Member Since: November 29, 2011
Answers: 1
Last Update: November 29, 2011
Visitors: 587
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I am an 18 year old male and I have been a pretty emotionally dead person for...well since my early childhood. And when I say dead I don't mean depressed or really down or anything of that nature. It's nearly impossible for me to feel anything genuine and I can only put a mask of fakeness on so I don't seem so far out. When I was in a psychology class I read about something called anti-social personality disorder and it almost disturbed me how similar the symptoms were to my own character. I've done enough to put myself away for the better half of my life and I haven't felt a shred of remorse or conscience. Anyways, I'm wondering if my lack of emotion is a cause of concern. Nothing brings me joy, pain, or sorrow and I can't even feel love for my own family anymore. NOTHING will make me feel anything and it bothers me. All I feel like is a body and a brain without a soul. Something is wrong with me but I don't know what. I'm a very intelligent person and all it seems I can do is succeed with material things like work while my relationships are built on false pretenses and emotions I never even felt but acted like I did. My question is: If there is anybody somewhat educated about this...what could be wrong with me? Do I have anti-social personality disorder?...and am I stuck with this? (link)
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I had always been a happy person as a boy always smiling my mother said, always bubbly.
I'm 20 now and that was before I had an unpleasent time at High school after being bullied for a couple of years I convinced myself that everyone there hated or were always looking to hurt me emotionally. It was irrational but in my mind it was pure reflex to close up.
I developed a kind of mental emotional armour like a thick skin and I didnt realise until later that this armour I had developed I had no way to switch off or take off, it was or is like a callous. It didnt protect my own emotional self but it protected my mind from my own emotions it was like a partition on a hard disk and I had no magic tool to fix it.
But it somehow didnt protect me from my darker emotions anger, fear (which kept me wary), rage suspicion. So I continued to feel anger and rage and fear at near enough everyone I knew at school, and if I didnt it was more like a neutrality or association.
But the fact that I felt mostly unpleasent emotions didnt make me a bad person I couldnt even contemplate hurting any of them, it hurt me to hurt them...if I ever got into fights which was a couple of times I would always feel bad about it later guilt was another I wasnt defended from.
It wasnt long before i just stopped feeling, and like a drone I just went about my school career getting my qualifications. I developed this weird social awareness the ability to just see and feel group dynamics without even trying, I started see who was alpha deltas etc. How the hierarchies worked, how everyone fitted together and what their standings were and it was all effortless.
I could analyise like I was an old man or somthing even my mother who is one smart cookie was amazed at what I could see and understand of social dynamics without even studying the subject at all. Yet be so stunted at acutally fitting in.
Let me clarify my mind defendeded my emotional self and viewed things with suspicion and becuase I can be irrational when it comes to the feelings I can't feel, things get lost in translation.
I had a few friends but I always kept them at arms length maybe I didnt fully trust them. So I didnt realise I was in such a bad place until later after I left school. It was then that I realised how closed off I had become I only had my parents that I was really sortof normal around.
I went to colledge and it was then that I realised the full extent of the damage that had been done to me I was emotionally stunted completely, it wasn't a dead end for me though, I met some great people there, nice poeple especially one girl it particular..she helped me more than she knows, I should thank her one day properly.
I had begun to heal after that I got more confident I interacted socially for the first time without that seathing suspicion plaguing my mind.
But it wasnt quite as simple as just getting over it, I still have the armour just linguring there silent and quite letting through just enough to function but still in a way cut off and cold.
In a way my experiences didnt make me stronger and more resistant emotionally they just made me super sensitive to everyone words and actions with regards to me, if someone says somthing to me and my mind takes it the wrong way it blows everything out of preportion. But it also makes me super sensitive to the way people interact with each other.
But the problem is I'm still dulled to my own emotions and I have no idea how to crack that armour completely, trust I think is the key but I don't know how I can trust somthing as amorpheous as humanity at large. The only emotions I can feel with any regularity is anger rage and fear. Funnily enough hope is another I can feel and know, a lifting of the spirit, not sure what that means though.
I don't think its exactly what everyone here has, but its a dulling of emotion I find it very hard to trigger emotions (not of the darker variety) harder still to recognise them, when I do have them its like I classify them as "pleasant feeling number 1" number 2 etc...its like the've somehow lost meaning and I'm rediscovering them one step at a time.
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