19. This realisation that emotions are fundamentally embodied seems to be missing from popular conceptions of emotions. It's a normal concept in therapeutic contexts, but outside those circles people tend to think emotions are in their head and just happen to affect their body.
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29. Lets get personal for a minute. My particular emotional processing problem I'm working on at the moment is this: I'm actually very good at emotional awareness... as long as I pay attention. And I really don't want to pay attention. It's at best too intense, at worse aversive.
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30. I wouldn't exactly say I have alexithymia. Given the level of introspective discussions about emotions I have with friends I suspect some people I know would smack me if I said I had it. But it's definitely something in that general space.
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31. This enables a level of self-analysis that I imagine looks quite impressive from the outside, but it's kinda weird only having awareness of emotional states through conscious introspection. I think it's less weird and more normal than it sounds, but it's still weird.
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32. My suspicion is that it's partly a disocciation thing, and that a lot of people (especially men) are disocciating a lot more than we credit, and that a lot of failures of emotional processing are actually dissociative states where your mind is disconnecting from your body.
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33. Dissociation is of course not male-specific, but given that a) Emotions are experienced bodily and b) Boys are trained to ignore their emotions and "toughen up", the easiest way to do that is to learn to dissociate, and I think most of us start doing it quite young.
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(I expect much of that will apply equally to trans people who were forced through masculinity training despite not being male. I'm not going to talk that much about that side of things because it would be theorising well outside my experience)
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34. The big problem with ignoring your feelings is that they don't actually stop working - they still do exactly what they're designed to do, that information is just screened off from you.
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35. You know the "Not sure if the world is terrible and everyone hates me or if I need to eat a sandwich" problem? That is what *everything* is like if you're not paying attention to how you're feeling. Your behaviour will not make sense to you.
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36. The claims I've read for the damage suppressed emotions do to your physical health and how much healthy emotional processing helps are so dramatic that frankly I don't believe them, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least some link between emotions and physical health.
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37. In particular constant muscle tension is bad for you, and if you suppress awareness of how stressed you are then you're going to be in a permanent fight or flight state that keeps your body tense. (I suspect this is my problem - I genuinely don't know how to relax muscles)
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38. Clarification of https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1207367418710020097 … They do what they're designed to do but you don't act on that. e.g. a body in fight or flight is fine if you're going to fight or flee. It's a terrible idea if you're going to sit there pretending things are fine.
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39. Have you noticed that people often outsource their emotions to those around them? Especially positive ones. e.g. I've pointed out before that the manic pixie dream girl is a fantasy of vicariously experiencing joy.https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1165990402777853953 …
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40. I am not entirely sure how this fits in with the emotions as expressions of bodily feelings model. It seems like it doesn't. It's closer to a form of empathy, which is a kind of second-person subjective experience. You're experiencing emotions from *someone else's* feelings.
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41. There is definitely something about emotions which is shared though - this ties in to the "emotions as behaviour vs emotions as feelings" thing. e.g. it seems to make sense to talk about the mood of a crowd, and that it's more than the sum of the mood of its members
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42. Your experience of emotions through others doesn't actually come from their feelings though. Consider watching a sad movie. The loop goes: Their behaviour -> Your feelings -> Your emotions You're modelling this as if their feelings were involved but they're not really.
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43. In a normal group emotional experience there are many feedback loops that do extend through everyone's feelings. e.g. in a conversation there's a loop my feelings -> my behaviour -> your thoughts -> your feelings -> your behaviour -> my thoughts -> my feelings.
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44. One of the most obvious benefits I've found to improving emotional processing is that it's often essential to getting unblocked - when there's something I can't make myself do, being able to understand why is often key to doing it.
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45. I suspect this is only the most obvious benefit because I'm not making especially good progress and this is the low hanging fruit.
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46. Also just because I can do this doesn't actually mean I'm magically never blocked. I've got several big things I've been blocked on for months, partly because even the question of identifying why I'm blocked on them is aversive.
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47. I mentioned briefly Matthew Ratcliffe's notion of "Existential Feelings" as feelings which structure your current subjective experience. One important such structuring is that often depression is experienced as a restriction on what emotions you can currently feel.
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48. In "emotional blunting" this can be total and you feel emotionless, but even without that depression is often experienced as the feeling that some feelings are impossible. I mentioned hopelessness, but also joylessness: Not just a lack of joy, but that joy is impossible.
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49. One thing that can be helpful is to notice that not all positive emotions go away. e.g. I often find that I am capable of sustaining interest in things (experiencing the feeling of interest) during depressive episodes where I'm not really capable of other positives.
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50. An odd way this shows up for me is what games I'm able to play. For example I cannot play Untitled Goose Game while depressed, because playing it relies on being able to experience the emotion of "glee" fairly heavily - there's really not much game there if you can't.
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51. Celeste on the other hand I can play even while fairly depressed, because the emotions it requires are mostly interest, stubbornness, and rage, which tend to be ones I have relatively stable access to. (read what you will into how much Celeste I've been playing recently)
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52. The Goose game example is interesting, because nobody would say they feel "gleeless", but the feeling is quite specific and is different from joylessness. My suspicion is that experiencing restricted emotional ranges is quite common but we don't notice most of them.
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53. There seems to be a huge amount of variation in the intensity with which people experience emotions, and I cannot tell how much of this is healthy variation and how much of it is that disassociation and some forms of depression tend to dial down the intensity.
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54. Also some forms of depression dial up the intensity. I can't say much of that from personal experience (or much about intense emotional experiences at all - I am very much on the not intense end of the scale, and a lot of my current work is on trying to understand that)
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55. An idea that is common in some of my circles is that basically everyone is traumatised to some greater or lesser degree, and that trauma is the root of most of our emotional regulation problems. This seems... more plausible to me than it used to, but I have many questions.
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56. The everything-is-trauma model people seem to be like everyone else in that it promises a miracle fix and that everything can be easily cured with this one weird trick. I think they're probably mostly right, but I'm not yet convinced they're right in a helpful way.
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57. I think it probably *is* the case that school, family, and other bad childhood experiences have left most of us carrying around a lot of anxiety that we don't really understand and are suppressing most of the time, and that most people would benefit from untangling that.
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