Feeling of emptiness; It means not feeling any emotions, positive or negative. The human brain always needs an emotion, wants to feel a positive or negative emotion. The feeling of emptiness is a feeling that disturbs people a lot.
If the feeling of emptiness lasts for a long time, feelings that we call depersonalization and derealization occur in the person. Depersonalization is the feeling of alienation from oneself. It can also be called a kind of feeling of numbness. In depersonalization, the person cannot feel the emotions that he perceives with his five senses. The food he eats tastes bland, his body feels numb, he cannot feel any sensation on his skin, this is valid for all sense organs. Derealization is the state of detachment from one's environment. In derealization, the person has difficulty perceiving what is happening around him and feels like he is watching the world from behind a screen. He/she finds it difficult to follow someone when someone is talking to him/her. He has difficulty focusing on his job. Their forgetfulness increases, in short, their functionality in life deteriorates.
What Causes the Feeling of Emptiness?
The most important reason for the feeling of emptiness is exposure to a high emotion. A positive or negative situation you have experienced recently may have caused you to feel empty. This could be breaking up with a lover, a recent job change, moving to a new house, changing the city you live in, or losing a relative. In addition, the feeling of emptiness is one of the most common emotions we encounter in the postpartum period, in some personality disorders (especially borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder), and in people with shy characteristics.
When our brain is exposed to a very high emotion, it turns off the switch, so to speak. The result of this is the feeling of emptiness. Since the brain cannot digest the high emotion it experiences, it prefers not to feel any emotion. This is not a conscious behavior, it is an unconscious process.
The Connection of the Feeling of Emptiness with Childhood Experience
The feeling of emptiness is seen in children who are neglected. The more a person is exposed to this emotion during childhood, especially between the ages of 0-6, which we call early childhood, the more likely he is to feel this emotion today. Neglect during childhood; what the child needs This means that he cannot reach the adult he needs (his mother or the person who cares for the child). People who feel a sense of emptiness are children who had little contact in their childhood and mostly grew up alone. The feeling of emptiness is higher in children who have not been in a relationship for a long time, especially during infancy.
The feeling of emptiness may sometimes not be a person's own feeling. In other words, if the person caring for the child felt this feeling during his or her childhood, he/she will transfer it to his/her child. The mother conveys this to the child by not making physical contact with the child, not listening to the child, ignoring the child, not making eye contact with the child, or leaving the child alone. People who convey a feeling of emptiness to their children often say the following: 'My child is the reason I connect to life, life has no meaning without my child, this child is my source of life.' Transferring the feeling of emptiness to the child is not a conscious behavior of these mothers. They do this behavior unconsciously.
Symptoms of the Feeling of Emptiness
In the feeling of emptiness, the person feels as if his life is just passing by. He cannot enjoy the work he does, the food he eats, the clothes he wears, or the holiday he goes on. It's as if his emotions are frozen. He lives his life as if he were watching a movie on the sofa. These people may think that they are not committed enough to their spouses, that they cannot love deeply like other people, and that they may feel as if they do not belong to this world. These people mostly experience the feeling of emptiness; He describes it as "I have a huge feeling of emptiness that has been coming back and forth for years, and I cannot put into words what I feel."
People who feel emptiness may turn to addictive substances to escape the feeling of emptiness. These addictions are alcohol, cigarette, drug or pornography addiction. Addictions prevent a person from coming into contact with the negative emotions he experienced during childhood. In particular, the most important underlying reason for drug addiction is the feeling of emptiness. Other methods used by people who feel emptiness to escape from the feeling of emptiness are overeating, consuming foods containing sugar and carbohydrates, and shopping. All these actions provide temporary relief to the person. The person who feels a sense of emptiness is in pain every time he feels these feelings. He is forced to resort to one of his addictions. All of these addictive substances cause the person to lose their health over time.
Treatment of the Feeling of Emptiness
My advice to people who feel a feeling of emptiness is to do activities that will bring you into frequent contact with your own body. For this, you can meditate, do yoga, do sports, that is, focus on activities that make you feel your body more.
If you have difficulty coping with this feeling even though you do all these, get support from an expert. Since the feeling of emptiness is an early distress, with the emdr and eft techniques, the connection of this feeling you feel with your childhood is established and the feeling is emptied.
In the treatment of the feeling of emptiness, we look at how the person experiences this feeling in his daily life, how he experienced this feeling in childhood, and how he experienced this feeling in adolescence. For example, if the place where a person feels the feeling of emptiness the most is the workplace, what is happening there that makes him feel this feeling is discussed. While the emdr technique enables the connection of early childhood memories in the treatment, the eft technique enables the emotions of these connected memories to be released.
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