fu], or an [ick] or an [ew], but it is still [engage]. That seems clear and makes sense to my nervous system. The responses take place within the [frame] of the [engage], and mostly the arise and pass quickly. But there may be elements of the [engage] that stick with me and don’t pass quickly. These pass through me like food passes through me–slowly, mysteriously, but also nourishingly, and resulting in a compostable residue.

All of that being said, there is a certain subset of emotional responses to engagements that is akin to eating something very spicy, and feeling that spicy food deep in my guts. A couple of types of engagements that feel especially spicy are 1) when someone brings me a whole story about something I’ve said or done that doesn’t match my insides at all, and they have no interest in asking follow up questions or hearing about my insides; and 2) when someone has a strong reaction to something I say that I know to be right and good and kind. Both of these types of engagements can be said to be “heated,” and both can leave me feeling hot and spicy in my center of gravity, and a little off-balance. When I was younger, I might have given a spicy response, and sometimes those spicy responses actually broke things open in the engagement and resulted in laughter of recognition. But other times those spicy responses left marks, and left me feeling terrible for having responded in that way.

As I’ve gotten older, these heated exchanges have not seemed as heated as when I was younger. I was able to sit in the middle of the spicy feeling in my center of gravity and not feel the need to give as spicy a response. Recently, for example, a parent in one of my spaces was engaging with their phone, an activity around which I have clearly set a boundary, and refreshed it often. In advocating for their child’s sensory and cognitive needs, I asked the parent to refrain from engaging with their phone, in as gentle and playful way as I could find to. They responded with their own spicy response. I was aware that an engagement such as this might in the past resulted in me feeling off-balance, and spicy inside. I might have felt my hand tremble, and I might have had a spicy space under my breath that made my voice tremble. But this time, I continued to be gentle in my advocacy, and found gentle reasoning where there might have been a spicy retort. At some point the parent became conscious of their place in the space, among other parents and their children, and I could see them reflecting, and thinking better of their need to push back and defend. It all felt very matter-of-fact, rather than spicy, in my insides, but with that there was also the feeling that the matter might not feel resolved for them. They might have some resentment left behind from the engagement. I experience this as the dangerous aspect of human relations. The little resentments that don’t get burnt up and released in the exchange can fester, and collect, and become highly charged. I’m always on the lookout for evidence that an individual might have a lot of these festering resentments, and I try to leave a big space between us, because something about my nervous system (even if I’m silent and secret) can make these resentments bubble up. It’s weird. I’ve learned to tiptoe.

All that being said, I’d say the biggest part of my emotional realm, especially since recognition of my sensory gifts emerged, has been a renewal of my love affair with experience, and often I experience this as having had a wonderful balanced meal, savoring all of the lingering aftertastes and feeling the meal move deliciously through my body. When someone asks me how I’m feeling in a moment like that, it feels kind of cheapening to say “good,” but I’ve learned that most folks are not interested or patient enough to hear about the lingering fragrances and tastes of my delicious experiences. So I write a lot, and in writing, my experience becomes real, and I might be able to share it in an appropriate moment. I recognize that my ancestors have been like this, and they’ve been showing me the way, even when I didn’t understand it, but only suspected.