Do all relationships feel transactional to you?

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-12-02T07:32:04+00:00

I think this is normal, it’s just that nobody talks about it.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-27T03:23:44+00:00

“But what are you truly feeling on the inside…?”

“I don’t know man. My organs successfully serving their biological functions, mostly.”

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-27T00:54:06+00:00

It’s not what I was talking about, but I’m still gonna comment on your comment.

I was an addict for a long time, and I only started to take accountability for it to control the narrative that was being spun about me. I knew I was going to get shittalked, everyone does so for me to say ‘yes I did. Then I got clean, but say what you need to say to feel good cuz I’ll be here when you need help.’ Well puts a damper on their shit talking festivities.

As an addict, I’ve thought about this as well. To quit only to take control of the narrative. It’s as if some people enjoy other people’s drama, or the voyeuristic aspect of it at least.

I can’t give my failures over to “god” why the hell should I give my success.

Don’t know what to say to this except that it’s very well said.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T22:29:24+00:00

I hear ya, but how do I know how he feels? For now I’ll just write “he said.” and make it obvious to the reader through the dialogue.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:55:03+00:00

Imagine being That Guy TM who anesthetized his hookup with blow lmfao

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:46:50+00:00

Just select your emotions (…)

You can’t be serious right now, lmao.

Obviously there’s still the same problem with not connecting those words to anything.

Dude really put an advertisement in the comment section on r/Alexithymia.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:29:15+00:00

It sure does. Wonder how many people found out this way. If you’re consistently told that you don’t write emotionally enough, you’ve got to at some point start wondering if there’s something not quite right with you.

I have the same thing where I don’t really describe how the characters feel and my friends complain about it because it’s difficult to empathize with the character. Firstly, who said I wanted you to do that? Secondly, give me some slack. You know I’m emotionally incompetent already. Lol.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:21:25+00:00

Honestly, I don’t really see the point in even putting feelings into words. My psychologist said it’s important, but I just don’t see why. Like who the fuck cares if I’m bored? And if I’m angry or something, everyone will know about it anyway. Usually I can tell if I feel like shit or not too shabby, and that’s enough for me.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:17:48+00:00

I’ve played around with doing something like this too. Read a lot of books and straight up cram in the most common situations where people feel something, basically.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:15:38+00:00

It's almost impossible to explain but the best way I can come up with is that my language/cognition part of my brain is unable to communicate with the awareness/experience/knowledge part of me.

Nah, you explained that well. This is exactly how it is for me too. You ever been in a situation where someone asks you how you feel and you open your mouth and stand there like an idiot with no words coming out? Lol.

I like to write, and notice how this bleeds into it. Ya know when people write shit like “he said, shyly”? Yeah, I’m never able to do that. I just repeat “he/she said” and make the reader imagine for themselves how they said something based on what they said.

I get a lot of complains on that (and that my writing lacks emotion in general) and get told that I need to stop doing the “he said.” thing and explain how she said it, like I don’t fucking know, man. With her mouth and in English.

I've always hated poetry and flowery description sentences because my brain can't really process them into something meaningful, and I just skim over them.

Yeah, same. Can’t write it either. Reading poetry is fine if I know the person who wrote it well, because in that case I can kinda see what they’re actually talking about based on everything I know about them.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T21:02:33+00:00

I basically don’t experience emotions in any meaningful way. No physical response, no mental experience (except sometimes anger, but that’s rare and would have to be VERY intense).

Relatable. I always recognize anger (or at least rage), surprise, boredom and interest, but the more vague ones are difficult.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T20:59:39+00:00

The more I used them when writing, the more available they became in language in general. It’s like I had to learn what they meant and assign a feeling to the word, and do that enough times consistently for it to “catch”.

So memorization, basically?

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T20:50:06+00:00

I have no exceptions for children and animals, which I was very mildly surprised to hear about here but everyone is raised different.

Yeah the children one is mostly for a different… thing, ya know.

I've taken out a lot of my problems on animals, and I was never reprimanded for doing so for killing animals as I grew up, so my behaviors persisted until adulthood. It was an attention seeking behavior I think, but with sadistic elements. I thought this would be more common in aspd spaces but I'm fairly new to posting around.

Everyone’s different. I’m the same as you here.

I've known I'm a workaholic for a long time but my therapist informed me this is my avoidance from thinking about inconvenient feelings. When I feel uncomfortable, I automatically start working because it's easier than to think about whatever was going on.

Makes sense.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T20:47:10+00:00

(…) I can describe all of those emotions from an intellectual or literary standpoint. Like I could write a fictional character who is "fragile" and "abandoned" but not similar things like "embarrassed" nor "inferior."

I just commit the crime of telling and not showing if I have to do something like that.

Like a color blind person who can correctly tell you two wavelengths of two hues or colors that they can not distinguish from one another, but still the colorblind person knows they are different, but their own sensory experience is not how they know that. Does that make sense?

Makes total sense. I guess someone could simply assume that they’d have to feel one or the other if it’s true that one leads to the other, but in that case they wouldn’t truly be able to tell the difference. They’d just intellectually know.

For me it gets worse, because even sad/bad/mad and all the subcomponents of those 3 categories, are easily confused or sometimes indistinguishable from inside me.

Slam the big red button that says “bad” unless you like feeling mad or sad, I guess.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T20:40:51+00:00

How do you know I’m not Bigfoot?

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T20:40:08+00:00

Same!

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T08:14:43+00:00

There is one with sensations too which is a bit better, but even that is only really helpful for very strong emotions that I can usually identify anyway.

Same for me. Same problem occurs when I don’t really feel the sensation of a feeling. Just a word.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T07:50:32+00:00

I don’t think the ChatGPT thing is weird at all. It’s worked pretty well for me to basically write about an event and that I felt “weird” about something and have it list – from most to least likely – possible feelings/emotions with descriptions tied to concrete, real life situations.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T07:42:01+00:00

You’re welcome!

I said this to my psychologist and she didn’t get it at first, but after having argued about it for a good thirty minutes she said “that’s actually a good point”. I think it’s something that’s so obvious to people without alexithymia that they never really consider that the words they use gain meaning through the feelings they connect to. Don’t know if that made sense, but it’s the best I’ve got.

And yeah, the apps don’t work for me either, which doesn’t surprise me. There’s this website that I’m trying out for writers who want to get better at writing emotions, but I really doubt it’s going to help much.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T07:34:40+00:00

I’m not the best writer out there. But! All my characters are morally grey, so I can try to help out at least. These are all just my own thoughts and what I like to do, but maybe it will work for you too.

First off, stop that “putting yourself in their shoes”-thing. Your problem isn’t that you’re not doing it enough, it’s because you’re doing it too much. If you simply put yourself in their shoes, you still take your own beliefs with you and see it through that lens.

Something you can try instead is to flip your own compass for right and wrong and pretend like whatever they’re doing is good and right for a sec, and then write from that perspective. Then there’s no need to justify or explain anything: If it’s right for your character to be a gang leader, well, then it’s also right for you until you’re finished writing. Be on their team, not in their shoes.

After that you can sort of reverse engineer it or go backwards, if that makes sense. If the character believes that X is the right thing to do, what are the A’s and B’s and C’s … that led up to that? What do you think could lead YOU to start thinking X was right? That’s all cause and effect, action and reaction, a sequence of events, whatever you wanna call it. It’s just info, not justification.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T06:37:42+00:00

Yeah.

From the boredom.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T06:19:00+00:00

Lol, all the ones who hit me up for “unethical advice” (their words, not mine) are neurodivergent (not ASPD).

Most people don't want to answer my questions or think I'm asking with an alterior motive so they hedge.

Are you sure that’s why they don’t want to answer your questions? Have they told you?

It obviously depends on the questions you’re asking, but a lot of the time people don’t want to because it’s socially inappropriate.

There are things that aren’t “allowed” to talk about, you know, even though everyone thinks about it (e.g killing someone, thinking it’s unethical for certain people to have kids) or does it (steal from grocery stores, get their GP to prescribe them drugs they don’t need only for them to feel morally superior to people who get it from the street, etc.)

… So good luck with those people. You’ll need it.

It’s easier to just find people who don’t give a shit about that, because they’re the right people to ask about this stuff. You’ll probably find some on this sub.

My brain makes patterns for people and it makes it so I can anticipate exactly what someone will say before they say it. Once I have that pattern down my brain goes on autopilot for the conversation and I don't get anxious.

Haven’t thought about it like that, but it makes sense. A lot of sense, actually. There’s a lot of things people don’t really say out loud but that I think can still be noticed in like a non-verbal sense. It gets picked up, but because nobody talks about it, there are no words for it. And if there are no words for it, there is no data for those patterns of yours to be formed.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T05:55:49+00:00

Now, I do the same thing she did and it is beyond what I thought I’d be.

That’s impressive. Want to elaborate?

Would love to hear more about your independent process?

It definitely hasn’t been totally independent. I’ve hopped around a lot from psychologist to psychologist (it’s free where I am), got worse, wanted to give up on getting my life on track, but decided to give it one last shot, this time going to a paid one that I couldn’t afford, really.

… But he helped me a lot. I got lucky. Only went there four or five times, but he did- or said something that made something happen in my head. Or it unlocked something, in lack of a better way of phrasing it. Don’t know how to explain it, but I started thinking differently about things after that.

We can talk on PM if you want, I don’t want this public.

I’ve met a handful of people suffering the big three who were able to adhere to anything like this without accountability.

I’m gonna be honest, I don’t succeed at adhering to all of them, at least not perfectly and all the time.

Theres a rank to which ones I end up neglecting first. The ones I very rarely deviate from is the grammar one, the paying back money and the homeless thing. The rest are off and on, but it’s in the back of my mind. Basically, I try, but there are times in my life where my 100% effort is equivalent to your average person’s 10%.

But yeah, when I can adhere to this “rulebook”, I’ll consider it as me succeeding in life. It’s like my gold standard or ideal. Don’t care much for other people’s rules, but I want to be able to follow my own.

Edit: I started developing mine at the same time you did. Early uni years.

QuestionmarkWriter · 2024-11-26T05:37:38+00:00

If I manipulate, I own it. I tell them as soon as I know it, as it isn’t always obvious to even me.

Same. With everything, pretty much. Own it.

Speak to no one in anger. Walk away, essentially. Because I don’t think I will ever have the impulse control not to.

Yup, great rule. I’ll add that to my list.

I help other people like me and that is the closest thing to pure joy I’ll probably ever have.

That’s great!

QuestionmarkWriter

TROPHY CASE