Why do I cry when I’m not sad?

[Corrupt_ToTheCore]

I’ve given up on emotions because it hurts too much. I don’t feel happy or sad, angry or guilty. I feel nothing as I stagger through my day-to-day tasks. Yet when I lie down at night and consider that I have to keep doing this for possibly 60-80 more years, I can’t stop crying. The only emotion I have yet to dispel is despair. I only feel the empty yawning pit that is the rest of my life that I have to live. I have so much more life I have to give before I can die, I don’t think I can take it.

 

[JDot]

I can relate to what you're saying. Especially when it comes to things like work. Sometimes I ask myself "Do I really have to do this for the rest of my life?" I think a lot of people feel this way. In a way it's what connects us with others who feel the same. Remember we're here for you.

Why do you cry when you're not sad? The truth is I think that sadness is there even if you don't feel it. Emotions are felt by the body. When those emotions become too much, I think our minds try to protect our bodies from all that emotion. I think your body cries to release all the emotion the mind is trying to keep you from feeling.

 

[lost_in_a_fairytale]

maybe you are feeling those things really, but your mind is repressing those feelings, which although can stay well hidden away for the majority of the time, catch up with you eventually and come out (the crying at the end of the day)

 

[Daphna]

I’ve given up on emotions because it hurts too much. I don’t feel happy or sad, angry or guilty. I feel nothing as I stagger through my day-to-day tasks. Yet when I lie down at night and consider that I have to keep doing this for possibly 60-80 more years, I can’t stop crying. The only emotion I have yet to dispel is despair. I only feel the empty yawning pit that is the rest of my life that I have to live. I have so much more life I have to give before I can die, I don’t think I can take it.

Shutting down is a preservation technique for your mind. Even still, you cannot compress all of that inside your mind or body. It has to escape somehow. It’s no wonder we feel despair when we do this. Change cannot happen until we deal with what we try so hard to avoid. I embrace my emotions and allow them to channel out through poetry and songs. I wasn’t always this way, but I have found that this is the best way to confront the issues in a healthy and beautiful way. We are very much alive and these are the experiences to prove it.

 

[Daphna]

Shutting down is a preservation technique for your mind. Even still, you cannot compress all of that inside your mind or body. It has to escape somehow. It’s no wonder we feel despair when we do this. Change cannot happen until we deal with what we try so hard to avoid. I embrace my emotions and allow them to channel out through poetry and songs. I wasn’t always this way, but I have found that this is the best way to confront the issues in a healthy and beautiful way. We are very much alive and these are the experiences to prove it.

Of course somethings are hard to face on our own and we are not alone in this universe.

 

[Corrupt_ToTheCore]

I don’t have anything. I shut down my emotions because I don’t need them, I don’t do anything... there’s nothing being repressed. I’m not hiding from anything. There’s just no reason to still have them so I turned them off

 

[may71]

There’s just no reason to still have them so I turned them off

I'm not confident that you can deal with negative emotions by just turning them off. Maybe it's possible in some cases, but if they are strong enough, they're still going to have an effect on you one way or another.

 

[Corrupt_ToTheCore]

I'm not confident that you can deal with negative emotions by just turning them off. Maybe it's possible in some cases, but if they are strong enough, they're still going to have an effect on you one way or another.

Once they are off, they’re off. I mean, NOTHING, not anger sadness annoyance frustration, nothing.

 

[may71]

Do you feel better off or worse off without emotions?

 

[Corrupt_ToTheCore]

Do you feel better off or worse off without emotions?

I don’t feel without emotions. That’s the point. I don’t feel the pain and the sadness and the hurt. I also don’t get to feel content or comfortable or relaxed. I just don’t feel.

if you’re asking whether my total emotional state has a higher value when I don’t have emotions than when I do have emotions, the answer is complicated. It’s almost like math. A normal human being will usually have a value of zero, and when they are happy they have a positive value, when they are unhappy they have a negative value. I normally have a negative value, but sometimes I can have a value of zero, a neutral value. However, when I turn off my emotions, it’s not a neutral value. It’s undefined. Log error, can’t be computed. I can’t feel “better” because I feel nothing at all.

 

[may71]

That does sound complicated.

What if your emotions could be turned back on, and the negative ones could be released, would you want that? Or want to try that as long as you could go back to feeling nothing?

 

[Corrupt_ToTheCore]

It takes a very long time, and intense, concerted effort to turn off my emotions. A lot of focus and dedication goes into that. I don’t know how to turn my emotions back on. They were turned back on by someone else, previously, and I don’t know how to do it myself.

 

[may71]

After my father died, I didn't really feel any strong emotions. I got an acupuncture treatment, but arrived late for it, so they just taped these things to my ear that I could massage during the week. So after massaging them for a while, and also listening to some music that had an emotional impact, the emotions were able to come out.

I don't if it would be the same for you, but I just wanted to tell you about that.