I know what my emotions are. I just don't conceptualise expressing them without an explanation what I'm feeling about. Well, until I found the usefulness of emoticons that for me work like those things you put on personal letters like kisses after a name or SWALK on the flap.
I can list feelings I experience. I can feel low things like loss, hurt, deflation, near-numbness. Ah there you go, the rationalising cuts in as I edit 'numbness' to 'near-numbness' as my brain says "You can't feel numbness." But I still understand that total numbness is on what I'll call the feeling spectrum.
I can feel things like happiness, elation, relaxedness, silliness etc.
What doesn't work for me is any concept that any of this makes sense without being because of something or about something or related to something. I have to find a reason or explanation for everything in life.
So it's the "How are you feeling?" question that freaks me because it feels like an exam question or, to express the emotional overtones of it better, like question on a DWP form.
Curiously, where I've tried things like meditating or similar, the sit there and feel thing, then I really, really freak out. Aargh.
On the funny side (or at least it's funny for me), I spent years trying to ignore all my physical pain. That or blotting it out with exercise highs. But one day, I found myself wondering what all this mindfulness stuff is about. Focussing on what's in the now or something? I left the house and tried to work out which bits of me were hurting in what way. Hmm. Was that mainly the arthritis or partly compensating for the old injury in my... I looked up at the sky, i.e. was the weather damp? Aargh, it was going to rain, the things I was carrying would get soaked! I ran for it.
Then I realised I have to do the opposite with pain from what everyone had told me. Now if pain is bugging me, I do a sort of audit. Which bits are hurting and why. That tells my subconscious whether I need to be concerned about anything and usually there's no pain there's no explanation for, and so my subconscious can ignore the pain and somehow that usually means it doesn't bother me. I call it the fire alrm technique. If the fire alarm goes off at work, you are suddenly alert and you look at the clock. If it's weekly drill time, whether the alarm then bothers you will depend on your mood (yes, ok, feelings!) and also whether it changes.
But a key aspect of that is using two things - my need to explain a feeling, and my brain's propensity to go off on tangents exploring connected observations, thoughts etc.
So it's not that I don't have feelings or that I don't recognise feelings, it's just that for me "How do you feel?" is, for me, like asking me to come out with an 'acceptable' description that can be justified.
I can deal with one aspect of it now - when people I know socially ask me how I feel. I give a socially acceptable meaningless response like "Better days, worse days." Thanks to the pandemic, I now have useful options like "Not dead yet!" Then if they prod further, I know they really want to know, but if they really want to know, there's a good chance they know my communication style and are ready for it.
That being said, I can cope with a Sam who asks "How do you feel?" or, more often "How do you feel now?" in a way that's clearly using it as a phatic phrase (social phrase) meaning "Your time's up, there's queue." My response to that will be something like "It's really helped to talk. Thank you." we exchange a couple more 'end of call' phrases and I put the phone down. That's different from what I conceptualise as the earnest question or even the desperate wail from someone who in turn conceptualises themselves as been there to listen to feelings and emotions not explanations and reasoning.
My nightmare with this is psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. Describing feelings to them is dangerous once they know you've got a bipolar label. Conceptually they're a prosecutor and it's the loaded question that determines the 'sentence'.
As I sit here and say all this, I'm making a decision. Not to try and change that need to latch my feelings onto explanations, but to focus more on what I'd half identified when I typed the OP, which is the need for a set of suitable phrases, for communication techniques, for people who really, really don't want the explanations.