Thank you, DirtDawg.
I know what you mean. I'm slowly getting better about being able to feel things as a situation is actually unfolding, not three days (or years) later. It's the counseling that's helping me with that part. It's never going to give me the spontaneous emotional give-and-take ability, but it is helping me to recognize and identify my own emotions, and to handle them more appropriately.
My counselor is a social worker whose parents were both Holocaust survivors. She knows a lot about trauma and being a social outsider. She's always stressed to me that AS is not a defect, it's a difference, and that it's got both positive and negative points. I was very lucky to find someone like her to help me.
