Emotional Permanence & Relationships

Emotional constancy and the out of sight, out of mind phenomenon in neurodivergent folks

What is emotional permanence?

Emotional permanence refers to our ability to believe in the feelings of other people even when we are not with them. For example, to know significant people in our lives love and care about us even when we are not physically together (or connected in other ways).

For some of us this is not something that can be taken for granted. Instead of feeling secure about the feelings of other important people in our lives we may fret about them, mistrust them, and become anxious or insecure.

We may struggle to maintain a sense of emotional constancy, and with our own lack of emotional permanence. Although this might be a problem, we can develop the ability to take stock of our own capacity to maintain emotional constancy.

In so doing, we can so work to improve these experiences for ourselves and for the important people in our lives.

How emotional permanence develops

Emotional permanence is something that we develop, similar to the ways in which we develop emotional regulation skills through co-regulation in our early relationships with caregivers.

We aren’t born with these skills, but we are born with the capacity to attach to our caregivers, and to develop reciprocal patterns of emotional exchange which form the basis for developing a sense of internal emotional stability.

It is natural to miss the people we feel bonded to when they go away, but it is important to develop trust that our relationships will endure separations. This is a mutual responsibility, however.

Trust is something that is earned and strengthened through positive experiences in those relationships, and both partners are responsible for being trustworthy.

If we grew up in a home in which there was a lack of predictable emotional care, if a lack of emotional consistency was the norm, then we may (understandably) have problems having confidence in the emotional consistency of other people.

This hesitancy to trust is a self-protective response. When we are hurt by significant people in our lives, it is a natural reaction to try and protect ourselves from further pain. One way of doing this is by becoming less trustful, more wary, and by putting emotional space between ourselves and others.

When this happens, we are more likely to become prone to emotional dysregulation, instead of acquiring a sense of relational security and emotional regulation.

Why are Autistic people more likely to struggle with emotional constancy (or emotional permanence)?

There could be a few reasons for this.

The most likely are:

• Difficulty with emotional regulation and the intensity of our emotions when we experience them
• Autistic and neurodivergent (ND) people are more likely (compared to neurotypical folks) to have experienced trauma, which can have a significant impact on emotional processing and relationships
• Executive dysfunction causing difficulties with working memory and emotional regulation
• Alexithymia: difficulty identifying, describing, and putting names to our emotional experiences

When it comes to Autism and emotional constancy, the issues can be twofold. On one hand, we may struggle with appreciating someone else’s emotional experience when they aren’t physically with us.

The other difficulty can be a trigger for rejection sensitivity or a feeling of insecurity in our relationships. We may struggle to feel cared about when we don’t hear from or see important people in our lives for some time.

This can also stem from cognitive rigidity, or black-and-white thinking. If someone doesn’t demonstrate that they’re thinking of us for a while, our brains may try to jump to the polar opposite conclusion, telling us that person must not care about us anymore.

These emotional triggers can be made worse when Autistics have co-occurring mental health issues which also lend themselves to increased emotional dysregulation, cognitive distortions, and rejection sensitivity.

The feeling is mutual

Adult relationships are a two-way street. By that I mean developing a sense of trust and security within a relationship requires accommodation, consideration, and compromise from both parties.

While Autistic folks may struggle more with the above-mentioned skills, there are many things we are very good at, and for a lot of us (despite popular myths to the contrary), empathy is one of them.

We may not express our feelings in ways that neurotypicals (NTs) are used to, but that does not mean we don’t experience them or that we don’t care.

Any healthy relationship will require very open communication to avoid inaccurate assumptions or miscommunication, and this is especially true for cross-cultural relationships (in this case, relationships involving people of differing neurotypes).

Too often Autistic people become scape goats, or are blamed for relationship issues and miscommunication because of our presumed ‘deficits’.

All humans, of any neurotype, will have strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to give one another grace and understanding, and it’s equally important for each person to take personal responsibility for their part in maintaining their relationships.

Salt grain

Let’s also not forget to take all these new “labels” with a grain of salt.

Sometimes they are wonderfully helpful, giving name to our experiences. In other ways they can be harmful, pathologizing human reactions, and used against us to invalidate our experiences.

Please take what you need from this and leave the rest. ❤

© Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB

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References

Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286

Ingham, Toby. (2023, September 5). Emotional Permanence. [Blog post].

Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008