Emotional Processing Is Different for Autistics

I talk a lot about delayed emotional processing in autistic people because I’m one of those individuals that has delayed emotional reactions fairly often. But, I know when you’re new to the idea of learning how your brain processes things, you read something like “delayed emotional reactions” and you’re like, “Well, what does that mean?” So today, I want to share two recent emotional processing delays that I personally experienced, in the hopes that it will help some of you who are trying to identify this stuff in yourselves.

Delayed emotional processing: it took me over two hours to feel sad.

This morning, I woke up around 8:00AM and I looked at my phone. Somebody had texted me with a bit of bad news. No one died — it was just mild bad news.

In my brain, I thought, “I bet I will feel disappointed when this hits,” but I didn’t have any physical emotional reaction in my body to the information. I got up and I went through my morning. I helped my kids and I got on my treadmill and I did all the things. Then, around 10:30AM, I started crying.

I had been thinking about the text I’d gotten and I’d been working through it, and so the physical reaction of the emotion wasn’t unexpected. But, when I looked at the clock, I realized that it took two and…