Apparently I am supposed to physically feel my emotions and respond to them instead of not knowing what happens to them most of the time which indicates that I am partially emotionally detached according to a scale of “woah excitement is in my fingers” to “my response to you asking me something about myself is I don’t know”
Discovering feelings in the body
The other way you know if you are emotionally numb is if you don’t have oodles of people that both hate and love you, that is because the numbeness is a gift that allows you to protect yourself from too much dislike, just gotta learn to get comfortable with dislike in order to maximize the amount of people that like you.
A huge part of beginning work with a therapist is learning emotional vocabulary because many people are just made ignorant of what our emotions even are. That thing you feel when something bad happens to somebody you don’t like? There’s two or three different words for that but you can’t be expected to handle it healthily if you don’t even know what it is.
That’s an extreme example but there’s also a whole bunch of different kinds of sad that some cultures (looking at you America) just refuse to acknowledge because being sad isn’t being a hard worker and that’s bad for the economy ☹️
Anywho, emotional vocabulary. Important stuff. They make worksheets and tools to help you explore words. I highly recommend for everyone but especially for men because they keep us stupid on purpose.
My son has a small slew of mental health issues. He’s 12 now, and been in therapy since six.
We tackled the problems together, and learned the language and coping together. Learning the language to describe how we are feeling has helped my son understand himself more than anything. The progress these last 6 years is astounding.
Language, and finding a way to represent your emotions using it, then knowing how to communicate that to those around you, is by far one of the strongest tools.
EDIT to tie it back to the article: Describing it initially as they do in this article, helped me explain things like anxiety or anger to my son. He often clenches his fists when he’s angry. Today, I only have to point out, Hey I noticed your fist are clenched, are you okay? And he immediately unclenches them, I see his body relax, and he’s able to talk more calmly about what’s bothering him, instead of just, self destructing. He’s been able to recognize he clences his fists when he’s angry/overwhelmed. Just in noticing that, behavior change has followed. It really is beautiful.
So glad to hear that! Wishing him courage and gentleness as he grows 💪
That’s great, I’m glad you’re taking an interest finding time to actively participate in therapy and “homework,” especially in a society that demands every moment be about everything but us and our families!
I know a lot of people hold a range of emotions in our jaw (teeth clenching), neck and shoulders (headaches, tight shoulders/upper back, even muscle spasms). A few deep breaths, held and released, has helped me relax tensions and respond rather than react, even if the response is to ignore intended triggers and just look at the speaker or calmly walk away.
Everyone in my house uses deep breaths. Im so glad you’ve found coping that works for you!
Thank you. Wishing you and yours continued success!
I felt real emotions as a child, genuine joy that made my stomach tingle.
As an adult i lost that feeling.
After starting HRT it’s come back to me. :3
I’m hoping that I get to feel again now that I’m on HRT. So far nothing.
I got some of it back. It is mostly rage and sadness, but i live in america so i think thats more external than me lol
I scored a perfect 10/10 on my anhedonia test!
Other people’s behaviour does make more sense now that I learned that.
Still struggling to understand the difference between egoism/hedonism and following instinct.
understand the difference between egoism/hedonism
I can see why they might seem similar. And you can certainly pursue hedonism in an egoistic manner.
But I prefer a utilitarian version of hedonism, which doesn’t necesserily need to come with any level of selfishness. It can, but it doesn’t have to.
I make selfish decisions at times, but try to make sure that doing things for my benefit doesn’t cost someone else.
Taking it even further, putting in a bunch of work to throw someone else a super fun surprise party, is hedonistic, but not very egoistic.
Hedonism is to maximise pleasure while avoiding pain. Unlike egoism, it doesn’t have to focus on only your own pain or pleasure.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35329.The_Body_Remembers
It is now thought that people who have been traumatized hold an implicit memory of traumatic events in their brains and bodies. That memory is often expressed in the symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder-nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses, and dissociative behaviors. In essence, the body of the traumatized individual refuses to be ignored. While reducing the chasm between scientific theory and clinical practice and bridging the gap between talk therapy and body therapy, Rothschild presents principles and non-touch techniques for giving the body its due. With an eye to its relevance for clinicians, she consolidates current knowledge about the psychobiology of the stress response both in normally challenging situations and during extreme and prolonged trauma. This gives clinicians from all disciplines a foundation for speculating about the origins of their clients’ symptoms and incorporating regard for the body into their practice. The somatic techniques are chosen with an eye to making trauma therapy safer while increasing mind-body integration. Packed with engaging case studies, The Body Remembers integrates body and mind in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. It will appeal to clinicians, researchers, students, and general readers.
The therapist I’m seeing now is big on this kind of thing. Not so much as the OP where we’re trying to feel emotions in the body, but more that we’re trying to feel the reactions and bigger emotions in the context of time. As in “How old is this part of you that feels this?”
It’s very helpful, in my opinion, because it’s allowing me to heal parts of myself that suffered the trauma, and it’s allowing the PTSD to feel less like a jump scare and more like an understanding.
That kind of sounds like an blend of approaches, or maybe Gestalt theory.
Is it working for you?apologies, I’m in the middle of laundry.
I was diagnosed with Alexithymia when I was diagnosed with autism. I have a very difficult time with emotions and emotional regulation. I’m trying to learn workarounds or something but my therapist isn’t too familiar with alexithymia…sigh.
I’m thankful that a lot of early childhood places are really beginning to focus on emotional awareness. There are so many resources for social-emotional learning for kids now. My child’s preschool is SEED certified (https://www.nmececd.org/seed/) and she’s been working on a feelings journal. At our elementary school we have social skills groups where we explicitly teach kids about emotions and also teach them life skills (we have small groups of kids playing board games to handle taking turns, losing, etc). At home and school we have these little “spot” of emotion stuffies and an accompanying book that explain what an emotion is, what it feels like, and what we can do about it. Our school also uses the zones of regulation (pic) to not only help kids understand but to also help the staff understand how our students are feeling.
What does it mean when you’re in every zone except green at all times, and no amount of medication or therapy helps?
Very interesting, I never heard of emotional numbness. I do think how our brain is hardwired has more influence with how we think and behave than it is given credit to. I have anendophasia, meaning I have little or no internal monologue. Like, when I want to pick a pen, there is no monologue of my mind saying “I must pick it up”, I just pick it up without any verbal thought.
that is because the numbeness is a gift that allows you to protect yourself from too much dislike, just gotta learn to get comfortable with dislike in order to maximize the amount of people that like you.
Like you, I don’t really care as much what others think. I probably have emotional numbness to certain extent, but unlike yours I would imagine. Unlike most people who have self-critical thoughts, I could easily brush aside negativity or I don’t dwell on it too much. I could feel something, but I just know that too much negativity is not productive so my mind goes away from it and I would rather do something that fix the issue or contribute to my long term goals and values.
However, with all that said, there is a limit to any varying degrees of emotional numbness because from my experience, one could come off as insensitive to other people’s feelings. I have imposed my own values to people who simply think differently without realising it and hurt them. Going back to self-critical and intrusive thoughts, most people have it which I didn’t realise and dismiss their feelings. It is important to develop emotional and social intelligence to curb the downside of emotional numbness.
emotions are experienced a bit differently by everybody. don’t stress yourself too much about not feeling emotions “the right way” :D
