I, like everyone else in this world, have my own set of issues. My issues mostly manifest themselves as anxiety and disassociation. I've recently been to seen a few different professionals to help me deal with these problems. And they have all told me, almost word for word, that my hyper-intellectualism is keeping me from dealing with my issues probably. They have all also said that I need to approach my issues from an emotional point of view.
My hyper-rationality has been both an asset and a curse in terms of my problems. Because I am rational, I easily accept (usually) the problems I have and what their causes are. As such, I am able to remove my conscious from these problems, set my problems aside, and get things done. I'm sure this has saved me on numerous occasions. In fact, I doubt I would have been able to make it through high school without this ability.
That, of course, is the asset portion of my rationality. The curse is that I am completely inept to view, feel, or analyze anything from an emotional point of view. I'm not saying that I don't feel or have emotions. I'm just so used to ignoring them and shoving them into a titanium box in the back of my mind that I have no idea how to bring my emotions back up to the surface.
I do occasionally have outbursts of emotions that I can't hide. Usually frustration or anger and usually directed at myself. My therapist calls these 'secondary emotions' because they are emotions in response to other emotions. Apparently, they don't really count. The only 'primary' emotion I can think of that I experience freely is excitement. This could be excitement for an event, excitement to see my friends, etc. Though, when I think about it, I do also feel content. Not necessarily happy, but I do feel content from time to time.
Of course, I might not even be aware of what 'happy' feels like. I may actually feel happy 'primarily' sometimes and am just not aware of it. Same for my other emotions. My therapist is having me do these exercises in order to train me to be able to identify my own emotions. There's no real solid guidelines for it, though, so I'm still having trouble. She's trying to discourage me identifying emotions by physical symptoms...
On a sort of side note, there's been something else that's been bugging me lately. And that is the concept of 'love'. (Still an emotion, still on topic.)
I'm assuming this is still just me having difficulty identifying emotions, but I don't think I believe in the concept of 'love'. Of course, that's a hard statement to make, considering the word has so many different meanings and connotations that how can I deny it altogether? I also hesitate to deny the concept because I don't want to sound like those overly angst-y teens who think they know the world, but don't.
There are many things in life that I have yet to experience, and I may find a lot of my preconceived notions changing as I life on. However, at this moment, I can't get my head around the concept of 'love'. If there was one person in the world that people would I assume I 'love', it would be my mother. However, I don't feel 'love' for her. Whenever I hear anyone... anyone... say 'I love you' in any context, I always feel like it's forced, wooden, fake. No matter how it's said or who says it. When my mom says 'I love you' to me, I force myself to say the same back, even though I don't feel like I'm telling the truth. I care for her, and if something were to happen to her, I would be very upset. But is that all that is required to qualify the classification of 'love' in a relationship? If that's so, then I 'love' a great number of people.
If that's the case, what separates the love of a parent or friend from the love of a partner? There's obviously a difference between the two, as people qualify that aspect of 'love' all the time. "I love you, man! But not in that way." Is there another emotions that can be synonymous the the type of love that two lovers can share? Some strange mixture of care and lust?
In my opinion, we should just scrape the word 'love' altogether. It has so many meanings and is used so much that it has essentially become meaningless. When a guy comes up to me and professes 'love' to me, I'm not going to know how to respond. I'm not going to know what that means. He's going to have to qualify it with a lot of other words to make sure I fully understand how the hell he feels about me.
