Does anyone else have the issue where you don't know how to respond to big news if it's given without emotion? More detail below.

Observations:
- I have had many fucked up things happen in my life.
- I often react to information others consider huge nonchalantly.
- recently I realized the pattern. I only do this for people who do not convey their feelings while sharing news. For people who express their feelings visibly I do not have this issue. And I suspect that I have bias towards nonverbal expression of feelings, like crying or big eyes etc.
- I am a high masking autistic whose trauma is very ingrained in always being aware of the unspoken energy around me and how to keep myself safe from negative energies.
- I am also a human who only has some autistic traits, and some allistic traits, and some autistic traits that I don't know how to allow myself to accept.
- I accidentally have been making my bf (autistic) feel very unvalued due to not responding aggressively to very huge things for him that seem matter of fact for me, but then when his brother (idk) told me THE SAME THINGS much more emotionally I finally get it.

Theory:
I feel like all these things are elements in a recipe for my exact issue. But I'm not sure if this specific issue is an autistic, masking, or allistic one.

Question:
Anybody else? Or anybody have an opposite experience? Heck, anybody have TIPS?

@actuallyautistic but open to all obv just remove the guppe tag if you're not trying to engage it in your answer

@tickles @actuallyautistic I think a lot of conflict between autistsnis caused by partial masking. That is to say if both parties are masking 100% there likely wouldn't be conflict and if neither party were masking then they'd be no conflict. In the former case due to mutual appeasement strategies, in the latter case it would be pure semantic communication so nothing to misunderstand.

But when there's impartial masking or only one party is masking... soo many things can be misunderstood.

@marytzu @tickles @actuallyautistic

I don't think that's true, because autists are people and people are not all the same.

Even whether we mask, what we mask and what way we mask is deeply personal and based on experiences of what works best.

And not every way of masking/coping involves appeasement. For a lot of autists, being some form of argumentative cynic is their way of 'masking'.

@robrecht @tickles @actuallyautistic not saying *all*, just *a lot of*.
Still... why do we mask if not to avoid conflict with allistics?

@marytzu @tickles @actuallyautistic

Well, autistic masking refers to any kind of hiding of autistic traits.

So other reasons to mask would include things like not wanting to be pitied, stereotyped or thought of as 'weird'.

And... Well... Acting like an asshole isn't going to avoid conflict, but it's definitely going to make people not feel pity.