> I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant. > Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things.
This sounds pretty similar to myself, therefore I have some questions:
In the past did you have a lot of overwhelmingly intense emotions? Do you sometimes go from almost non-awareness of feeling (or feeling but weakly) to overwhelming emotion in a very short span? Does encountering information also bring with it emotions? Do you have alexithymia? Are you able to enter your body and basically stay there for 30 minutes without returning to analysis or abstract thought? Does doing this affect your emotions at all?
Is there an internal sense that there is a part of your mind that is ‘personality’+‘analysis/thoughts’, and a part that is ‘where all of the qualia happens’? Possibly also with a third part that is ‘emotions’? These might be divided a bit differently.
For me, the ‘where all of the qualia happens’ component was acting as a blockade between ‘thoughts’ and ‘emotions’ - it enabled thinking to happen even during intense emotions, but seems to have caused alexithymia. And ‘pushing that to the side’ makes intense emotions available to my sense of experiencing things, and thus available for thinking about/analyzing. Instead of being inaccessible.
All of this happened because as a child during tantrums I set up a ‘mental space’ where I could perform logic and analysis even while having extremely intense emotions. This seems to be why people say that I am ‘like a robot’ or ‘an absurdly analytical person’ - because I am actively suppressing emotions through that dissociated? state. All the time.
So you might get some benefit from seeing what happens if you go from disembodied to embodied for a while. And put away any tools which keep you in that state.
> I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant.
> Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things.
This sounds pretty similar to myself, therefore I have some questions:
In the past did you have a lot of overwhelmingly intense emotions? Do you sometimes go from almost non-awareness of feeling (or feeling but weakly) to overwhelming emotion in a very short span?
Does encountering information also bring with it emotions?
Do you have alexithymia?
Are you able to enter your body and basically stay there for 30 minutes without returning to analysis or abstract thought? Does doing this affect your emotions at all?
Is there an internal sense that there is a part of your mind that is ‘personality’+‘analysis/thoughts’, and a part that is ‘where all of the qualia happens’? Possibly also with a third part that is ‘emotions’? These might be divided a bit differently.
For me, the ‘where all of the qualia happens’ component was acting as a blockade between ‘thoughts’ and ‘emotions’ - it enabled thinking to happen even during intense emotions, but seems to have caused alexithymia. And ‘pushing that to the side’ makes intense emotions available to my sense of experiencing things, and thus available for thinking about/analyzing. Instead of being inaccessible.
All of this happened because as a child during tantrums I set up a ‘mental space’ where I could perform logic and analysis even while having extremely intense emotions.
This seems to be why people say that I am ‘like a robot’ or ‘an absurdly analytical person’ - because I am actively suppressing emotions through that dissociated? state. All the time.
So you might get some benefit from seeing what happens if you go from disembodied to embodied for a while. And put away any tools which keep you in that state.