NT Experience

“I have lost something precious; I need time to heal.”

For NT people there are two types of sadness:

• grief: loss of people or pets
• sentimentality: value objects and the moments they represent

Grief is experienced as a physical presence – it isn’t just a thought, it is a hollow feeling or a fog that slows them down. For NT people, a significant portion of their identity is experienced through these social connections. When a person is gone, part of their mirroring identity is lost with it. This is a very intense emotion and goes through some phases of expression. It may never go away entirely, but eventually it will lose some of its impact.

Grief can also be for an abstract future. If they lose a job they can grieve the loss of the identity they had in that space. The same can happen for perceived loss or loss of potential.

Sentimentality is a mixture of happiness and sadness. The happiness comes from the memories of emotions around the object, e.g. a ticket stub to a concert that they went to with their grandfather when they were little. The sadness comes from realizing the moment is gone and it may bring up past grief. This is also part of identity. This is not all bad feelings – it allows them to relive the moment and re-feel the emotions.

My Experience

I feel grief for loss of people, pets, and objects. The magnitude of my sadness is based on:

• how much I valued the lost thing
  • I can value things by proxy in some cases
  • I experience Narrative Affective Resonance where the loss can resonate with me
• how unique it was
  • humans and pets are unique
  • objects can sometimes be replaced and sometimes not

I will be extremely sad when my dog, wife, or children die (assuming I am alive at the time). They will be permanently and irreversibly removed from this world (physically at least). I will not be able to see them again.

I don’t feel the NT hollowness or change in identity. I feel the physiological aspect of it – crying. I feel a high magnitude deletion event – a feeling of permanent loss. I suspect I won’t go through the stages of grieving, at least not like an NT person would, but I don’t know.

I feel a lesser grief for people I don’t know, and more in the abstract. When young people are killed in war, I imagine the waste: there were countless hours of love, teaching, schooling, and effort in that person and it was all lost in an instant.

The narrative affective resonance lets me model somebody else’s loss as my own. I cry for sad movies or when somebody else talks about the loss of their pet. I am not mirroring their emotion as an NT person would, I am modeling it and feeling my own loss.

I feel a lower magnitude grief when somebody loses a treasured stuffed animal from their childhood. I don’t have any particular feeling for stuffed animals, but I can model the feeling of love for the item – I had treasured things that I had when I was young (and still have some of them). The item could be replaced with an equivalent, but it wouldn’t be the same. The loss itself makes me feel sad.

If unique historical artifacts or art was lost I would feel a larger sadness. These can’t be replaced, they can only be remembered. I don’t think this could be as great a sadness as the loss of a person or pet, but it is a feeling perhaps an NT person might not feel. My lack of Social Salience causes me to value both in somewhat the same way.

As far as sentimentality goes, I am not sure I can feel it at all. I might value an object from my past, but I am remembering its value then and considering it now. It doesn’t trigger memories – I can access those with or without the object. My memories are about events and places, not emotions.

Comparison

I find it hard to even describe my emotion of sadness. It is strongly associated with the physiological act of crying and feeling of loss. Beyond that I can’t say. It doesn’t have the same permanence as the NT sadness. The trigger has high overlap with the NT experience but the emotion itself is completely different.

Semantic Divergence: yes, large. Unlike some of the other emotions this one is mostly inward focused – I don’t think the semantic divergence is as harmful here. That said, I might feel sad one day and fine a few days later and NT people might find that unusual. I have read that everybody processes grief differently, so perhaps that is my explanation.