I have it all.
I have money, youth, appearances.
I have tried all the vices:
Drugs, sex, love, friends and fun nights out, career, hobbies, good food, travel, whatever.
I can't enjoy anything. Anhedonia probably.
I have therapy on Tuesdays. Prescribed different antidepressants.
I still want to leave. Escape everything. I just want to waste away. I worry my family and that makes my guilt consume me. It makes me want to leave even more. I can't keep up with it all.
I can't do this anymore. The only thing that makes me feel comfort is drafting my suicide letters. My body is so tired but my mind can't sleep. The antidepressants work sometimes but when I'm low there's nobody to help me but myself and I just don't have the energy.
How are people so happy ?? I cringe at all my interactions with people in real life. I hate myself, my lack of identity is making me spiral.
Hi sweet
@lemonhoney (I'm sorry this message will probably be long)
I'm sorry you feel that way ❤
I think I understand, maybe you feel a big emptiness inside, a guarded loneliness, the feeling of being dead, or wanting to hurt yourself to feel things inside you
If that's the case, I'm sorry ❤ I understand how complicated it is...
If you agree, I will try as best I can to give you some food for thought and solutions
Firstly, think about the cause of this emptiness
1) Brain damage/degeneration/Neurodevelopment: some brain lesions (notably of the limbic system (inner medial core of the brain) and the frontal regions) can have an impact on the processing of emotion and its perception. The frontal region is considered to be important in the social aspects of human behaviour (empathy, social adaptation, representation of affect, decision making, expression of emotion). The limbic system is an associative system (heart of the emotion, and of all emotions, distributes these emotions by associating them with memories, actions, images seen...). It does not matter what the cause of the damage is, but if a region is damaged, degenerates or develops abnormally, there may be consequences.
A) Axexythmias: which is a difficulty that an individual has in feeling and expressing emotions. Feelings are poor or absent and tension can be felt. Very often, people with this condition end up adopting extreme attitudes that can put them in danger to stimulate themselves and seek sensations (drugs, sex, adrenaline, speed....). An alexythmiac does not really understand what he or she is feeling and will, for example, simply describe having physical sensations (bristles, shivers, tense muscles) when these are emotional manifestations. Alexythmias can have a developmental cause, but can also be due to trauma in adolescence, personality, defence mechanisms. It is more of a symptom than a disease. It is rarely neurological.
B) Apathy: which is characterised by an absence of motivation, an indifference to things, to emotions, to what surrounds the person and an absence of desire to act. Apathetic people often justify the lack of action by saying they are "tired". They don't really care about what happens to them, so I don't think that's your case.
C) Loss of emotional feeling through damage: in extreme cases, some brain damage can permanently alter the ability to feel emotions (everything: fear, disgust, anger, sadness, joy). These people use their reasoning to understand things, for example, if you are crying, they may say "I don't feel anything, but since you are crying, I assume that something has made you sad.)
D) Neurofunctional conversion disorder: a disorder with an emotional origin (a great shock, such as a rape, murder in front of our eyes, abuse, harassment, and so on) having such an emotional impact, that the emotion will be converted into a particular activity on the brain. The emotion and memories of the trauma will have completely disappeared, but the area where the brain networks receiving this emotional conversion will be impacted. For example, a person who has no reason to be a quadriplegic on an MRI scan or from a motor point of view, but is still quadriplegic. These are people who, when the emotion is evacuated and the trauma addressed, recover from their disorder gradually (here the person may recover slowly and be able to walk again).
2) Mood disorders: the emotional experience also depends on the emotional dynamics that take place in the body.
A) Depression: depending on its severity, it can lead to profound anaedonia, and indeed often the more severe it is, the more the emotions are abolished, leaving only emptiness, powerlessness, despair and often suicide
B) Bipolarity: by alternating euphoric, impulsive and extremely vivid phases (manic/hypomanic) and depressive phases, each phase can impose itself with great violence, these phases alternate from week to week (mania -> depression -> mania -> depression). But the depressive phases can be extremely violent, leading to absolute despair, anhedonia (including absence of emotions like depression) and often to suicide
C) PTSD: shock evoking death directly or indirectly, traumatising the individual with subsequent violent reliving, tetany, nightmares, avoidance of situations evoking the problem, depersonalisation, derealisation. In some cases, the shock and tetany may be such that emotions are no longer expressed
3) Personality disorders: some personalities affect emotional feelings.
A) Borderline personality: Identity is at the heart of the problem and one of the recurring symptoms is called "chronic emptiness". Basically, these are people who are emotionally unstable, going from strong anger, to crying, to joy, with a recurrent tendency to feel deeply empty, like an empty shell. They tend to think about suicide and harming themselves, dislike loneliness and abandonment and can be impulsive.
B) Narcissistic personality: people lacking empathy, with desires for megalomania, lust and love. Believe themselves to be excellent but are unaware of their low self-esteem. They act out of self-interest and feel emotions mainly for themselves rather than for others (due to their very low empathy).
C) Antisocial Personality: A person with a great lack of empathy and the ability to take on evil for its own sake. Dislikes conforming to moral values, may use violence. Self-interest is what counts. They feel emotions but are self-centred.
D) Avoidant Personality: fearful, distrustful people. For fear of judgement, mockery or violence, they prefer to adopt defensive behaviour by staying alone. They often internalise emotions a lot and express them rather poorly, and are rather undemonstrative. The difficult expression of emotions is mainly based on a difficulty in bonding and trusting as they have difficulty in forming social relationships. Being alone is safer but they may suffer from it
4) Defence mechanism: more or less conscious psychic processes that seek to protect the individual from an unhappiness, a memory, an inner emotion. As long as the defence mechanism is applied, the person is not impacted, but when the defences are lifted, the anxiety and associated feelings come back to the face. This can explain burn out, anxiety attacks, suicidal raptus (impulsive suicide, with no previous actions to identify the presence of a crisis). It can also explain falling into depression.
A) Repression: putting a memory or a personal fact into the unconscious. This mechanism is unconscious but we are aware of the missing memory (for example: I try to remember what happened to me at school but I don't remember it). Here for example, if there was bullying at school, it could be repression))
B) Rationalisation: trying to explain an emotion through reason. Try to tell a trauma, using abstract reasoning so as not to have to feel the impact of the trauma on us (for example, when talking about a trauma: "Yes, I think that what made me suffer was the fact that I tend to dislike it when things happen like that, I'm usually clean, and well, I couldn't avoid messing things up". Here, the person could have said "I was raped and I feel dirty since".
C) Intellectualise: use the thought as a way of distancing oneself from the emotion "I think I feel that way...", rather than saying "It destroys me".
D) Displacement: attributing to something external to us, a trauma and strong inner emotions. For example, transference phobias (which can be explained by childhood experiences) mean associating an external object (e.g. clowns) with an internal fear that actually means something else. So as long as the clown isn't there, you don't feel anything related to the trauma.
E) Cleavage: allows one to split the image one has of something, someone, a memory, to keep only one aspect. It very often allows to split into two sides "One said great, that we idealize, another that we deeply hate". For example, someone you love, if you argue with them, you can hate them and forget that you love them. This is a form of cleavage
F) Inhibition: a regulatory mechanism for suppressing or drastically reducing the emotional impact of something on oneself. A forensic scientist inhibits, because otherwise he or she would spend all his or her time being tetanised. One can inhibit during a bereavement, to distance oneself as much as possible from the real impact of something on us.
5) Disorders of psychic functioning
A) Dissociative personality disorder: alternation in different personality traits. The feelings are as if several people were living together. Memory disorders may occur because we do not necessarily remember that one of our personalities did this or that. Emotions can fluctuate but also be absent.
All of this is obviously food for thought to try and understand what you are going through at the moment. Don't try to diagnose yourself, because the risk is to get locked into an opinion/label and you shouldn't think that "Ah, maybe because I think I have this, I function like that".
The problem with that is that it might just reinforce your suffering...
The experience of suffering is always multifactorial (genetic or not, personality, attachment, environment, season, biological, neural, psychic, infantile, pathological or not)...
You are not in only one category, we are in all categories of the world. Only, we sometimes fit more in some than in the other
What I wrote here is just a sort or way to ask you some questions. "What could explain that I often feel empty? This? Maybe because yes, I have had that... That too! Because when I think back I had that too...
So, I'm not qualified to make a diagnosis, you, don't get caught up in a theme so that you don't think that what justifies everything you're experiencing is "This", "This disorder".
What you're feeling is just symptoms. And as you understand, for one thing observed, we have millions of causes!
On the other hand, I will describe a metaphor that I have always found interesting to visualize. Emotional functioning is like plumbing
Imagine that your brain is a complex set of pipes. In these pipes, there is water flowing (positive emotions). In all water, there are impurities, limescale (negative emotions). Sometimes, when you are not well, the water is more loaded than usual with impurities, and then time passes, many impurities accumulate that you end up with clots forming. Eventually, the water doesn't pass anymore.
Very often, these clots prevent you from feeling emotions. Because with time, when the negative emotion is too intense, it turns into emptiness, into a feeling of nothingness, of emotional anaesthesia.
Do you see what I'm getting at? ❤
Very often these clots have to be removed for the emotions to return.
Negative emotions have more impact than positive ones in the brain, to remove them you have to talk about them, you have to identify them, you have to ask yourself "why do I feel that way" and you have to dive into those negative feelings, deeply, but you have to go to let them go.
It's of course better to do this with someone else ❤
As soon as the long accumulated knots and sufferings are released, hope and emotions return ❤
My comment was long sweet
@lemonhoney and I am sorry for that ❤
It's just that your situation is very large, and I think what I described could help you to understand what's going on inside you ❤
Finally, when I said to you, "don't lock yourself in a category", I think you understood it but it's for your own good ❤ Because it's a mistake that psychiatrists, doctors make, they lock you in "a type of illness" and it's enough that they made a mistake for it to follow you all your life, for you to be misdirected, and for you yourself to end up not understanding at all what's happening to you....
Anyway, I talk too much
Even if things are not easy, we love you and we believe in you ❤
I wish you the best, I hope things can work out and I believe in it ❤
Hope you'll feel better ❤
Love ❤
