Unfortunately, you can’t give up your negative feelings without also giving up your positive ones. When pain, anger, and sadness go out the window, they tend to take your love, warmth, and joy with them.
You see others experiencing those wonderful emotions, and you may wish you could too. Sadly, you cannot.
You are often uncomfortable when other people have strong emotions. When you find yourself in a situation where others are having feelings, you may have one yourself: discomfort.
All you want to do is get away from this situation because it seems awkward and unnatural.
You can observe yourself in certain situations, and wonder why you’re not feeling something more. Others around you are crying tears of joy or sadness.
You look at them and wonder, “Why don’t I feel that? What is wrong with me?”
One of the effects of walling off your emotions is that you lose touch with them. When you’re disconnected from your feelings, you’re not thinking about them or noticing them.
If you ever need to explain how you feel, you stammer or clam up.
Unspent feelings, or walled off ones, have a tendency to all pool together into one big soup inside of you. Denied and pushed down or away, the individual ingredients (your emotions) blend to make one big one.
This big one is likely to be anger. Anger is powerful and can break through your wall more easily, so it becomes the primary emotion you feel. So you essentially have two emotional states: angry or numb.
You sometimes wonder why you don’t feel sadder when faced with loss. Similar to above, it’s possible to go through a funeral of a loved one or a job layoff and feel very little. Your brain knows you should be sad, but your body does not feel it.
You can go through happy life events without feeling as happy as other people seem to be when they have similar happy events. Many people with this issue describe their joyful life experiences as “bland.”
Some have gone through weddings, vacations, graduations, or award ceremonies feeling as if they are watching themselves from afar, disconnected from the experience, or even waiting for it to be over. They feel numb.
Feeling emotionally numb as an adult can be the result of many different things, but often, it has a lot to do with your childhood — and if you were raised with emotionally intelligent or neglectful parents.
Emotional neglect happens when parents fail to respond to their kids’ emotional needs, and experiencing this as a child can have lasting effects into adulthood.
Consider this. Would you rather live a life filled with ups and downs, joy and sadness, frustrations and pride and surprise? Or a life that goes along, one day after another, with few disruptions or changes or shake-ups?
While it might seem counter-intuitive, people who pick the first scenario are typically happier overall. That’s because if you are on the roller coaster, you are living life in a more powerful way. You are more connected with your emotions, and so you are probably far more fulfilled.
But if you choose the second option, however, it might be a sign that you are emotionally numb and disconnected from your feelings.
You probably grew up in an emotionally neglectful family and learned at an early age that your emotions were irrelevant or burdensome. You may have even “walled off” your feelings as a coping mechanism, as a result of this Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN).
Every meaningful life change comes down to a person deciding that enough is enough. They no longer want to experience life the way that they do.
It doesn’t matter how far or fast one runs, sooner or later, our problems eventually catch up to us. At some point, you simply have to make the choice to stand up and fight to win, no matter the cost.
You have to be the one to make the choice to stand up to your fears and battle them. You may feel like you don’t have the strength or ability to do it, but you do. You have more strength and resilience than you may realize.
But it is quite hard to do completely on your own. Do seek the help of a certified mental health professional. They can serve as an excellent guide to overcoming your fears and problems so you can start living your life on your own terms!
Still not sure how to face and overcome the problems you have? Talking to someone can really help you to address and fix this issue. It’s a great way to get your thoughts and your worries out of your head so you can work through them.
A therapist is often the best person you can talk to. Why? Because they are trained to help people in situations like yours. They can guide you and help you to tackle your problems head on rather than avoiding them or living in denial.
A good place to get professional help is the website BetterHelp.com – here, you’ll be able to connect with a therapist via phone, video, or instant message.
While you may try to work through this yourself, it may be a bigger issue than self-help can address. And if it is affecting your mental well-being, relationships, or life in general, it is a significant thing that needs to be resolved.
Too many people try to muddle through and do their best to overcome issues that they never really get to grips with. If it’s at all possible in your circumstances, therapy is 100% the best way forward.
Online therapy is actually a good option for many people. It’s more convenient than in-person therapy and is more affordable in a lot of cases. And you get access to the same level of qualified and experienced professional.
Here’s that link again if you’d like to learn more about the service BetterHelp.com provide and the process of getting started.
You’ve already taken the first step just by searching for and reading this article. The worst thing you can do right now is nothing. The best thing is to speak to a therapist. The next best thing is to implement everything you’ve learned in this article by yourself. The choice is yours.
There are a lot of people out in the world who are not positive or supportive. They can only see the world in dark or bleak ways and they insist on infecting everyone around them with the same negativity.
There are also people out there who want to see others suffer just like they do or undermine the efforts and success of others. It’s a “crabs in a bucket” mentality, where one crab will try to pull itself out and the other crabs will pull it back in.
You must take a long hard look at the people who are closest to you. You will have a much harder time confronting your problems and improving yourself if your friends or romantic partner is belittling you, undermining your efforts, or is outright hostile to you improving yourself.
It is an unfortunate reality that so many people tend to lose friends when they start focusing on self-improvement.
Self-improvement is difficult. And when you decide to improve yourself or your position, other people around you may unfairly think you’re attacking their own choices or unwillingness to improve. You cannot let yourself get sucked into that kind of negativity and downward spiral.
Does that mean you forego and throw away your friends? No. Not at all. What it does mean is that you have to ensure that people who would undermine or destroy your progress do not have the power or capability to do so.
It is your life, not theirs; and there is no reason to put up with passive-aggressive comments or outright hostility.
Unfortunately, we sometimes end up outgrowing old friendships and relationships because they were rooted in negativity that wasn’t recognizable at the time. That is a decision that you hopefully won’t have to make, but don’t be too surprised if you do.
Persecution Live 