Below is a short excerpt from my journal that I write in vigorously. This entry was from a really hard day when I was feeling totally detached from myself.
“Today has most certainly shown how detached I am from all emotions. Nothing in me wants to show any emotion. Still feel like I’m floating out here, but I have a chain ball keeping me down…. gut wrenching and trying to drown my outer self. I actually think that it’s myself throwing what emotions I should have physically throwing them at my floating self. I’m shouting at myself to not allow myself to shut down everything but it’s not happening…”
It’s as if your mind is not in your body, as if you are looking at yourself from a distance. It’s like looking at a stranger but it is really yourself.
Emotional detachment refers to an “inability to connect” with others emotionally as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “emotional numbing” or dissociation.
Why does anxiety cause detachment?
Your brain uses many different chemical messengers to operate. These messengers not only tell your brain what to do, but they also affect how you think, how you feel, and how you respond to things around you.
Anxiety causes some of these messengers to decrease. Studies have proven that anxiety seems to cause the production of some messengers, like serotonin, to suffer from lower levels than necessary. This can lead to a lot of changes in your behaviour, and one of the most problematic is detachment.
Even with this understanding I have never and still have never been able to fully understand why I feel like this. The feeling like I am a ghost outside of myself, watching people go by in their own worlds but I still have to act like everyone else.
It can be really scary; in my life sometimes it feels like I am totally not 100% in my life. This might not make any sense, but I feel like am living outside of life too. Two running worlds and I am living in them both.
I am also detached from emotions. Maybe not the right word but I suppress as much emotions as possible so that I can be seen as less vulnerable. Therefore, if something happens I try and show no emotions and detached myself from my emotions and myself. This has always been a big thing in my life that I have grown to automatically do, I do it almost self-consciously.
Lisa Dodds is a mum to three beautiful daughters and has been married for six years. She loves spending time with her family aswell as running their newsagents with her husband so her life is pretty busy but she loves it that way. She has a personal blog about her life with bipolar 2 and her ups and downs. She loves to write and play her piano. She also loves photography and hopes one day she will be able to take it up more and maybe one day possibly make it as a career.
Defying Shadows 