Sounds like derealization

I’m not sure if this is similar, but I just didn’t feel emotions before E. I got angry sometimes. I think I cried twice in my life, I didn’t even cry when my step-mom passed (I wanted to but the tears just wouldn’t come).

After hrt, it was like how I saw without glasses to having them on the first time. My whole emotional world was in HD now, I had names for feelings. They were also way more powerful, I was crying in front of people and in public and I just was NOT prepared for it at all and found it very embarrassing. My endo doc said to take it easy on myself and that “women cry in public, that’s okay.”

Growing up, my mom was very busy. She had school and then a job and two kids besides me. The other two were much more demanding than I was in terms of their own mental health, so I did my best by repressing and keeping things in and seeming steady and like I didn’t need anything. Recently, there was a tornado warning and she mentioned it, I said I had a phobia of tornados and chuckled and she was surprised, she didn’t know - I’ve had a phobia of tornados since I was like 3 years old. She didn’t know because to her I never reacted, but I was terrified of them anytime I though there were funnel clouds or whenever I heard there’d be a really bad sudden thunderstorm.

So, I’ve basically been training myself to not feel my feelings since I was a toddler. Also, I’m trans and that comes with it’s own heapings of ignoring feelings. So Ive had something similar, like a big dull weight and veil covering everything - mine might’ve been different than yours though!

I think I feel something very similar. I have this kind of weird lag where I experience something and then I can’t figure out how I feel about it or what it was really like for a while. A few hours or a few days later I will finally have a reaction to it, but even then a big part of it is intellectually deciding how to feel instead of just knowing.

Since I’ve been on estrogen, my emotions are a lot stronger. Overall that’s really nice, but it hasn’t really fixed the detachment. Like the last couple of weeks have been pretty eventful for me, I met some new people and tried some new things. But it’s still the same way it always has been. I figure out like the day after if I liked something or not. It makes functioning socially like a lot harder.

I do think a big part of this is just autism for me. But like the autism and the transness are linked in weird ways. Like do I mask for autism reasons or because I had to pretend to be a guy for a long time?

I definitely do, but I think the source of that is complicated. CPTSD with dissociation as my go to coping strategy took a while for me to sort through and, even though I have a better handle on it now, it can still make things cloudy. I also try to be careful about letting my my mind drift or wander too much, cause I can really just exist in thoughts for a long time if I let myself. Part of that was definitely due to waiting to transition until I was in a safe place, but it’s also trauma from non-trans related things that happened where I grew up. It’s definitely annoying and feels like there are days where a significant amount my energy goes to staying present and anything past that is difficult

I have ptsd and recognise this a lot. This is also exactly why I see my therapist because she often directs me the right ways with her questions which gives me some clarity and allows me to process my feelings and thoughts a bit more.

I agree a lot. To me, I’d describe it as a ‘head in the clouds’ kind of feeling. Like there’s some long tether between ‘feelings’ in the visceral sense, and the conceptualizing and wandering thoughts of my ‘conscious mind’. And any big emotional change feels like its distant and takes time to ‘work its way up’, not to mention just the various impressions that I just don’t feel emotions on connect to reality the same way others do. One of the little things that is just kind of petty but always makes me feel alien, is I just don’t like most media. I don’t like movies or TV, I don’t like the vast majority of music.

I also definitely have that ‘veiled third eye’ feeling, or the sense of catching snippets of sounds or sights that are hidden or Important. But its worth noting, I have schizophrenia, so I know what that part of it is all about. But a big part of those kinds of things for me isn’t just the hallucination of the sense, but the delusion that it is real and important, the same way some thoughts feel profound and correct, and I gotta recognize and ground or check in with others.

The way I think and feel emotions is strange to me… I feel like there’s this veil over all my perception that I can just barely catch a sense is there.

For me its most noticeable with pain (probably because a lot of people don’t even consider it an emotion, but just a purely physical phenomenon). Like, not that long ago I stubbed my toe, yelped because of it, then was convinced I didn’t really stub my toe because there was no pain as far as I could tell. The next morning, it felt stiff, so I think I stubbed it pretty hard.

This morning, I started to wonder if a similar disconnect between my subconscious and conscious experience of pain has actually been the cause an unsettling feeling the last couple days (I was just chalking it up to burnout at work…). I wish my brain wouldn’t keep secrets like that from me when there’s the possibility that I could do something about it >.>

Funnily, one of my earliest memories (assuming it real) was being at my friend’s house and his dad asking us what superpower we’d want and I think I said something like “no pain” (but meant invincibility I think), and he pointed out how that means you could be damaging your body without realizing it.