when culturally-embedded coping mechanisms attack

Not sure if this belongs here or in the abuse forum, but I'm sort of more talking abt brain reactions to shit than abuse per se, so I erred on this side.

Context: I am from a particular sociocultural group that is known within my country for... extreme reticence with regards to emotional and subjective interpretations of one's own internal and external experience. It's been identified as a major at-risk group for mental illness in general, especially depression, and suicide. I'm from a big, fairly old-fashioned family that, two generations ago, was living without electricity in the middle of the woods in one of the last places on the planet to be explored and inhabited by humans. It's not really a mystery that such an environment encourages practical concerns and self-sufficiency above all else, and all that soft emotional shit is mostly a distraction, but... the dominant figures in my life have stubbornly continued to hold that attitude and set of values despite living in a society where it is no longer necessary. And I'm slowly coming to realise that I've been grandly screwed over by it.

My mom barely talks about emotions. She very seldom displays emotions other than irritation. She does not really react well when I try to bring up most subjective topics, to be honest - not in a bad way, just a 'why are you concerned about that? It's not like you can do anything about it.' Which in turn makes me wonder if she thinks the act of talking about it itself has some sort of significance to her that it doesn't to me. Either way, I just grew up... not really talking about this shit. Sometimes I attempted to force the point. This seldom worked, either. I keep trying to explain things I've learnt through therapy or online to her and she just doesn't Get It. Worse, she brushes off my concerns that she's not understanding, and goes and doesn't really seem to take much of it into account.

At the moment, I'm seriously considering that I may have schizoid personality disorder. If I look at Salman Akhtar's phenomenological profile I hit basically all the features in the overt column and over half those in the covert column as well. I have definitely got alexithymia; I cannot tell what emotions I am experiencing in the moment until my body starts physically reacting to the emotion. I can vaguely tell whether it's depressed or stimulated, but within those two groups, contentment and sadness often feel very similar, and I legit cannot tell the difference between anger and strong amusement up until I start shouting. I am probably depressed, but ironically up until recently I tended to mark my mood on trackers as 'reasonably stable and happy). I have got stealth anxiety, which results in me feeling absolutely fine up until I try to do something and it's like I hit a brick wall in my head. And/or I start crying.

I... do not want to call my mom's actions abuse. She grew up with all this and more - it's not a pattern of behaviour aimed at control so much as it is aimed at survival. Except it's survival in a world that hasn't existed for a few decades. She's taught me things that her mother and father used to get on with their lives, except these things are actively preventing me from getting on with mine. I feel like a shell of a person in so many respects, dissociated from the world around me and especially from other people.

I have a girlfriend, whom I respect and care for very much. I'm not sure what my emotions toward her actually are, though, because mostly when I think of her in the context of 'this is my partner' I get this unpleasant feeling of Nope in my chest. I'm not sure I can explain it more than that; she's the person I've felt closest to in my life and in some ways I feel like I can't bear that.

(She's very aware of this, btw; I try to keep her in the know so that she doesn't have to worry about what might be happening in my head. I'm not happy with how passive I am in this relationship compared to her, but she's happy to hang around even so, and I'm not gonna tell her she shouldn't, haha.)

I guess it's probably kinda something in that liminal space around the edges of abuse, maybe. Mom's never done or said anything to me that I'm comfortable calling Definitely Abuse; she's been kinda strict but mostly very fair to me, and despite the fact that she worked ridiculously hard to support me growing up, and gave up so much of her own life to do so, she's never held that against me or even made noises like she might. She blames herself for not doing more, but she kept that from me until I was very close to adult. It's just that she's emotionally kinda incompetent in this culturally conditioned way, and I never would have guessed how much that could fuck me up.

 

I'd never heard of alexithymia before. That's like the opposite of how I am, hyper aware of my emotional state and kind of slow about physical feelings and what they mean. Brains are so exquisitely weird.

I get exasperated sometimes when people are really invested in the idea that emotions make you vulnerable and decide that suppressing and ignoring them is the way to deal with that. That's just so illogical. Ignoring a vulnerability doesn't make you strong, it makes you completely unable to handle or even detect threats, be they internal or external. Just. Wtf.

The Nope feeling sounds important. I don't have the faintest idea what it means, but in my experience, feelings that seem centered anywhere in the torso are definitely worth investigating.

 

Yeah, brains are weird, in so many ways. According to Wikipedia, alexithymia is reasonably common - estimates run up to 10% of the population, iirc. It's often associated with mental illness and developmental disorders, as so many of these things are. I think I was probably predisposed toward this sorta thing, but the lack of emotional exploration growing up probably did not help, haha.

Same hat wrt the people deciding that emotions make you weak - I'm not sure if it bugs me per se, but just from my own experience, it doesn't even work like that. You can't get rid of your emotions entirely, you just find ways to dissociate them from yourself. I don't get the extreme hurt and despair that I've heard many of my friends with various traumas and disorders talk about - I just find myself slowly freezing in place, increasingly unable to do the work of living and only having context to suggest to me why. When I'm anything less than well-rested and unstressed, I can't even handle the things that make me happy for long. I have to go off and give myself time to come back down to this unfeeling baseline, otherwise I literally can't think or concentrate or even really do anything but frantically stim. tl;dr it's a giant pain in the ass.

And yeah, I have Issues with relationships relating to the emotional shit, so rn the assumption I'm working on is that there's emotions there that I'm not realising, and that they're more intense than general enjoyment of her company. It's happened to some extent with every close relationship I've ever had, it's just stronger with her because, I think, I'm comparatively closer to her. :B