Good morning, Confused:

Yes, I believe that it does. As a child, with a mother like yours, I absorbed the experience that Love= Work, and an unpleasant kind of work (managing, supervising, and in my case, taking abuse).. so why would I be interested in “love” as an adult?

As a teenager and young adult, I was caught between daydreaming about romantic love and not having anything like that at all in real-life. Feeling any measure of real love for another person triggered the memories of the work and abuse I mentioned above (false love), so I lost feelings quickly and withdrew.

Coming to think about it, referring to the title of this thread, I did not “just randomly and suddenly” lost feelings. It was a protective mechanism, protecting myself from “Love”

🤍 Anita

Hey Confused:

I am trying to remember.. I think that I was in a much worse mental state than the one you’re in (a psychiatrist would have definitely prescribed meds for me, lol).

So, best I can figure, looking back, I automatically withdrew. It didn’t take something to happen. There was no relationship, none in-person or LD, so no events within a relationship.

I remember I liked a guy at one point (I was in my very early 20s, I think, not sure), he appeared handsome to me, and suddenly, a few hours later, I couldn’t even recognize him, literally, I couldn’t. He looked like a stranger I never met, and not at all handsome.

You never experienced disorganized attachment to this extreme, did you?

🤍 Anita

I was in a dissociated state for decades, some times were better than others, some worse.

I don’t think 🤔 we had/ have the same experience, no two individuals do. We have similarities, to one extent on another.

“It all feels so strange”, so you are feeling something (“strange”). How does it feel in the body, this strange 🤔?

Thank you, Confused!

I suppose so, my dissociation was, unlike yours, more than emotional.

When you say “complete void”, you mean not even little emotions. You mentioned earlier feeling “a relief, kinda”, I think those were your words in regard to the psychiatrist not thinking you need meds. Was that.. kinda, litte emotion?

🤔 Anita

Hey anita

I experienced all those but with a different order that u wrote them, except Somatic one.

At first, when this happened, i woke up with a feeling of “doom”, like something bad has happened and idk what it is. Then depersonalization happened kinda, i was feeling like i am not “me”, i can’t describe it better sadly, like the person i was looking at the mirror wasn’t my true self, even my father noticed that week that i look very aloof/angry and it scared him. After came the cognitive dissociation. I remember not being able to form sentences with ease, forgetting what i wanted to say 10 seconds after thinking of it. I was on discord with a friend of mine, and i would start telling him something, then i would lose the words to form the sentence i wanted and i would zone out in conversations. Even having extreme difficulty texting someone, i would leave 15 people unread because i just couldn’t type words, it was exhausting and hard. Then came Dissociative amnesia, for example when i think about how i was feeling with this girl when i was having the time of my life with her, i couldn’t experience the feelings, it was just distant memories. Even now, when i think back on anything in my life, it’s like i am reading an archive that someone experienced. And finally, i think now i have the emotional dissociation, even though today while i was riding the motorcycle i thought about her, the plans we made, how much we wanted to travel together and i started crying in my helmet and my thoughts were “the back seat is hers only, i dont want anyone else” (and i think i meant it for my life too), then the crying stopped abruptly (like someone closed the valve) and again i felt nothing.

Damn all this is making me paranoid. Sometimes i think “am i doing this because i feel guilty to her?” other times i think “maybe i really want HER but i dont want the distance, so my body is at war with my mind” then i think “maybe i just wanted the feeling and not her?” It’s all entangled and i’ve never had this happen to me before. Usually i was a much simple-minded person

So they say, but i’ve never been through this again in my life (at least as far as i can remember). What was the stress about? I can’t understand what could have stressed me so much to push me into this state?

So this just needs time and it gets better? A while ago i cried again when i thought of the plans i had and it was more than the morning’s one but it stopped again. 5 minutes later i feel as if it never happened.

Yes that’s what i’ve been doing in the past 2 months now so i guess it doesnt help. It was a first for me and i got scared.

What was the heavy thing though? Very strange. I’m trying but im a really impatient person, maybe that’s here to teach me to be patient 🙂

I hope it comes in time, i will try to focus on other things and let my mind rest, but sometimes i think that this is what it craves, problems to search solutions for.

Hey anita

Im trying but i cant rest, not even in my sleep. I had 3 weird dreams and 2 of them were about her (maybe the 3rd one was too but i dont remember). In both, i was in her city for other things (where i visited) and i was feeling anxiety and that “something is missing/not right”. Then i woke up feeling like shit. What is going on haha