Today, I read this post on the internet while trying to do some self-diagnosis for something I've been experiencing. The person making the enquiry was facing a situation so similar to mine, that it was almost disconcerting. Mainly, it's to do with feeling a lack of emotion. Like her, I've felt... almost nothing as of late. Perhaps the occasional bout of anger, of sadness, usually at night, and these come so intense and so overwhelming that I'm reduced to a pathetic mess of tears and snot, but come morning, it's all gone again. Come morning, nothing.
The solution given was as follows:
Whenever we try to shut off close down or avoid certain emotions, the problem is that everything else can get shut down as well. It’s not like there’s one dial for happiness, another for sadness, and yet another for anger.
We either feel our emotions or we don’t. If you want your positive emotions back, you will have to open up to the negative ones and work through them. The reasons why we shut down emotions are all based on fear, but with different variations.
We may be afraid of hurting somebody else or we may be afraid that if we show our anger we’ll be negatively judged for it. We judge that we should have gotten over something from the past, but when there are still feelings left, we’re afraid that something’s wrong with us that we haven’t “gotten over” something.
There are many more faces you can put on fear, including the one you mentioned, where you're afraid of people disappointing you, so you close down instead.
To feel love again, you'll need to face your fears of what will happen when you access your anger. The problem with believing our fears, whether it’s on a subconscious or conscious level, is that the fears is always out of proportion with reality, but we have no way of knowing that unless we face what we’re afraid of.
You may even be able to respond with, well, logically there's nothing that you're afraid of, you’re a strong woman and can’t be bothered with stuff like that, but what resides in your subconscious is not under logical control. From what you write you can’t be feeling happy. How can you be when you’re not feeling anything?
A person’s happiness depends on their ability to be able to exist in the world without fear of being hurt.This includes the ability to express yourself in whatever way you want without the fear of being judged for your individual expression.
Much of our lives is spent trying to fit in, making others happy, and pleasing the people around us so that they accept and love us. We are afraid of rejection, saying or doing the wrong thing, and other people walk around you with some degree of fear.
We all want love and don’t feel that we can be ourselves and express our needs and desires for fear of conflict with others. You need to get help with finding out why you’ve closed down. What sequence of events and associations have made you feel so hurt that it’s no longer safe for you to participate in life.
You need to learn different alternatives to closing down your emotions so you can be emotionally safe in this world.
Can you see a pattern of creating expectations of people that are regularly broken? Where are you not listening to your inner voice? Can you see where you ignore your needs to be loved by others? Do you believe what you’re told without waiting to see if a person’s actions are concurrent with their words? Do you get angry later when what people say isn’t what they do?
There’s a lot for you to find out about how your mind thinks, how it comes to conclusions about people, what meaning those conclusions have, and how you can change those meanings to bring love and happiness back into your life.
Besides asking yourself these questions, you also need to look at your suppressed anger and explore its triggers. All emotions relate back to behavior that you learned a long time ago. What patterns of behavior can you identify and redefine to bring you less pain and to build your knowledge about who you really are?
You are not your behavior, the lack of love that you feel, and the hurt that you've experienced. So who are you? What do you like, what don’t you like? What parts of yourself are you comfortable with, which parts do you despise about yourself? Where are you angry with yourself? Where do you not let love into your own soul?
You’re tired of being who you think other people want you to be. In a way, you’re in an emotional rebellion. If you can’t be who you really are and feel loved and accepted for you, warts and all, it can make you feel like life is hardly worth living.
Your body, mind and soul are trying to communicate to you that something needs to change, that you can’t go on the way you have, that it’s just not working for you. All the hurt you’ve experienced is cumulative, and you’ve gone numb to stop the pain, which would overwhelm you if you were feeling the emotions right now.
This is why it’s important that you find a counselor you’re comfortable with to guide you through the process of uncovering your pain a little at a time until you learn how to do it yourself and you can continue to safely do it on your own.
I don't know how to feel about all of this, mainly because it seems so real. So applicable. As if the person here was talking directly to me.
Yesterday, I yelled at my sister and we had a shouting match, but really, through it all, I was relishing the pretense of feeling an emotion as intense of anger, rather than actually feeling it. It felt nice to shout, but the motivation behind it was pretty much empty. It's like I'm walking around, perfectly empty. I know I should be feeling something, but I don't. It's very much like standing in front of a large glass dam, facing something of a tidal wave of emotion. You can see it, you know it's there, but it doesn't so much as touch you. It's detached.
And I guess I kind of hate it.
I mean, while it is great to not feel any negative emotion, as the person mentioned in their response, I don't feel any positive emotions either. There is no real happiness, no real laughter, not even love. Which really sucks, not only for me, but those that I profess to love. I think somewhere within me I know that I'm supposed to love them, and I bet I do, I just don't feel anything right now. I laugh when I know I'm supposed to laugh, I smile when I'm supposed to smile, I frown when I'm supposed to frown, I'm sympathetic when I know I'm supposed to be, I cry when I'm supposed to be sad, and I yell when I'm supposed to be angry. It's all so mechanical, and yet with no feeling behind it. It's like I know what's the socially acceptable reaction in each instance and act accordingly, not according to what I feel, which is in fact a giant mass of nothing.
Someone close to me could die and I don't actually foresee myself having a violent reaction to it at this point, or much of a reaction for that matter.
I miss feeling. I miss emotion. I want to feel something. Anything.
I want to be able to tell my boyfriend that I love him and feel it, make it real not only in my head but in my heart. Because in my head, I know I love him, and I know I don't want to go through anything without him, and I don't ever ever ever want to hurt him. But where the emotion is supposed to be, there's just a blank spot. And while this is the same with everybody else, this in particular frightens me the most, because he's the one I care most about, more than anybody else, and to feel empty with regard to someone so bloody important to you, well, that just cannot be normal.
I have no idea why or when this started. Someone once told me that keeping your emotions suppressed could not be a good thing for you. I never really bothered about this piece of advice, because to me, the alternative, to let everybody know how I am feeling, to even feel everything I was supposed to feel, was... unimaginable. There was no way I could do it, not with everything I would have to face.
Oh, come now, what can a girl of 19 have to face that is really that big?
I don't know. Literally, I have no idea what I am hiding away from. Or I do have some idea, but only a rather vague one. And maybe to someone else, the pain I think I will face might seem insignificant, again, I have no idea. All I know is that there is something there that my psyche has chosen very prudently to lock away, and the very thought of unleashing it terrifies the crap out of me.
It's like monsters that I have captured and trapped in a cage of frosted glass, shadows and vague glimpses I can see, but not the creature in its entirety, yet I view enough to know that I don't want to release it and face it.
But oh for heavens sake, the feeling of numbness that I have right now. It's like nothing matters, and nothing ever will matter. It's like there's literally no reason for existence right now. It's so empty, and so dark.
I dont think I've ever contemplated suicide as often as I have in the past few weeks than I have my whole life, and that includes the time I literally took a knife to myself.
I sound like I'm whining. I wonder how many people reading this will think that I'm just an attention seeking teenage girl who has no clue the troubles of life and just wants to make a scene.
Whatever.
A part of me wonders if I should take the advice the counselor has given. Open myself up to the emotions that have been locked away.
And then another part of me just rejects that so badly. Even if I could do that (can one even open up a door shut so tight?), do I really want to? What if it destroys me? There's too much in there to face, too many emotions bottled in there since primary school. Since I decided that regardless of what hurts me, it makes more sense to just smile it off and tell no one, force myself to feel nothing, rather than confront it head-on.
Yet at the same time, I kind of what to feel what I used to feel. Happiness. Joy. Love.
I don't know what to feel.
There's a reason I chose to lock myself up in Utown and refuse to go home, and it has nothing to do with the noise at home.
There are too many reminders of what I can't have.
Like family, like love, like feeling.
Open myself up to my negative emotions, can I do it? I dont think so.
Seek professional help? I don't want to. At least...
Not yet.
Fuck, I am so messed up.
Something's gotta give.
Purpleandorangesheep
me 