its good to hear from you, i know this adjustment since diagnosis has been hard. Please let us know, or email if there is anything we can do to help.
your question has me thinking about those old views of my childhood, which i have picked over for sleep experiences, and episodes no one understood (again). it's so hard to remember enough detail, or have any objectivity.
i never read anything about the emotional habits children with N and C might establish, and i think that would be a great tangent for study. coping as kids might have formed similar traits in many or all adults like us.
were you having total collapse during C? how young? would that not have sent your parents running to get you diagnosed?
i understand that their reaction might have been one of your fears, and you might have been controlling to keep everything secret.
(this is harder than reinventing the wheel, more like inventing the cart, putting the horse behind it, and then trying to build a wheel under it!)
i had a rare reaction to anger, the kind of rage where you cant speak: my vision would black out, but more like red. it usually was so interesting i would stop being that mad. it can still happen, maybe 3 times as an adult. as a kid, maybe twice. so i might have been keeping anger under control.
i think i mostly got weak and tingly from laughing: it had to be a great laugh, and then i grew up thinking that everyone got that way, and i also "measured" how funny something was by it.
oddly, my children without N get that "best laugh" feeling, but one daughter is almost never emotional. like you describe, she doesnt seem to empathize, and especially will not open her own hurts. but she is not unfeeling or uncaring, she just cannot "go there" emotionally.
is there something like music, art, dance, old movies that lets you out of that shell? did you find a secret place (as a kid or a teenager) where you could?