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Re: And how do we know when we are truly happy?

Posted by susan C on September 6, 2001, at 14:05:12

In reply to And how do we know when we are truly happy?, posted by kid_A on September 6, 2001, at 13:03:18

Hi Kid

No emotion? I agree with your comment about apathy is much better than despair...However, I would hope as I gain some mental clarity that it is my resiliancy that returns. That emotions are there, that I can get happy, angry, sad, go through loss and discover and be depressed as well and move through them. Resiliance is my favorite word right now. Like silly putty, like a squeeze from a hug, like the crust of fresh baked bread.

Off to the grain silo, yours sincerely,
Farmer Mouse
Susan C

> Indulge me if you will... Ive been thinking a lot about happiness and sadness and what we consider 'normal' and what we consider pathologies be they what they may, manic depressives, post partum, chronic depression, etc etc...
>
> All of us have made attempts at repairing our sadness through some means or another, we sense there is something wrong and we set about to fix it, sometimes sucessfully sometimes not...
>
> I know that I have always felt awkward in my sadness, I couldnt shake it and I didnt know anyone else who really felt the same... I knew why I was sad mostly, but still I didnt think that I could rid myself of it...
>
> Since I've started medication and talk-therapy my life has turned around considerably and Im doing the things that I want to do in my life... Ill have some bad spells when I forget to take my medication (oddly the antipsychotics seem to affect my moods the greatest, and when I skip them for a few days I start to ruminate...)... but by and large my emotions though not in the clouds have flatened out, and believe me, apathy is much better than despair...
>
> Its then that I started to think about everyone else... Lets say that the basis of the mechanims for hapiness or at least stasis exist in these specfic chemicals and receptors that our drugs target. Now to be a succesfull species it would help us as advanced organims if we were not mired in sadness... Through natural selection we have developed chemicals in our bodies that help regulate our emotions so that if some other caveman clubs the cavegirl you had your eye on, the more successfully adaptable of us will not just brood in our cave until we starve...
>
> Now, lets make things clear, we -still- lost the cavegirl, we lost our mothers to sickness, or any other number of impulses that may contribute to some form of sadness, but the adaptable caveman grieves and then moves on, the unadaptable caveman, with malfunctioning receptors can not move on, and dies out...
>
> Now as modern day cavemen and cavewomen, we all have stressors that act upon our lives and perhaps these are known to us, or perhaps they are unknown and our sadness comes from a place that is nameless even to ourselves... By taking the drugs we take we are litterally whitewashing over the emotions we got stuck in... perhaps we are going overboard, perhaps we are jamming the receptors too much as anyone who has experienced apathy and anhedonia can attest to... So you might say in a way, we are taking apathy pills (lets call them that instead of happy pills, since truly its not that easy)... Its not as simple as getting 'better', we are just pushing ourselves chemically into an area of hyper apathy, so that perhaps when we look in the mirror, its still the same old ugly face staring back at us, perhaps its still the drunk or the jobless, perhaps all our loss is still true, our loss is still real and meaningfull, but in our new chemical state we stare past that face and into the white of no emotion.
>
> Any thoughts?


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poster:susan C thread:10876
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010901/msgs/10882.html