...emotions. We all have them, but many of us are adapted to not feel them. The problem is that even though you aren't aware of them consciously, your body is aware. Emotions that are not felt consciously come out as behavior and symptoms.
As a psychotherapist, I say "well said"! As someone reading this thread long after it's stopped,or perhaps your post was just recently, and I haven't figured out how to locate threads I was involved in to check back in.....I'm remembering how depressed I was in my post in October...eeks. In general, with age I just seem to get more and more emotionally volatile..too much in some ways, too little in other situations.
I was in tears last time I saw my gp because my only relative my brother had excluded me from his life. She gave me a depression questionnaire..now that was surreal because in 1974, as a college intern, I was working as a research assistant to the statistician that invented the Depression scale at the Nat. Institute for Mental Health and we based all our subsequent research and published results on that scale. With lots of life under my belt, and 30 yrs of practicing psychotherapy, as well as years IN therapy, I realized it is worth @&#€. I can't believe it is still being used and they revised it but made it worse!
The people making up these "testing instruments" are not mental health clinicians and have NO experience with real patients and life...because I was one of them! They are academics and researchers who are getting paid to pretend something immeasurable is measurable and quantifiable, a bias so they can justify all the money spent on research and they can build careers by publishing and scratch each other's backs professionally by continuing to reference each other's professional publications and crediting each other with inventing "tools". It is a game that served me well in grad school. Those were great days, even published a chapter in a psychology textbook myself, but looking back I feel a bit sick that I was part of validating that scale ..something I never thought would be in use over 40 years later.
Now that I know what depression feels like, it all seems silly and useless. Of course the dr gave me a script for another SSRI which made her feel better like she'd accomplished something. I took it for two days, remembered the horrible reactions I get with SSRI s, and stopped. Replaced it with GABA and 5 htp temporarily, but what bounced me out of the depression immediately was my brother calling me in October to drive him for hernia surgery and stayed at my house overnight. I felt needed and connected to Family again and that's all I needed.......so far, so good.
I know I still hold my feelings reserved when it comes to connection because i am afraid of having to go through the grief again. You know, we with this crazy illness have lost so much of our lives, work, and family and friends, that no wonder we suppress our emotions about life. We have had to grieve SO much. And if we start to feel better and get some life back, I'm not going to get attached to it because I've had 35 years of relapses and poof....laying in bed alone watching Netflix for months again. I've learned to adjust to being alone, as I think Matt was referring to.
Sorry so long winded, caused me to compare where I was at in October, then looking up that depression scale and seeing how widely it is still used after my dr visit, learning that my friend and mentor, the woman who created it died last summer, and what delusions I was under in my youth about the validity of psychology research. I really am passionate about psychotherapy, but there is a reason the researchers publishing and setting guidelines for mental health in our doctors offices are so out in left field, and then our drs our clueless about mental health...It's because those "experts" who come up with the psychology theories have no experience with real, live people.