Draft:
Autism – two states – up/down – happy/sad – joyful/depressed. I used to feel that it was due to some kind of bipolar disorder. But it seems that I’m learning that autism can cause this “fault line”. So rather than have many emotional states with lots of shades between hyper and hypo there seems to be just two states – up and down. Or happy and sad. No subtle levels of emotion in between. Or so it seems anyway.
There may be a third level – neutral/level/ambient. Maybe it’s just the emotions that vary from the neutral state that are extreme or polarised.
Update: after discussing this concept with someone I need to include the idea that subtler emotional states are all there but are not seen externally. These other shades exist internally but might not be outwardly expressed. It seems with autism that the “Theory of Mind” idea causes a flipside problem – we feel that others can see our emotional and mental states; we feel exposed so we try to hide our inner selves and squish those delicate emotions.
And even that can be seen as a Theory of Mind problem – because, if you think about it, that can be seen as another failing in the ability to intuit another person’s thoughts. In short, poor understanding of another person means we think that they have a great understanding of us. What a mess!
Autism subreddits: