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.
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?