Is it alright...?

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Is it alright to express anger/dislike/sadness/etc?

Recently I've been feeling like I'm not allowed to express any negative emotion especially anger or sadness. If I even show a hint of either everyone is all over me, complaining about how emotional I am. Then there's the fact that my stepfather can be as moody and bitchy as he wants about me but if I try to defend myself or express insult at one of his hurtful comments I come out looking like the bad guy.

Also now that all of my friends are gone I have no one to talk about the things that are bothering me and being able to let go. I have to be miss perfect, always doing everything nice and getting good grades. f**k that. Neither of my parents understand the fact that I'm not as smart as they think and if I can only pull a D or C grade wise that that truly is the best I can do. But apparently I'm not allowed to be myself in my own house and I have to conform to whatever it is my family wants me to be since I'm now the eldest child.

I'm f*****g tired of living up to everyone's expectations and them giving me s**t when I fall short!

That is how I've felt a lot of the time....it feels like a lot of times if I get upset about something and express any strongish emotions about it I am whiny and immature. But if someone else has a total freak out over something minor they don't get as much hell for it. Its given me the the feeling that I fail so badly I can't even be upset correctly. I also kinda know what it feels like to feel like you have to live up to everyone elses expectations.

I am 21 and I am still struggling with not worrying about if what i do will live up to peoples expectations, I mean I don't truly care anymore its more a bad habit then anything. I cant seem to get over that habit though....I guess you just have to get rid of the emotional feelings attatched and then break the habit to just do what you would like regardless of what every other person in the world thinks.

I'd say that expressing your emotions is all right as long as you don't (emotionally) hurt anyone by doing so. I'd even go as far as to say that repressing your emotions is not healthy in the long run. I've been doing that for years and now I'm at the point where I'm about to find myself a therapist who can help me to reactivate my long-repressed emotions. Emotions are there for a purpose and stuffing them back into some dark cupboard intside your mind is not what nature intended us to do with them.

Another aspect is that others can only guess at what you're feeling if you don't give them some clues and that they will guess incorrectly at least on some occasions. I'm currently realizing how much my not displaying emotions has complicated my family life. So many misunderstandings with my parents could have been avoided if only I had sent out the kind of signals they would have expected of me instead of just keeping quiet about everything.

The difficult point is that NTs expect people to display emotions but only up to a certain intensity. That maximum acceptable intensity correlates to their perception of the magnitude of the cause that made you display emotions in the first place. I have read (and from my own experience I'd say that there is a lot of truth in this statement) that many people on the spectrum have difficulties to feel and display emotions of a medium intensity - especially in the case of so-called negative emotions like wrath or sadness. We tend to go from low intensity upset to full-scale foam-at-the-mouth wrath and that is something NTs have difficulty dealing with. They expect a whole range of medium intensities which many of us appear to bypass somehow. If it were not people on the spectrum and NTs I was talking about here but members of different cultures that deal with emotions in different ways, I'd call this some kind of cultural misunderstanding.

If you feel like you need somebody to talk to about the things that trouble you IRL, you can PM me - I know how it can sometimes help just to talk something over and get somebody else's opinion on it.

Exactly. Everyone in my family can have their freakout moments but me. They even do it in public, while I try and do it quietly at home or in my room but I'm the one to get in the most trouble. It's been instilled in me that sadness is a bad emotion to show. For years if I started to even start to tear up I would get verbally b***h slapped and told to stop being such a baby. Now that I'm 18 it's even worse because, like one of my friends, I prefer to try and stay in a child-like mode being amused by simple things and wanting to just have fun. Now I don't even have to be in an emotional state to be called a baby for liking, say Pokemon or Digimon.

My family is expecting me to 'make it big in the world'. To do great things and all the crap. Right now they keep telling me 'You can do better then this! You should be bringing home straight As like your brother! What the hell happened to you?' And unfortunately I don't have the ability to get myself out from under their expectations and simply stand up for myself. I wish I could though.

They just have this image in their head of a innocent me that is just so smart when I'm exactly the opposite. If they found out about half the things I like they would be disgusted with me and say I was possessed or some s**t like that.

Edit: Thanks FluffyDog I might take you up on that if you don't mind.

Yeah that is a lot like how I feel...and have felt. In my case I am trying to do whatever it takes just to move out, only thing that puts a damper on that is getting a job right now is pretty much impossible as I would not be able to get there and back and I don't know that I would be able to function at a job. So I think maybe finding a way to get away from your family might be good sometimes being around them can make that sort of thing worse. I don't know what your full situation is but thats my advice. Easier said then done though.

I wouldn't have offered my help if I minded your accepting it.

The only thing I cannot promise is an instant response as I'm quiet busy with my RL at the moment plus I live in a different timezone than most others on WP. But I'll try not to take longer than a day to react to any PM I might receive from you.