Something I’d be interested in from this comment and maybe the OP is more clearly spelling out the bad thing that happened, as a result on “turning off emotions.”
I happen to agree with the frame you and Hazard have here, but if I imagine a person who’s currently thinking “yeah I can turn off my emotions it’s great!”, this post and comment doesn’t quite articulate what they’re missing or sacrificing. (To be clear, articulating this seems quite hard, just noting that it’d be useful if you could manage it)
Sometimes you scrape your knee really badly and don’t notice. It’s nice to not feel the pain, but also you just bled all over the carpet and now your mom is mad at you because she has to scrub the carpet for 20 minutes to get the dried blood off it.
If you could notice you scraped your knee immediately, make a fair assessment as to what care the scraped knee needs, and then turn the feeling off that is a super power. Sometimes I do that and it’s awesome. But I don’t have the power to turn them back on. They turn back on when they want, not when I want. Now I’m stuck in a bad state until something shocks me out of it. Plus sometimes they turn off completely involuntarily like the worst habit one could ever have.
My symptoms might be slightly different than Hazard’s because I specifically relate to depersonalization symptoms but here are some negative things I deal with when I have involuntary disconnect.
1) Sometimes I try and move my body and nothing happens. I feel the sensations of movement, but my body doesn’t move. When my feelings turned off, so did everything else.
2) Sometimes I can’t empathize. I can logically say what someone is feeling, but I don’t feel any true empathy for them when I’m in that state. I can’t turn just my feelings off, my ability to feel other people’s emotions turns off too. It leads to me treating people like they are disposable. It leads to me not enjoying talking about other people, as feeling their feels is what makes that fun.
3) My memory is extremely bad. I don’t remember what I say when I’m depersonalized. If someone wants me to repeat something they liked, oh boy is that stressful because I have no clue what I said or if I could say something similar. I was completely unaware of how I treated people when depersonalized because I remember so little of it. I don’t really remember much from last August to this June to be honest.
4) Sometimes I feel inhuman. If I spend a long period of time not feeling anything, then I’ve kinda opted out of the human experience and it’s like why am I even bothering to be alive? I’m not suicidal, just kinda meh.
5) Sometimes I make a bad call when to turn it off on purpose. Someone will be upset, I’ll turn my feelings off so it doesn’t bother me, and then the problem comes back later when honestly if I had faced the feelings I would have come up with a solution to the issue.
6) I have a weird relationship with akrasia. Sometimes I am the master of akrasia, just turning off my feelings and doing it anyways! But then I stop caring enough to even do that. Until my system 1 turns back on my system 2 won’t even care enough to input a new command.
7) “Turn off feelings” for me is a bit of a simplification. It’s just like, the feelings were in notme (my system 1?) so when I separate from notme I don’t feel it but it’s still there in notme. And then when I reconnect with notme they’re calm enough that I don’t really notice them but they are still lurking around in very faint ways.
8) I stay in situations I shouldn’t. My natural reaction to a bad romantic experience is just to turn off my bad feelings and continue the relationship. Without the negative reaction there isn’t really anything pushing me to call things off. So I spend a lot of time sticking in things I shouldn’t.
As someone who fatefully discovered dissociation/depersonalization/derealization (https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/dissociation/) around 10 only to have shit hit the fan in my 20s, I think I can articulate what’s lost when you lose touch with emotions. At first it feels great to ride above the pain, for me social pain in particular, and only come back down when it’s safe, like at home with my family. But eventually you can’t come back down to experience even essential things like interest, excitement, most of all love and connection. I feel that I was slowly bleeding out the entire time I was away from my body, never fully replenishing what was lost, and after years I was just empty and shriveled. I had my first real depression at the end of college and I felt mostly numb but also miserable and heavy. There was a deep sense of loss for I didn’t know what. Now I know what I was craving was a sense of being embodied, of feeling real and being connected to the world.
Healing sucks immensely because years of dissociating from emotion makes them very intense and when you come back and your coping skills extremely weak. But coming back to your body and your feelings is really the only way to come back to life. Being estranged from them is actively rejecting the reality of your experience and dividing yourself. It’s the autoimmune disease of the soul. Someone who’s checked out of a major part of their experience is not only missing the experience, but engaged in a civil war to keep it that way. You may be safe from barbed emotions when you’re dissociated, but eventually you’re not able to rest even in your own experience. It’s a torture that’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it to understand but I hope I’ve given some insight.
Big picture (from the subagent model): The children (emotions) will go behind your back and talk coordinate with other sub agents if going to the parent is not safe. Children often aren’t that smart, and will probs pick a spaghetti tower solution. You will end up with behaviors you don’t understand that will be hard to change, and you will won’t be able to improve at meeting the needs of those children (because you don’t know those needs exist).
Some specific examples:
Me being “inexplicably” depressed on the weekends. Because I’d ignored my emotions, I could see no explanation besides “The brain will randomly decide to feel aweful, there is nothing that can be done about this except go to sleep and now I’ll probably feel fine come monday”. So there was a decent amount of pain and suffering that has since been dealt with, but when I was ignoring my emotions I felt like I was stuck with it forever.
Ignoring my emotions has a powerful narrowing effect on the options I have for building skills and getting more competent. When I saw a challenge, possible goal/dream/desire, if I didn’t immediately know how to get it, I would ignore my wants and tell myself I didn’t want it. There’s a way in which I was only able to make local optimizations. There have been plenty of times in which I’ve “just been doing something for the hell of it” and then realized I was skilled enough to enact an old desire. This is a pretty random/happenstance process. Now that I’m better at listening to my emotions, I’m able to Scheme towards things that I want that don’t yet feel possible.
Ignoring my emotions contributed to a behaviors were I’d be very quick to
Another Big Picture: Thinking ignoring my emotions is great feels like mistaking wire-heading for leprosy. Wire heading as “self modify to feel good about whatever my circumstances are” and leprosy as “I’m still being torn apart and damaged by things, I just don’t feel it anymore.”
Something I’d be interested in from this comment and maybe the OP is more clearly spelling out the bad thing that happened, as a result on “turning off emotions.”
I happen to agree with the frame you and Hazard have here, but if I imagine a person who’s currently thinking “yeah I can turn off my emotions it’s great!”, this post and comment doesn’t quite articulate what they’re missing or sacrificing. (To be clear, articulating this seems quite hard, just noting that it’d be useful if you could manage it)
Sometimes you scrape your knee really badly and don’t notice. It’s nice to not feel the pain, but also you just bled all over the carpet and now your mom is mad at you because she has to scrub the carpet for 20 minutes to get the dried blood off it.
If you could notice you scraped your knee immediately, make a fair assessment as to what care the scraped knee needs, and then turn the feeling off that is a super power. Sometimes I do that and it’s awesome. But I don’t have the power to turn them back on. They turn back on when they want, not when I want. Now I’m stuck in a bad state until something shocks me out of it. Plus sometimes they turn off completely involuntarily like the worst habit one could ever have.
My symptoms might be slightly different than Hazard’s because I specifically relate to depersonalization symptoms but here are some negative things I deal with when I have involuntary disconnect.
1) Sometimes I try and move my body and nothing happens. I feel the sensations of movement, but my body doesn’t move. When my feelings turned off, so did everything else.
2) Sometimes I can’t empathize. I can logically say what someone is feeling, but I don’t feel any true empathy for them when I’m in that state. I can’t turn just my feelings off, my ability to feel other people’s emotions turns off too. It leads to me treating people like they are disposable. It leads to me not enjoying talking about other people, as feeling their feels is what makes that fun.
3) My memory is extremely bad. I don’t remember what I say when I’m depersonalized. If someone wants me to repeat something they liked, oh boy is that stressful because I have no clue what I said or if I could say something similar. I was completely unaware of how I treated people when depersonalized because I remember so little of it. I don’t really remember much from last August to this June to be honest.
4) Sometimes I feel inhuman. If I spend a long period of time not feeling anything, then I’ve kinda opted out of the human experience and it’s like why am I even bothering to be alive? I’m not suicidal, just kinda meh.
5) Sometimes I make a bad call when to turn it off on purpose. Someone will be upset, I’ll turn my feelings off so it doesn’t bother me, and then the problem comes back later when honestly if I had faced the feelings I would have come up with a solution to the issue.
6) I have a weird relationship with akrasia. Sometimes I am the master of akrasia, just turning off my feelings and doing it anyways! But then I stop caring enough to even do that. Until my system 1 turns back on my system 2 won’t even care enough to input a new command.
7) “Turn off feelings” for me is a bit of a simplification. It’s just like, the feelings were in notme (my system 1?) so when I separate from notme I don’t feel it but it’s still there in notme. And then when I reconnect with notme they’re calm enough that I don’t really notice them but they are still lurking around in very faint ways.
8) I stay in situations I shouldn’t. My natural reaction to a bad romantic experience is just to turn off my bad feelings and continue the relationship. Without the negative reaction there isn’t really anything pushing me to call things off. So I spend a lot of time sticking in things I shouldn’t.
Thanks, appreciate this writeup a bunch!
As someone who fatefully discovered dissociation/depersonalization/derealization (https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/dissociation/) around 10 only to have shit hit the fan in my 20s, I think I can articulate what’s lost when you lose touch with emotions. At first it feels great to ride above the pain, for me social pain in particular, and only come back down when it’s safe, like at home with my family. But eventually you can’t come back down to experience even essential things like interest, excitement, most of all love and connection. I feel that I was slowly bleeding out the entire time I was away from my body, never fully replenishing what was lost, and after years I was just empty and shriveled. I had my first real depression at the end of college and I felt mostly numb but also miserable and heavy. There was a deep sense of loss for I didn’t know what. Now I know what I was craving was a sense of being embodied, of feeling real and being connected to the world.
Healing sucks immensely because years of dissociating from emotion makes them very intense and when you come back and your coping skills extremely weak. But coming back to your body and your feelings is really the only way to come back to life. Being estranged from them is actively rejecting the reality of your experience and dividing yourself. It’s the autoimmune disease of the soul. Someone who’s checked out of a major part of their experience is not only missing the experience, but engaged in a civil war to keep it that way. You may be safe from barbed emotions when you’re dissociated, but eventually you’re not able to rest even in your own experience. It’s a torture that’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it to understand but I hope I’ve given some insight.
Good point. I’ll try to add details.
Big picture (from the subagent model): The children (emotions) will go behind your back and talk coordinate with other sub agents if going to the parent is not safe. Children often aren’t that smart, and will probs pick a spaghetti tower solution. You will end up with behaviors you don’t understand that will be hard to change, and you will won’t be able to improve at meeting the needs of those children (because you don’t know those needs exist).
Some specific examples:
Me being “inexplicably” depressed on the weekends. Because I’d ignored my emotions, I could see no explanation besides “The brain will randomly decide to feel aweful, there is nothing that can be done about this except go to sleep and now I’ll probably feel fine come monday”. So there was a decent amount of pain and suffering that has since been dealt with, but when I was ignoring my emotions I felt like I was stuck with it forever.
Ignoring my emotions has a powerful narrowing effect on the options I have for building skills and getting more competent. When I saw a challenge, possible goal/dream/desire, if I didn’t immediately know how to get it, I would ignore my wants and tell myself I didn’t want it. There’s a way in which I was only able to make local optimizations. There have been plenty of times in which I’ve “just been doing something for the hell of it” and then realized I was skilled enough to enact an old desire. This is a pretty random/happenstance process. Now that I’m better at listening to my emotions, I’m able to Scheme towards things that I want that don’t yet feel possible.
Ignoring my emotions contributed to a behaviors were I’d be very quick to
Another Big Picture: Thinking ignoring my emotions is great feels like mistaking wire-heading for leprosy. Wire heading as “self modify to feel good about whatever my circumstances are” and leprosy as “I’m still being torn apart and damaged by things, I just don’t feel it anymore.”