Are you overly emotional?

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makes me think of stendahl's syndrome.

if that is anything like my weeping over great music and magnanimously transcendant human/animal behavior, then i include it in stendahl's syndrome.

there are some of us out there/here who have something mightily reminiscent of stendahl's syndrome, where the body's emotional regulation mechanism goes awry over exposure to a highly individual and unique trigger- for me, it is transcendantly magnanimous behavior of animals and humans, or great music. for others, it is great art, or beautiful nature scenes. it is like my body/brain can only handle so much beauty before it just goes TILT! and the waterworks start overflowing. i find that when i have a stuffy nose, that if i listen to great music then my weeping jabs clear out my sinuses quite effectively, so there is a useful aspect to this thing.

Beautiful music and beautiful live singing also drive me to tears.

I have strong emotions but a far stronger mind. I can suppress damn near anything.

Yes, me too,. Especially combination of music and video.

I can relate. I actually crave the experience of beauty and sublime feelings. There's a sense of thrill and exhilaration with it. Also, really dark/sad/poignant stuff can lift me up in a way. I've been told that it's catharsis, but it's really more than that.

It's weird though, as all this emotion that I can experience through art/music/nature etc... is almost completely absent in my ordinary day-to-day life and interactions with people. Around other people I always feel so empty, bored, and just emotionally dead compared to everyone else in the room. I also have a big fear of losing my emotions, or never being able to experience true connection with anyone. I'm such a private person in my own thoughts that it's like I can never truly realize the emotion that's inside me. It's such a suffocating thing. Not that it's ever any use trying to explain this stuff to someone else.

you sound like a person with tremendous self-control and self-discipline. the opposite of me

Sorry. I lost you there.

I think I'm under emotional. Its so easy for to be considered insensitive that I try never to share my opinions with people who dont know me. I dont understand empathy because I guess people's emotions wrong and then react inappropriately. And thats the thing, I have to guess.

But like a lot of you said, I can be moved to tears by something if its beautiful enough.

you give the impression of always being in control of your public face. i can't do this, i wear my heart on my sleeve, so-to-speak, which cannot be censored.

Eh...sometimes.

I think you did a wonderful job of explaining it. For whatever it's worth, you are not the only one.

To answer the question, no, I am rarely overly emotional. I would describe most of my emotions as being soft or gentle (on the positive end), or perhaps muted or blurred (on the negative end). On occasion, they are sharp, vivid, or strong, and I can only imagine that this is how most people experience life, if I'm to judge based on their level of (outwardly-projected) emotionality.

my parents were told by my psychiatrist when i was young that i had a "poverty of emotions", and i think it is true.
i can not really understand fully what emotions are.

i know i do feel things on occasions, but i do not think they are true emotions. i think they are merely affective responses.

my emotional scope is narrow, and i feel basic feelings like "contentedness" (rather than happiness), and "discontentedness" (rather than sadness), and not much more.

i feel humorous often, and i laugh at silly concepts, but it does not go any deeper than that.

feelings are not emotions, because feelings are static, and emotions are dynamic, and i do not have any dynamism in my feelings.

things that do not directly affect me do not inspire any feeling in me.

if i am in a traffic jam, then i may say "oh for f*cks sake!! !", and that may seem like an emotion, but as soon as the traffic jam clears, i completely forget about it and the feeling of discontentedness evaporates and leaves no trace in my psyche.

if i am uncomfortable (like wet and tired), then i will seem extremely displaced and cranky, but as soon as i dry off and lie down, then i am back to equilibrium.

the closest i ever come to emotion is when i consider animals. i do feel a deep sense of obligation to help animals and try to make their lives happy for them, and if i lose an animal friend, then i feel like i have a bowling ball caught in my esophagus.

but that feeling does not have any attenuation, and i am stuck in a rigid an unmoving sense of sadness for as long as i feel sad, and then i wake up one day and it is all gone.

people feel emotions i know when they watch football games, and when they go to weddings, and when their friends lose all their money etc. i never feel anything like that.

one of my few friends is affronted at my apparent lack of consideration and emotion for his "plight". he was saying the other day that he has lived a life of poverty and his family has disowned him. i said "hmmmm no good", and he became very enraged and said "are you serious? is that all you can say? you've never felt poverty or rejection ever!! ! how dare you gloss over my life with a statement of "hmmmm no good".

i did not know what to say because although i logically accept that it is bad that that happened to him, i can not really care. i wish i could but i can not.

i said to him "what do you want me to do? cry? do you want me to say 'boo hoo hoo' ? do you want me to throw all my money away and live like you have lived so i can understand how it is to be in your shoes?"

he told me that he felt like flattening me and i tried to say that it would do no good if i lived a life like him, because i would still not have any emotional investment in his plight.

he almost punched me and i had to tell him to go. he went away enraged and disgruntled, and as soon as i closed the door behind him, i fired up empire earth ( a computer game) and happily became absorbed in it and forgot about the whole incident.

i know i am not a very nice person, and it is because i have almost no ability to feel emotions.

only when im drinking

I wasn't sure if you actually meant the opposite. I don't see myself as having self-discipline at all. I bottle things up out of "shyness" for a time but it isn't really productive. I'd rather be able to express myself in a meaningful way but IRL I tend to get tongue tied and quickly give up. I also have anger issues that result in meltdowns.

Last edited by marshall on 26 Oct 2010, 8:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.