Emotional Addiction

Post Reply New Topic

I head someone say yesterday,

"If you can not control your emotional state, you must be addicted to it."

I take this to mean that if I had the courage to change how I feel, I would. And that, I do not change because I have become too comfortable with my misery. Or, my body, over time, has become addicted to the peptides that satisfy each cell's addiction. Can I really force myself to be happy regardless of my environment? If so, how long does this transition take and what method would be most effective? If living with an angry sad person can make me sad, wouldn't the same be true if I could find a way to influence things in the other direction?

I think people have some but not full control over their emotional states.
In the early stages of feeling down or anxious, it does help to avoid focusing on the bad feelings.
In my eggsperience, focusing on bad feelings makes bad feelings worse.
Over time, this may lead to long-term negative emotional states.

At one time, I was fully able to control (read withhold) my emotions, mostly because of my upbringing. Needless to say, I'm a wreck, physically and mentally.

What I mean is defocusing from negative emotions, it is different from withholding emotions.
Defocusing helps me get through bad emotional moments in the moment.
Also on short time scales like minutes or hours.
I had no negative side effects from this, mostly positive learning of emotional regulation and understanding emotions better.

Just because someone says something doesn't mean it's true. If you care about this person's opinion, you could ask what they mean and how this applies to you, otherwise, try not to think about this.

It sounds like, no it is not possible to force yourself to be happy and ignoring the things that eat away at me could cause long term problems, while focusing on bad feelings makes bad feelings worse and may lead to long-term negative emotional states. Is this what I am hearing here so far?

If whatever I do is going to make things worse... I think I would rather try the happy thingy. It is my personal theory that attitude is the steering wheel of life. Everything can be traced back to an attitude choice. I can't seem to make it work yet. I guess that I was hoping to find someone who has successfully done this.

At work, I have witnessed two different people encounter the same problem and one will smile calmly and do what needs to be done, while the other will throw a fit and then do what is needed. I reckon it's all perspective. If I could only figure out how to attain that calm smilely point of view when I am hit in the face with poop.

A bit of advice I once recieved was to allow your emotions to run their course and not try to manipulate or over think them which can lead to anxiety and depression. What I mean by this is observing the emotion and thinking why am I feeling this. Than letting it run its course. If your feeling sad , let it run it's course. Don't dwell on it, but let it proceed naturally. One issue a lot of us with this gift of Autism have is obsessive thoughts along with anxiety and depression from failure, be it from social attempts or otherwise. A great phychologist/therapist once told me that depression can be caused by a lack of emotions, that blah feeling ling or feeling empty. This is caused or can be caused by trying to ignore emotions like sadness or fear. When we do this we also constrick our other emotions like happiness, or joy. This leads to a dulled sense of emothions or a form of depression. This view on depression of how it is a lack of emotion has belped me a lot. I would try to either dwell on my depression to the point of insanity within the prison of my mind, or I would ignore everything and become a depressed robot. This does not ensure the sadness ir other negetive emotions will go away, but it helps in handling them and being able to process them in a healthy way wich will ultimately make you feel better. Just remember we are not perfect and we will mess up and make mistakes, but that's ok. We are only human.

^^^ I like that.

I've had to learn to listen to my emotional states, because I grew up burying/hiding a lot of negative emotion. I would periodically have a massive breakdown due to this.

I am the throw a fit, then do my work variety.