I Don't Feel Anything And I Don't Want Anything. How Apathy Devours Us

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

This is a very common complaint. Lack of feelings, a film of indifference, which imperceptibly drags on a whole life, swamps it with boredom, indifference and muddy meaninglessness. Dusty routine and constant fatigue are the eternal companions of this state.

Let me introduce you to Mrs. Apathy. A discreet lady, dressed in something gray and shapeless, quietly and imperceptibly settled in the corner of the room. Surprisingly, as soon as, for all her lethargy and immobility, she manages to so quickly seize power over everyone who is nearby.

The first way to form apathy is a consequence of blocking feelings.

Excessive toxic emotions can be so painful and intolerable that their awareness and experience is perceived as life-threatening. Impossible heavy. Then the only way to somehow cope with them is to muffle them, suppress them, freeze them. And it really works! As if anesthesia was performed - there is no pain, only a slight chill. However, it is impossible to selectively suppress only pain. Everything is suppressed en masse: joy, pleasure, and vital energy. This is a state of stunned numbness, sluggish crushed, endless fatigue that does not go away with rest. The body is heavy, as if loaded with weights, the simplest actions can be given with great difficulty. Sometimes even getting up, washing and getting dressed becomes a small feat.

In an acute, pronounced form, this impotence presses down with a heavy plate, does not allow going to work, it is impossible to concentrate on anything at all. Solid cotton wool in the head. At the peak of these experiences, a state of painful mental insensibility can arise - when the very inability to feel feelings becomes so total and all-encompassing that it itself causes very excruciating suffering. A person is ready and would like to feel any pain, just to feel alive, and not a wooden Buratino. But it cannot.

Often these experiences are not so pronounced, but create a dusty, creeping background for years, regularly sucking out the forces. Painful anesthetized feelings do not make themselves felt, and the freezing is still not so total as to completely take life. You can set goals, achieve results, even try to have fun. All this, however, will ring with cold metal or resemble brightly colored artificial plastic, but what can you do. There is a price to pay for pain relief.

This is a depressive (anesthetic) variant of the development of apathy.

And it usually responds well to treatment. In acute forms, the main emphasis is on drug treatment, in chronic forms, the role of psychotherapy increases. But this psychotherapy will not be sweet - in order to revive feelings, you will have to revive and experience all the pain that was once frozen.

The second way that apathy grows is by not recognizing feelings.

“I don’t know how I feel” are typical words for these patients. Something rolls up to my throat, gets stuck in my chest. But how to call it, what words to choose to describe your feelings - it is not clear.

Often, close emotions seem to be stuck together, there is no internal distinction between, say, sadness and longing or delight and joy. Sometimes from the whole spectrum of human feelings there are only two pressed semi-finished products: positive and negative.

In another case, the problem is not even to name the feeling, but simply to notice it, to fix it. Many people are probably familiar with the situation when an angry person furiously assures others that he is not the least bit angry. Just not realizing, not keeping track of what is happening to him.

Now imagine that exactly according to this mechanism, without at all fixing what they feel, and without even imagining, not noticing how they manifest these feelings outside, some people live most of their time.

Or, even if, by some happy coincidence, the feeling is still noticed, it is forgotten very quickly. Doesn't leave any significant trace in the memory. It was - and how the cow licked her tongue. Something vague barely reaches from the depths of consciousness, as if it were not yesterday, but several years ago.

It turns out that the emotional life of such people can be very stormy and eventful. But the whole thing passes by consciousness. An unconscious, unnoticed, unnamed feeling is doomed to remain an impulsive impulse, a fleeting surge, and there is no way, in this situation, to build your life focusing on yourself, on your feelings. After all, they remain sealed. It seems like it is, it seems to be pulled apart in different directions, but what it is, how, where it comes from and what caused it is a mystery.

And at the level of consciousness, only emptiness remains. Everything is smeared, overwritten, forgotten. Blinds into one indistinct tangled lump. There is no way to hear yourself, and it seems that there is nothing inside.

This is the alexithymic pathway of apathy.

Medicines will no longer be able to help here. Only psychotherapy. Moreover, it is long-term. It is very difficult for such people to learn to listen to themselves, to notice what is wrong with them, to find the exact words to describe their feelings. And also - to remember them, to keep them in memory, to let them color the days and years. It's like learning to master a muscle you never knew existed before.

Well, another option for apathy is simply a lack of feelings.

They are not blocked, and not that they are not recognized. They really do not exist. This is, so to speak, a nuclear version of apathy, a true one. Its a scarce option.

Feelings can be overwhelmed by mental illness, simply not formed during development.

Let's say, with various forms of autism. It is not for nothing that people suffering from mental disorders often find themselves like symptoms of autism - there really is a lot in common. First of all, the emotions responsible for social competence, the ability to feel the state of another person, and generally understand how people find intersection points with each other, are affected.

In several other variants, these deficits exist in character pathologies.

Higher emotions, such as the ability to love, gratitude, empathy, are not formed there at all or are underdeveloped. Connections with other people are formal, mechanical. The world of human relations then turns into a deserted and emasculated, saturated with ritualized games, the main goal of which is to fill the void and at least a little to dispel boredom. Everything that happens between people turns into a windbag farce, a senseless show, a rat race. There is no personal involvement in what is happening, everything is done formally, for show, because it is supposed to.

Dealing with deficits is very difficult. To grow, to germinate in oneself feelings that have been erased or have always been absent altogether, to learn how to experience them, you need a tremendous mental effort, and systematic, for a long time. This is painstaking, very costly work that lasts for years. They usually decide on this because of the complete intolerance of what is happening now. But the result of this work, if it is possible to achieve success, is as if a dry tree has bloomed. I think it's worth it. However, here everyone decides for himself.