Faded Emotions

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

It is your own emotions that underlie empathy - the ability to understand and recognize the feelings of another. There is a direct connection here: after all, we can understand other people only by passing their experiences through ourselves. The better we are familiar with some emotions, the easier it will be for us to see, even by the smallest signs, them in another. The more sensitive we are to some certain experiences in ourselves, the more sharply we will react to them in another.

A healthy, developed emotionality underlies the ability to be sensitive, the ability to fit into a company, to be dexterous in relationships, to know where and when to keep quiet, where to joke, and where to say bluntly. So that a person does not have an unpleasant feeling of awkwardness, inappropriateness and an elephant in a china shop, which is always blurting out something wrong.

To describe these abilities, terms such as emotional intelligence, social cognition, and others are used. Humanly speaking, this is exactly what is called charm.

And this is exactly what is affected in mental disorders. First of all, with disorders of the schizophrenic spectrum, although other nosologies are possible here. Sometimes, as if there is a targeted, targeted destruction of this particular sphere. Gradual. Long lasting. Increasing over the years. If left untreated, it is steadily increasing.

The understanding of oneself, one's emotions, one's feelings is impaired. There are fewer of them, subtle gradations disappear, whole blocks of experiences may fall out. All feelings seem to dry out, dust, smoothed out. In this case, two or three vivid emotions may remain, for example, anxiety, irritation and cloudy hopelessness. Or the silly joy and mechanistic optimism of a clockwork toy. And with these two or three emotions, a person will react to absolutely everything that happens to him - there are no others left. It’s like a hackneyed record that repeats its three notes over and over again, and no other compositions are left. And the melody itself is becoming more and more unpretentious and fake.

Outwardly, this is manifested primarily in facial expressions. It becomes scarce. The face is as if wax, motionless. Like a frozen mask. Or, another option, the facial expressions seem to be exaggerated, caricatured, sometimes even violent.

The further these changes go, the harder it is to feel them somehow from the inside. It's just that the isolation from other people and the world around is growing more and more, the feeling that everyone around lives according to some incomprehensible laws, unspoken rules, which are nevertheless for some reason obvious to everyone else, is growing more and more. As if an alien was among people, and his only salvation is a formal instruction that constantly fails.

In the final stage of these disturbances, emotions do not remain at all. Only apathy. Everything becomes indifferent. Unimportant. Uninteresting. Not even longing remains, not even pain - nothing hurts. Animal, vegetative existence is quite satisfactory - there is nothing to move for. There is no stick or carrot. A person only responds to the roughest, physical stimuli. To lie down and spend as little energy as possible is the only possible strategy of behavior. Yes, and no strength remains, because our strength is a derivative of our desires, which are born from emotions. From the fact that something becomes indifferent. And if everything is indifferent? This is called an emotional-volitional defect, apato-abulic syndrome.