Each person lives depression personally, there are those who experience a mixture of sadness and anger combined with discouragement, others, on the other hand, perceive only a void and a total absence of emotions, characterized by the fact that they feel absolutely nothing. Is it like having a plummeting body and a mind dominated by fog, as if being itself is undone and the body completely static, as if it didn’t exist?
Phillip Lopate, a well-known American writer, once described this same situation in a fantastic poem whose title is Numbness, in Portuguese it would be something like Insensitivity, in the poem the author paints a perfect and totally real millimeter portrait of this type of depression in which the person experiences a complete emotional vacuum.
- He says the feeling is like moving around the ice fields.
- It’s indifference.
- A heart beating at zero degrees.
- An anorexical hope that disconnects us from the world.
“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, life itself. “Andrew Solomon.
What we need to understand, first of all, about depression, is that few diseases can become more complex and multifaceted, some people have very clear symptoms, but others, on the contrary, have symptoms that do not form invisibly, for months or even years The disorder affects a person’s sleep, concentration, memory, movement and even manipulation of language.
Now, in this clinical picture there is another aspect that we generally do not talk about, this is the type of depression in which the patient shows absolute insensitivity, says that he does not feel any emotion and only perceives a wall that is in front of him. him, completely disconnecting him from the world and even from himself.
When a person doesn’t feel anything during depression it’s simply because at some point he felt something too intense and couldn’t handle it, one aspect that the clinical literature tells us about this is that many patients with these characteristics Experience is a type of emotional hangover.
It’s the result of something that, for a moment, completely exhausted them. In addition, behind depression itself, there may also be other conditions, such as anxiety disorders or even unresolved traumas.
In addition, it is worth talking about the classic idea that many still have people suffering from depression, this disorder remains associated exclusively with sadness. In many cases, however, this reality presents other masks, another architecture, because depression is not only sadness, it is pessimism, it is anger, it is discouragement ?, and what also happens is often indifference, insensitivity, emotional neutrality that is often accompanied by other physical effects. symptoms, such as headaches, muscle aches and digestive problems.
Patients with this profile are characterized by hypersomnia and can sleep between 10 and 15 hours a day, yet, as they say in consultation, they feel absolutely unable to laugh or cry, it is as if their mind and body have forgotten not only how to live, but also the very meaning of emotional behaviors. Something that seems so devastating has several explanations that we will detail below.
When someone doesn’t feel anything during depression it may be because they’ve learned from a young time that it’s better to hide and hide, swallow crying, pain and worry, in fact it’s very common.
When, for example, we go through complex family moments, stressful situations at work, or other adversity, we are simply advised to continue our routine as if nothing had happened.
However, these situations generate high anxiety, which gradually becomes chronic, until the person falls into a depressive state. Used for months or even years not to release emotions, not to externalize and to face worries, fears and losses, the brain itself ends up ending. Adopting this coldness on the scale of emotions, something like this also causes the classic mental cloudiness, which not only makes it difficult to react to our environment, but also reduces our attention, concentration, memory, etc.
If you read the poem quoted at the beginning of the text, Phillip Lopate’s describing the insensitivity of his depression, you will find very revealing details. There’s a part where he tells what his father called him, since he was nine years old. , “cold fish”. Criticism of his shy behavior from an early age by a figure of authority, disapproving his appearance and way of being, conditioned his own way of perceiving himself.
This is something we can often see: how the weight of a complex past or unresolved trauma promotes the development of depression and its specific characteristics, such as emotional insensitivity, even if the condition occurs many years later.
Our brain is a truly amazing organ. In addition to being wonderful, sophisticated and crucial to our evolutionary success, what characterizes it is also its gigantic complexity, so it is often so difficult to effectively use such a complex organ to solve these complex life situations.
What we have to understand is that even if they repeat the famous phase in which the brain is like a computer, there is very little truth in this idea. We’re not machines, and this amazing organ is very emotionally driven. Understanding their processes, understanding, how to handle them and putting them in our favor is the only way out of our own prison, from depression.
So one thing psychologists recommend in cases where we feel absolutely no emotion during a depression is trying to start our sentences with an “I feel. “It is necessary to make an inner journey in which we take off our shells, such as the layers of an onion, to access emotions embedded, trapped and even inflamed.
We need to explore possible traumas, understand them, integrate them and cure them, so therapies such as cognitive behavioral can help us, without excluding other treatments aimed at the control and resolution of anxiety disorders that are usually present in these clinical conditions.
As soon as we begin to unleash our anger, hatred, fears and worries, we will embark on the long road to recovery.