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I've never been sad when anyone I know is hurt or dies. Also never when I get dumped or lose a relationship. I feel other things very strongly, but just not the feeling of loss. It's like "well, that happened, time to move on now" for me. Am I broken? Is this normal? I'm autistic if that helps.
| It's normal for everyone. | 1 | |
| It's normal for autistic people. | 5 | |
| It's not normal. | 2 | |
| It's not normal, but it's OK. | 6 |
It's possibly related to your autism, but I think it's generally healthy to have the attitude you do. It's all too easy for most people to spiral down into the pits of guilt and fear and despair when something bad happens, even when we're not responsible for the event and it comes under the general heading of "shit happens" - as so much of what we experience does.
I don't think it's positive for someone to just basically not give a shit about others and so to never invest time and emotional energy in relationships, but your response to KholatKhult indicates that's not what you do. It's just that when someone departs from your life for whatever reason, you easily accept the new reality and adapt to this change very rapidly.
Maybe you're familiar with the Kübler-Ross model of grieving where there are typically five stages people go through following a loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Like most things in psychology, it's not a hard and fast rule. It's also not a linear process, the stages don't always proceed in that order and there's no fixed timetable. But the only psychologically healthy endpoint is always acceptance.
That process applies to every sort of loss, not only the death of someone we're close to. Obviously, the strength of the feelings is drastically different when you lose a favourite pen compared to what's felt when you lose a parent or child and the timescale necessary to work through the stages is very different too, but the stages experienced are similar.
It sounds to me like you're wired to get through to acceptance much more quickly than most of us can. As long as knowing that doesn't make you treat your relationships very casually because you know you won't feel any pain when and if they end, and as long as you can intellectually understand that others do sometimes take a lot of time to get through the process and sometimes get hung up on one stage or another, then I'd suggest you just accept yourself as you are.
It’s not normal and it’s poor social survival skills.
And makes you an ass.