Dear nrk2208:

You are welcome. I believe I understand better.

You wrote: “I am a very unemotional person”- this means to me that you were born an emotional person, just like any other baby, that you were emotional as a young child but that over time, as a result of early life experiences,  you have become unemotional, that is, you disassociated from your emotions. Some disassociation happens with every adult, this is why adults don’t act as joyfully and impulsively like children, at least not most of the time.

Some of us disassociate more than others to the point where it becomes a big problem, a problem because we are animals after all, and in the course of  evolution we were emotional before we were logical. Like other animals we know what to  do because of emotions: hunger-> looking for food, fear-> running away, anger->fighting, and so on.

When a human animal disassociates from his/ her emotions, trying to be strictly logical, like a robot or a computer, we get confused (“Inability to take any decision- A feeling of confusion”)- because as hard as we try, we are still animals, we still need our emotions to direct us, to make it possible for us to choose. We become more sensitive to media messages about what we should do when we are lacking the internal compass that tells us what to do, aka emotions.

In addition, without feeling emotional attachment to your wife and child, without the emotions of love and joy, you are not experiencing the benefits of your hard work as a family man, it is all work and no play, no joy, and so, life is a burden.

To top the ineffectiveness of significant or severe emotional disassociation, when we don’t experience our emotions, it is not calm that fills in the emotional void, it is anxiety and distress.

What do you think of my understanding at this point?

anita