Help me experience joy again.
November 5, 2014 2:53 PM   Subscribe

I have been experiencing a really limited ability to feel actual emotion, even though I'm not having a depressive episode, and I am having a lot of trouble finding a way out. Snowflakes inside.

I have been doing a lot better lately, thanks mostly to therapy. We're down to talking about the underlying issues now, and this is the one that I have had the most trouble with.

In therapy last week, my therapist and I were talking about my childhood (in a CBT context), and he thought for a moment and then asked me, "Do you remember ever feeling actual joy over something?" I completely blanked. (I should note that I do not consider my childhood to have been "unhappy" in the usual sense and I have never been abused or had family problems.)

And it's still like that now. Like I said, I don't necessarily feel *bad* all the time -- that tends to happen in isolated "flare-ups" -- but I just don't actually feel happy about anything. I laugh at jokes, take interest in things, etc., but it's all kind of flat to me. And underneath everything there's always at least a little bit of objectless nervousness. My therapist also pointed out to me that I basically don't do anything that is spontaneous or "just for fun". I have tried doing such things but they have only been boring.

I feel like the fact that I don't actively feel terrible right now is actually making it more difficult to fix. It doesn't feel awful enough to make it a problem in my day-to-day life. But obviously just feeling not-awful all the time is not quite right.

Any ideas you have would be very appreciated. Thanks.
posted by myitkyina to Human Relations (9 answers total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
James Baraz is a meditation teacher here in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written a book called "Awakening Joy" and also has a five-month course on doing so. He is not my primary teacher, but I have participated in meditation retreats that he has led, and he's for real. If the course is interesting to you, but you don't have sufficient resources for it, I'm positive there are scholarships available and/or sliding scale fees. James is a lovely person and the teachers who co-teach the course are all remarkable people. It's worth a try. Here's a link to the blog on his site. You can also find a link to the book there, and more information on the course.

You could also check out Rick Hanson's e-newsletter (free and with no advertising), which comes out about once a week and includes one practice to help focus the mind on the experience of joy and the cultivation of happiness. His work is primarily in the field of neuropsychology, in "re-wiring" the brain to create more channels for happiness and in understanding the evolutionary benefit, no longer needed, to look for the negative.

Neither one of these guys is a kook or a cultist. They're both people with high integrity. I met James for the first time in the mid-80s and although we haven't ever been friends and he wouldn't know me from Adam, I've seen enough of the quality of his work to know trust that he is who he presents himself as.

Good luck. A life without joy really sucks. I wish you the best, however, you decide to approach this.
posted by janey47 at 4:40 PM on November 5, 2014 [2 favorites]


rats, I should add that the Awakening Joy course can be done in person or on line.
posted by janey47 at 4:41 PM on November 5, 2014


I know the feeling.

For me it comes with way too many obligations. "I should do this, I should do that, what about my finances, retirement, my family obligations, blah blah."

It's okay to live a little. It's okay to be young. God, how I wish someone had told me this earlier in life.

Take some risks. Make some mistakes. Overreach yourself a few times. Skip out on obligations once or twice. Go to Paris. Buy something extravagant. That's what brings the exciting, joyous, anything-can-happen feeling back.

That and falling in love.
posted by quincunx at 4:43 PM on November 5, 2014 [4 favorites]


Best answer: When my husband was (slightly) depressed, we had a conversation about happiness in which he claimed he was 100% sure he had never in his life felt joy or intense happiness about anything. I was pretty sure that was untrue, as I had been present when he showed outward signs of intense happiness. I reminded him of those times and he was sure that inside he didn't feel happy: just kind of meh, and that he probably just did the happiness expressions because they were socially accepted.

A few months after that, he decided that his slight feelings of depression were nevertheless worth trying medication for. A while after the medication started working we had another conversation about how he had supposedly never felt happiness, and he was amazed to recall that he had said (and believed) that. Now he is sure that those times in the past when he seemed happy, that he WAS actually happy.

I know you say you are not depressed right now, but even so, your brain can lie to you about things always having been the way they are now. Consider that it is just possible that your current inability to feel joy is only temporary, and that your brain is mistaken about your feelings in the past.
posted by lollusc at 5:32 PM on November 5, 2014 [15 favorites]


Best answer: Like I said, I don't necessarily feel *bad* all the time -- that tends to happen in isolated "flare-ups" -- but I just don't actually feel happy about anything.

That's general depression. Depression isn't necessarily some transient occasional event, the way a lot of people here on the blue seem to experience it. For many, many others (like myself), depression is something that they live with day-to-day, year-after-year. In a way, it becomes normalized. It becomes engrained in your self. It become a part of who you are just as sure as the color of your eyes. As you say, you don't necessarily feel "bad" all the time...you just don't feel anything. That, is big-D depression. Those times when you actually do feel bad? That's sort of the pressure valve venting.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:09 AM on November 6, 2014 [4 favorites]


Best answer: To follow up with an actual suggestion...At least you're in therapy. That's a good, and necessary, start. In my experience, what you should strive for, with your therapist's help, is to learn strategies to learn to live and function on a higher level with the depression. Are you on any medication? Even a low-level dosage of something can be enough to help you make that leap to learning to live and function normally with the depression.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:36 AM on November 6, 2014




You say you are going through a period where you can't feel emotions. That happens to people from time to time - but I don't think it should happen often. Most times, people should feel strong emotions when confronted, say, with injustice or cruelty. If somebody related to you a true story where something cruel or unjust happened, and it didn't make you angry, that would be strange. If that is the case, you might explore this with your therapist. Though I think it's quite common to go on the Internet looking for advice, I think sticking to your professional therapy is important - because you've said you have an established relationship with a therapist and he/she knows you better than us.
posted by McMillan's Other Wife at 2:45 PM on November 6, 2014


Best answer: I have had similar problems with inability to feel joy. For me, part of it is certainly an underlying tendency toward depression and anxiety, which still effects me even when I'm not having an acute episode.

Another big part of it, which I have only recently started to understand, is that I am really cut off from *all* of my feelings, good and bad. A lot of my early experiences taught me that feelings, and especially strong feelings, are dangerous and uncontrollable and a bit shameful. I did not learn how to deal with feelings in a health way, and so I ended up doing the best I could, which was to find various ways to shut my feelings down. The feelings don't totally go away-- they are still there and still very much affecting me-- but I'm not always consciously aware of them. I might realize I'm clenching my jaw or scowling and that's a clue that I'm feeling angry, or I'm having a powerful urge to go eat an entire carton of ice cream, so maybe I'm lonely or afraid. One of the obvious downsides to this is that my feelings come out in less than ideal ways, such as engaging in compulsive behavior or avoiding situations that I need to deal with. But another very negative result is that I lose the good stuff, too, because moments of joy or gratitude are buried down with the rest of it.

Various types of mindfulness exercises help a lot. I try to stop regularly and, whatever it is that I'm doing, come back to the present moment. Notice what I'm feeling physically, what I'm seeing and hearing, how I'm holding my body. When I'm actually present with what's going on around me and my immediate reactions to it, I'm much more likely to have moments of joy or well-being. This is hard to do when you have a lifetime of training in disengaging from the present situation, but it's something therapy can help with, as well as many spiritual practices.
posted by bookish at 3:10 PM on November 6, 2014 [2 favorites]


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