i've been briefly experiencing some relatively new and unfamiliar positive emotional states and now i'm genuinely a little confused about what to call which ones. idk which ones are joy, calm, relaxation, happiness, safety, relief
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a lot of what i was thinking of as "happiness" i think was more a combination of relief (from depression and anxiety and body tension) and excitement. which are all different i guess!
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sometimes i get this feeling of like... warmth spreading through my body? but like it's low-energy? is that happiness or calm or joy or safety???
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i had an experience kinda like this trying to distinguish between different forms of attraction when i realized i hadn’t been distinguishing between, like, intense attachment feelings vs. sexual attraction, e.g.
so many different feelings!
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When I unblock trauma and finally feel all those positive emotions I've been hearing about for years that I thought were a figure of speech
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This sounds like ventral vagal activation.
I mean, that doesn't tell you what to call the emotional experience.
But FWIW this sounds like the mechanism. Social engagement branch of PSNS instead of the shutdown/collapse (dorsal) branch.
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humanity has only started to scratch the surface of the depth of our emotions
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