# If you don't feel your emotions..



## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

Then you have deep inner tension within your physical body. Your emotions are felt within your body for example fear is felt in your stomache, love and pride in your chest, anger in your jaw etc so if you don't feel anything that means that there is a contradiction between what your heart wants and what your head wants which creates physical tension imbetween the two areas cutting your mind off from the information contained within your body.

Go see a Ayurveda doctor and they will tell you this as basic information


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## Surfingisfun001 (Sep 25, 2007)

Hey how have you been? I remember you use to post a lot when I first joined. Have you gotten any better since then? I get tension in my jaw a lot. I remember I use to feel fear in my stomach before DP, I was thinking about this the other day actually and how weird it is that even though I experience fear I don't "feel" it anymore.


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## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

surfingisfun001 said:


> Hey how have you been? I remember you use to post a lot when I first joined. Have you gotten any better since then? I get tension in my jaw a lot. I remember I use to feel fear in my stomach before DP, I was thinking about this the other day actually and how weird it is that even though I experience fear I don't "feel" it anymore.


Hello mate, yeah I remember you when I used to be around, I hope you have improved. Myself I am a lot better than a few years ago although I would be lying if I said I was perfect but things have changed from before when I would feel almost nothing, for me now I can get very strong emotions while watching films and things like that but around real people I still shut down a lot but am able to work and earn a bit of money and relax and feel around the closest of "safe" friends.

It has been a bit of a journey like getting to know myself for the first time as I went through a lot of stages of studying psychology and all sorts of alternative methods and healing trying to find a cure, but I have come to the conclusion its all about connecting to your body again and regaining healthy defences so you don't need dp to protect you from being hurt any more, as when I first started looking into things I had no idea there was any tension within my body until I started doing some things like body meditations and realised there is extreme tension all around my face, jaw, around my eyes and my throat and the left side of my body is very contracted, all of which was stopping my brain from connecting to the information in my emotions. Right now im finding a technique called 'Focusing' very helpful which is a gentle way of reconnecting to your body in quite a loving way. Through doing that I have come to realise that dp is simply part of yourself doing it's best to keep you safe and look after your wellbeing so hating it wont do any good, but the way to get out of it is to reclaim the more healthy ways to protect you so you don't need dp any more, and having psychotherapy has helped a bit with that as it gives you a safe environment to try out new ways of defending yourself against people who might threaten your boundaries, so if you feel safe and confident enough you can handle yourself from anything coming at you from another person you wont need to cut off your emotions any more. Thats the theory anyway Ive still got some way to go


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## Minerva8979 (Jan 30, 2010)

Yea, I can believe it. Over the past year I noticed a lot of tension in my jaw. Apparently I'm clenching my teeth at night.lol. I also get throat headaches where it feels like I'm being strangled upside down. Once I associated the pain to not expressing myself verbally and it seemed to help when I finally spoke my peace.

Pablo, are you still seeing an Ayurvedic practicioner?


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## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

Minerva8979 said:


> Yea, I can believe it. Over the past year I noticed a lot of tension in my jaw. Apparently I'm clenching my teeth at night.lol. I also get throat headaches where it feels like I'm being strangled upside down. Once I associated the pain to not expressing myself verbally and it seemed to help when I finally spoke my peace.
> 
> Pablo, are you still seeing an Ayurvedic practicioner?


No im not seeing a Ayurvedic practicioner right now, but it was an area of health I looked into because all the local Western health methods I tried failed and didn't provide anything approaching a decent understanding of overall health in my opinion, not all of the alternative methods I tried were that much better but they mostly did have the approach that you have to treat the whole person and the understanding that any 'mental' problem will also show up in the physical body, so there is no real seperation between mind and body in these approaches. Now I see a psychotherapist who is trained in Core Process Psychotherapy which is a combination of western psychology and body work + buddhist principles, and also use a technique called 'focusing'

I too have throat issues when sometimes it feels like I can't breathe and jaw tension, for me I think it's to do with at some point in my life when I was very young I learned that it was safer to keep my expression in rather than let it out so I had to repress it, which involved physically tensing areas of my body in order to do so and swallowing my anger etc.


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## snow storm (Aug 10, 2010)

Pablo said:


> Hello mate, yeah I remember you when I used to be around, I hope you have improved. Myself I am a lot better than a few years ago although I would be lying if I said I was perfect but things have changed from before when I would feel almost nothing, for me now I can get very strong emotions while watching films and things like that but around real people I still shut down a lot but am able to work and earn a bit of money and relax and feel around the closest of "safe" friends.
> 
> It has been a bit of a journey like getting to know myself for the first time as I went through a lot of stages of studying psychology and all sorts of alternative methods and healing trying to find a cure, but I have come to the conclusion its all about connecting to your body again and regaining healthy defences so you don't need dp to protect you from being hurt any more, as when I first started looking into things I had no idea there was any tension within my body until I started doing some things like body meditations and realised there is extreme tension all around my face, jaw, around my eyes and my throat and the left side of my body is very contracted, all of which was stopping my brain from connecting to the information in my emotions. Right now im finding a technique called 'Focusing' very helpful which is a gentle way of reconnecting to your body in quite a loving way. Through doing that I have come to realise that dp is simply part of yourself doing it's best to keep you safe and look after your wellbeing so hating it wont do any good, but the way to get out of it is to reclaim the more healthy ways to protect you so you don't need dp any more, and having psychotherapy has helped a bit with that as it gives you a safe environment to try out new ways of defending yourself against people who might threaten your boundaries, so if you feel safe and confident enough you can handle yourself from anything coming at you from another person you wont need to cut off your emotions any more. Thats the theory anyway Ive still got some way to go


Yeah, I really think connecting to your body is absolutely the first step towards recovery. I have taken some steps since the start of my drug-induced dp 3 years ago, and now that I understand more and more of why I feel the way I do it's all a bit easier. At least now I know in what direction I need to move. I work so much on standing up for my self more these days and try to be more assertive, but it really is hard work. I have a close but quite ambivalent relationship with my family, and it takes all the courage I have not to pretend that everything is alright when Im burning on the inside with sadness and anger. It's really important to have some close friends or familiy members who accept you and support you. I try not to cut off my emotions anymore, cause I know that when I do...I will feel depersonalized, and I do most of the time. The pressure inside me builds up more and more these days, and I actually feel like sobbing when I meet people, but the feelings of shame and fear prevents me from doing that. I have been met with a lot of fear and anger when expressing strong feelings in the past so it makes it a bit hard for me to open up, although I really need to do it. So I cut off and get numb instead, which I have done so many times I gradually have developed a moderate depression. For me now it's all about trying to find ways to build my self-esteem again to be able to express and ventilate some of the feelings I have on the inside, which are extremely intense at times. But I guess that it takes some courage (and time) to get over old relational patterns and find new and healthier ones. I find psychotherapy helpful as well, as a tool I use to increase my self-esteem. For me it's all about empowerment, so I can dare to connect with the world again.


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## sunyata samsara (Feb 18, 2011)

deep inner tension, dude you have no idea lulz. years ago i use to have muscle spasms constantly so i eventually told my doctor to give me zoloft, took that for a year to rewire my brain. i still get spasms but its not constant. the only emotions are bliss, love and rage. i think everyone is fighting the truth in one way or another. the ego doesnt want to be enlightened cause then it wont exist.


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## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

sunyata samsara said:


> deep inner tension, dude you have no idea lulz. years ago i use to have muscle spasms constantly so i eventually told my doctor to give me zoloft, took that for a year to rewire my brain. i still get spasms but its not constant. the only emotions are bliss, love and rage. i think everyone is fighting the truth in one way or another. the ego doesnt want to be enlightened cause then it wont exist.


Yeah I agree, fighting the truth and resisting what exists, but I try not to be harsh on the restrictive ego these days as I think it's just doing it's best to protect us and trying to keep us safe


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## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

j4mtj said:


> Yes, I think that resisting what exists causes unnecessary suffering and results in various body tensions. Regarding the topic 'if you don't feel your emotions', I think I felt them, but growing up it was implicated that don't even have the right to feel certain things let alone express them - too dangerous.


Yes it was the same with me, there are certain things like anger I was not allowed to express when growing up and certain feelings were not respected, feeling powerless I cut myself with dissociation in order to regain some power over being hurt. Though I am no longer powerless as I am an adult I can't convince myself to let go of the defence.

Although now im no longer on the path of trying to get rid of the ego which holds these patterns in place, rather im trying to expand my ego to include the things which weren't allowed in my childhood, to reclaim my full self rather than living through the partial self I had to when growing up, so I have to find a way to love my dark side which was neglected before.

So in a way im trying to do the opposite of what many "spiritual" people are doing as I am now trying to become an even bigger egoist rather than get rid of the ego lol


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## sunyata samsara (Feb 18, 2011)

j4mtj said:


> Yes, I think that resisting what exists causes unnecessary suffering and results in various body tensions. Regarding the topic 'if you don't feel your emotions', I think I felt them, but growing up it was implicated that don't even have the right to feel certain things let alone express them - too dangerous.


Same here my parents are control freaks so i would get in more trouble if i expressed negative emotion. They acted like i didnt even have the right to express those emotions. I think the reason i dont experience most emotion is because i practiced a lower Buddhist practice of rejecting emotion and got to good at repressing emotion. I think after enough repressed emotion is there it turns into muscle spasms, at least it does with me. Turns out there are higher forms of that meditation like feeling your emotions fully but not being controlled by them and an even higher one where you channel them.


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