u/kelcamer

"Individuals on the autism spectrum or with elevated autistic traits have shown difficulty in recognizing people’s facial emotions. They also tend to gravitate toward anime, a highly visual medium featuring animated characters whose facial emotions may be easier to distinguish. Because autistic traits overlap with alexithymia, or difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, alexithymia might explain the association between elevated autistic traits and difficulty with facial emotion recognition. The present study used a computerized task to first examine whether elevated autistic traits in a community sample of 247 adults were associated with less accurate emotion recognition of human but not anime faces. Results showed that individuals higher in autistic traits performed significantly worse on the human facial emotion recognition task, but no better or worse on the anime version. After controlling for alexithymia and other potentially confounding variables, autistic traits were no longer associated with performance on the facial emotion recognition tasks. However, alexithymia remained a significant predictor and fully mediated the relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition of both human and anime faces. Findings suggest that interventions designed to help individuals on the autism spectrum with facial emotion recognition might benefit from targeting alexithymia and employing anime characters."

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/autistic-traits-alexithymia-and-emotion-recognition-of-human-and-anime-faces/1177F5EC58FF0C00CC3C6F28BE5E4183

If someone asks you something, or you ask them something, are you primarily perceiving the information as irrelevant, and focusing exclusively on what the asking or answering means for your status?

I'm trying to understand here, this is not my native framework, and I'm curious if this is how most people experience reality.

Put simply:

1. Does the act of someone asking you for information itself reduce your status?

2. is the information contained within the interaction viewed as structurally irrelevant?

3. Is stating "I don't know" a status drop?

Dad, I've been in therapy every week for the last six months and a lot of the three years before it.

The little kid inner child part of me just feels sad that remembering being really hurt from something my dad did to me. She just wishes he could really hear my pain and not call me schizophrenic for accurately remembering it.

Being hurt taught me to tell the truth. And I finally did tell it.

It's been six months since he said it, and the memories still hurt. It's hard, dealing with EMDR, knowing I can never have closure, knowing my reality to him will always be invalidated. It's hard, knowing he can never truly hear me. It's hard to look at the idea that he can only see the image of me, but not who I am.

I miss the times when I was very little and he would ask me where it hurts and give me a hug, instead of me needing to prove my pain, needing to have witnesses for any of it to matter, instead of it being seen as an attack on someone's image instead of me fighting the CPTSD within.

He says money and other good times are supposed to cancel out everything else.

But I told him what honestly happened because I learned to tell the truth from that memory. I told him because I thought maybe he could validate, because I got so used to having validating friends and a validating marriage.

I miss the version of him that didn't rely on alcohol to numb pain, but the thing is this version only ever existed in my inner-child-mind or during some good years.

I'd like to believe that love outside of protecting a particular self-image exists. I'd like to give it to myself.

But dad, I don't know how. I had some examples as a kid. I learned a lot from different people. But....it doesn't make it hurt less.

What would you do, Dad?
How do I grieve the knowledge that, no matter how many ways I express my pain, that it can't be heard by him?
How did you learn to love and validate yourself? How do I grieve the pain that he will always suffer with the same?