Emotional anesthesia

Reacting to a painful event by actively or unconsciously trying to soften one’s emotional reactivity can only have apparent advantages. Emotional anesthesia compromises, in the long run, the ability to feel vital and also to participate in the beauty of life.

Emotional anesthesia

Reacting to a painful event by actively or unconsciously trying to soften one’s emotional reactivity can only have apparent advantages. Emotional anesthesia compromises, in the long run, the ability to feel vital and also to participate in the beauty of life.

by CRISTINA RUBANO

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© Antonio Guillem -123rf

In medicine , an anesthetic is usually administered to relieve the patient from painful sensations associated with more or less invasive therapeutic interventions which will nevertheless have the aim of restoring the health and well-being of the body.

The human mind can use a similar mechanism in emotional terms – this is why we speak of emotional anesthesia – to distance itself from the emotional consequences of painful, stressful or traumatic events.

Far from a temporary sedation for the purpose of a future benefit, because the consequences of this strategy can be paradoxical, gradually extinguishing vitality of the person: anesthetizing oneself from emotions means giving up contacting both the painful ones and the positive and gratifying ones …
Emotional anesthesia and alexithymia

The inability to recognize emotions and express them to others is psychologically defined as alexithymia .

Far from being an “all or nothing” dimension, this particular difficulty in participating in one’s emotional life (or on the contrary to being overwhelmed and mentally disorganized by it) can represent a stable trait of the personality or become accentuated in particular moments of life when they occur particularly stressful or traumatic events that make it difficult to tolerate and process their emotional significance .

The human mind can operate this “surgical” detachment from the emotional component of events in many ways: by expressing the discomfort through thesomatic channel , hyperinvesting on the rational components of thought  and evaluating events exclusively from this point of view, directing the person’s attention to “distracting” activities such as drinking, eating, shopping, etc. Let’s see some of them.
Emotional anesthesia and obsessive control

Those who have predominantly obsessive personality functioning are inclined to invest most of their mental energies in the rational evaluation and planning of events.

Not infrequently, these people excel in work environments that strongly require the ability to be cold, precise, rigorous and planning down to the smallest detail (think for example of surgery).

This dimension of the personality can therefore contain adaptive potentials that can also allow the mind to function highly in certain areas of life.

However, if this mechanism is too rigid, theemotional counterpart risks remaining completely out of reach of the person who may have difficulty expressing what they feel in a given circumstance, decoding the emotional states of others and, more generally, orienting themselves in all those situations in life where things are not obviously “black or white” and where the unexpected causes events to escape an exclusively rational planning and management.

Then you can feel as if you are in the grip of a kind of emotional anesthesia because this component is purely silent or poorly “trained”, opening up to the unpredictability of emotions can nevertheless represent a discovery capable of finally connoting the life of an obsessive mind with three-dimensionality and “color”.
Emotional anesthesia and depression

The depressive disorders – occasional or arising from a more general psychological vulnerability and genetics – are characterized, among other things, by a specific emotional anesthesia which is often the main alarm signal for the person and those that are around (though there may be also forms of masked depression, which are expressed exclusively through the somatic channel or that veer towards manic denial ).

One feels essentially “dull”, lacking in energy and without any motivation to pursue one’s job, one’s hobbies or interpersonal relationships.

It is as if at a certain point everything that was previously a source of pleasure and interest turns out to be indifferent and one feels that one is living beyond a filter that prevents us from really participating in what is happening.

These reactions can be consequent to highly traumatic or stressful events (especially those that are interpreted as bereavement , separation, loss ) recent or past.

Often severe losses experienced at an early age contribute to making the person more vulnerable in adulthood to react to similar events with a depressive withdrawal.
Emotional anesthesia and eating disorders

Eating disorders such as bulimia and binge eating disorder are characterized by a kind of addiction to a state of emotional anesthesia.

The person who compulsively searches for food and who abuses it in an uncontrolled way is not dependent on the food itself, but on the process (Johnston, 1996): the act of eating and of voraciously filling oneself often up to sickness is completely divorced from really enjoy what you eat.

This mechanical filling in fact occurs in parallel with a sort of progressive mental “emptying” during the bingein fact, the person feels a temporary relief from emotional tension until he no longer feels anything by entering a sort of mental blackout which in some cases can result in a temporary dissociative state with phenomena of derealization or depersonalization .

This creates a sort of short circuit because emotional anesthesia makes it impossible to recognize one’s needs (for comfort, privacy, rest, to impose one’s reasons, etc.) and to satisfy them.

By shifting them to a sense of “false” hunger, one will only remain “hungry” on an emotional level: it is not surprising, therefore, that that concrete food with which you fill your stomach can never be truly “nutritious” – not even in large quantities. The risk is that the problem of food becomes so pervasive that it takes away the possibility of enjoying the other aspects of life .
Emotional anesthesia: why ask for help

The ‘ emotional anesthesia is therefore an alarm bell that tells us that our mind, temporary or a more problematic, is distancing itself from the emotional reach of something.

If this strategy can prove to be temporarily useful during an emergency or in the performance of certain professions, as mentioned, but it turns out to be rather maladjusted in the long term because it does not allow to elaborate the emotional significance of the events risking to anesthetize the person on all sides of the life.

We can compare this mechanism to a rather bulky packaging placed to protect an obviously fragile object, perhaps even precious: the goal is not to keep it buried for life by the layers that protect it, but to gently discard it to assign it a safe place among the other “objects” that characterize the shelf of existence.

 

by Abdullah Sam
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