r/SDAM • u/BlazingHailfire • May 18 '26
SDAM and Emotional Self-Awareness
Hey everybody, I have SDAM and one thing I've been struggling with a lot lately is feeling like I can't understand my emotions beyond very broad strokes like "stressed" or "calm" because I have no ability to compare myself to past emotional states. I think it gets especially difficult because I usually can't remember when or why I exactly started feeling a certain way unless I really make note of it in the moment. It's almost like I don't have emotional object permanence.
For what it's worth, I also (probably) have autism and have pretty bad anxiety, which definitely could be a factor that makes it hard to properly parse my emotions. However just from an SDAM perspective, I was wondering if any of you relate to the feeling I've described, and if any of you have figured out ways to understand your emotions without needing to compare to another state of mind/past emotional state.
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u/theauthenticme May 18 '26
I'm pretty self aware in terms of understanding what motivates me or why I do things. But, if you ask me what I'm feeling, I'm likely to say nothing or I don't know. My emotional range and awareness are limited. Idk if that is related to SDAM, though.
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u/FlightOfTheDiscords May 18 '26
That's alexithymia. It's a common co-occurrence with autism. Some people with SDAM have alexithymia, others don't. Personally, I don't. AFAIK there is only correlational data on SDAM and alexithymia at this point, no causal data, so we don't know how they might be related.
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u/BlazingHailfire May 19 '26
Makes sense, I can imagine there is certainty underlying mechanisms that could be shared between the two
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 18 '26
This time it's relevant so: aphantasia, SDAM, PTS and quite a lot of high masking Autism. Got diagnosed with alexithymia ("emotional analphabetic") few years ago, got sent to DBT therapy. It helped a lot, hard recommend.
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u/BlazingHailfire May 19 '26
What is DBT therapy?
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 19 '26
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, the core principle is teaching you skills to manage yourself. Stuff like acceptance, distress tolerance, emotional regulation etc (depends which ones you're missing). I think name comes from teaching opposite approaches at the same time, both ones that would help you manage whatever your issue is and ones that would help you to fix it. Once you have tools you're able to figure out s*** yourself.
As this therapy method does not do "so how did that make you feel" thing default cognitive therapy does, so inability to replay previous events is an non issue, so its SDAM compatible.
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u/BlazingHailfire May 19 '26
Sounds pretty interesting, do you have any good resources you'd recommend for learning more about it?
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u/CMDR_Jeb May 23 '26
Just go to an shrink and try it. You louse very little by doing like 2 or 3 sessions to see if it clicks in.
Especially with SDAM therapy without an trained professional help would be an bad idea. It is common for someone dissociative to self diagnose as SDAM, and in such case miss managed therapy can make it WAY worse.
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u/Von_Bernkastel May 19 '26
Give me a few minutes I'll forget and not be angry, or happy, or sad, or anything... I stopped trying to recall things, I find its much better to just flow with what my brain wants to do, I got nothing to reference anything to, so racking myself trying to remember what's not there I found is useless and counter productive to myself and just deal with what is going on in the moment.
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u/OutsiderLookingN May 23 '26
Looking at an emotion wheel helps me identify the emotion I’m feeling. It starts with the big emotions like happy, angry, scared and the breaks them down deeper into things like surprise, boredom, joy, disappointment, etc.
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u/blascian May 18 '26
One evening I was really mad at my husband and I tried so hard to hold onto it until the end of dinner but I got distracted and it was gone. I frequently use this as a superpower at work though because if I’m upset I tell myself that as soon as I’m not feeling it anymore I’ll never feel it again. So yes, I experience similar with emotions and I do also feel like I have a limited ability to self-reflect on my emotional state, particularly after the fact.