Emotional Whiplash

[goldkin]

As is common with the rubberband trip between my family home and my current one, I'm suffering from a severe case of culture shock this week. This leads me to suffering from something I call emotional whiplash, as my emotional center and personal self-image attempt to catch up with rapid changes in contextual information.

This usually leads me to feeling emotionally very small once I return home. A part of this is the fact I live with introverts that keep very much to themselves, returning from an overdose of heavily extroverted people that make me feel several sizes too large on the socialization scale. The result is this sort of ill-fitting feeling of emotional disquiet that leaves me paralyzed for days, as I try to reclaim my quiet desire for affection and positivity after having it effusively and uncomfortably thrown at me by the cartful during my vacation.

I wish I handled this better. At core, I'm a strongly emotional person, and the disquieting polarization of emotional input completely throws me off balance. This usually results in about a week of lost productivity, as I spend that time alrecover.


Is there some better way to handle this? I know that, in part, this is signaling that I'm not meeting my emotional needs... and among those are my desire for affection and for quiet reminders that what I do and who I am are both, somehow, meaningful. My current coping mechanism has simply been to latch on to what scraps I can in my daily life, and that's simply causing me to rapidly burn out.

I guess what this is really saying is that I need focused love in my life again. I have no idea how to attain that for myself, as my lack of social poise and emotional balance have basically driven off most of the people I might otherwise care for. It's difficult for me to communicate that with care, I actually do much better when the initial results so clearly speak against.

Sigh. Humanity is so utterly confusing to me.

Comments

[403]

To clarify: Is it that your folks are pushing too much of a kind of socialization/affection that's a poor fit for your emotional needs? That once you're home, the net amount of affection available to you is insufficient? That you run different social "programs" based on who you're with, and shutting down the one used with your blood-family is a long & resource-intensive process? Or something else entirely?

Anyhow, it's not just you. When I visit my relatives, I need a substantial amount of recovery time afterwards.

[goldkin]

To clarify: Is it that your folks are pushing too much of a kind of socialization/affection that's a poor fit for your emotional needs? That once you're home, the net amount of affection available to you is insufficient? That you run different social "programs" based on who you're with, and shutting down the one used with your blood-family is a long & resource-intensive process? Or something else entirely?

Sort of a mélange, really. My family ascribes to the hyperactive model of social activity, being very pushy about making me social whenever I happen to be awake. My remedy for this is usually to tilt my schedule into the evenings, allowing me the mental peace and quiet that I desire between (often highly interruptive and uncontrollable) periods of social activity.

It's not a good model, but it does fill a small percentage of my desire to be social and loved upon. The felines in my family (as we have always had cats) fill another, arguably larger percentage, when I'm there. They're much quieter and more peaceful presences for me, fortunately.

Upon returning to Washington, I'm left in sort of an awkward social limbo. I've been primed with ways I am supposed to act in social company that are, through the influence of the people I've been around, exceptionally loud and demanding. I filter most of this out now, but what's left over stems into awkwardness and inappropriate behavior with those whom I cohabitate with or socially engage with.

It makes me feel exceptionally uncomfortable and self-conscious. This usually robs me of my morale for the subsequent week, as I quietly remind myself that there's only so much I can do in these situations and that I'll do better shortly.

The other part of it, I think, is I tend to gravitate towards people whom have controlling conversational styles. I can usually tolerate this and contribute actively, because the analytic mentality behind it happens to bring a lot of information to the table. But when I'm not feeling especially social or able to maintain a coherent mental context... it makes me feel impish and imbecilic. That goes right on the emotional stack, also to work itself out over the week.


I suppose I would do a lot better if I felt there was some sort of empathy going on to ease me into either social context. What I get is sort of a hard gestalt and repeated questions of whether I'm "okay"... and my immediate response is to follow social convention ("oh, I'm fine") instead of pointing out that I have specific emotional needs that are not being met, because the latter has a steep up-front cost that I have yet to find pays itself off.

tl;dr: I'm a very socially awkward dragon, because it's very difficult for me to settle. I'd like to, I just haven't yet found the resolve or luxury to do so.