Do you feel that something is missing? Do you feel “bad”? What is that emptiness? Dissatisfaction? What do you fill your emotions with? What are you denying yourself? Here we will let you know about the Emotional emptiness.
Definition
Emotional emptiness is a feeling that heralds suffering and internal conflict, when your thoughts and feelings feel forced and alien.
This results in a loss of motivation and interest. From Taoism, for example, this emptiness is positive because it tells us about dependency, detachment, not being clinging to anything, however in Western culture we associate this emptiness with something negative and to ” cover” that emptiness you normally buy, You drink alcohol, you eat, you play sports, you want to cover it up anyway but they are not really solutions. The gaps of being are not filled with having, there is something missing in your life and you have to find out what.
Symptoms
The symptoms of an emotional emptiness can be diverse, the vast majority psychological and/or behavioral . These tend to vary depending on the cause of the emotional emptiness and can be grouped into:
- Apathy, boredom, disinterest, lack of motivation, reluctance.
- Sadness, isolation, melancholy.
- Frustration, anxiety , boredom, fatigue.
Causes of emotional emptiness
- Unresolved doubts : should you have done something you didn’t do? should you have taken that course? go to that appointment? what would have happened if… These questions can cause that gap, which due to emotions such as fear, shame or lack of time you have not resolved.
- Unresolved issues : surely you have unresolved relationships in your life, situations that leave something pending inside you, something that has not ended.
- Conflicts with yourself : everything that goes against what you want, think or feel generates internal conflict, if you live a life other than the one you project, it will create suffering and anxiety and will drive you away from yourself, it is like living a life that does not it’s yours
- External conflicts : when you have had problems with your children, parents, with your partner or with a friend and they are not resolved.
- Feelings of guilt : for not having fulfilled your obligation, for having failed yourself or someone else, for not having done enough in a specific situation.
- Self -defense : whose objective is not to suffer or repeat painful situations from the past.
- Feelings of loneliness : the feeling that you have no one with whom to share your emotions and/or problems.
- Lack of emotional intelligence : when you can’t identify the emotion, you know that something is happening but you can’t figure out what. How to stop feeling that emptiness?
How to overcome the emotional emptiness?
- Accept yourself, love yourself and learn : you are capable of sustaining the emotions that make you suffer.
- Identify your emotions and measure their intensity : normally, if you have just finished a vacation trip you probably feel an “empty” because you are no longer on the beach, because you are no longer accompanied, it is time to return to work and to the routine, it is It is normal for you to feel that something is missing, but if you identify that it is something normal after a vacation, it will not lead to a stronger and more difficult feeling to overcome. The emotional emptiness is filled when you find explanations for it .
- Start new projects, give meaning to your life : if you are in a job that you don’t like, try to change it when the right conditions exist.
- Meditate : from mindfulness , for example.
- Circle of trust : people who understand you, who know how to fill that emptiness , often emotionally.
- Loneliness is not bad : do pleasant activities alone, look for something you like, dance, take a walk, investigate or paint. An excellent way to combat this feeling is by reconnecting with yourself.
- Face it and make decisions : if something doesn’t make you feel good and causes you suffering or nullifies you as a person, close it.
- Set goals to feel self -fulfilled : set new goals, small objectives to get where you’ve always wanted, or at least try.
- Work on your self-concept : on self-knowledge, the ability to know yourself emotionally, physically and mentally. In this way you will be able to detect your internal conflicts, a good knowledge about yourself will lead you to an emotional balance and ease to manage thoughts, change negative thoughts for positive thoughts, high self-esteem, you will come to understand that what worries you is no more that a subjective interpretation of your external world and that the power is in your thoughts.
- Psychological help : where you learn to return a good image of yourself, to find out where this anguish comes from or if there are other traumas, situations from the past related to this feeling.
Emotional emptiness and dependency.
The way in which we are educated and society means that, on many occasions, we have false expectations regarding the search for our partner. The belief in the search for our soul mate , our better half or our prince charming.
They have made us believe that, to be complete, we need another. Look, that simple phrase, the damage it can do to your self-esteem. Believing that you are not complete , that you are missing your half.
We idealize the concept of a couple and two things can happen: either no one fits us under that profile because we have idealized it too much and it is impossible for anyone to comply with it, or we settle for the first thing that comes to us because we believe that it will fit directly.
In both, we can get frustrated because it doesn’t meet our expectations and that’s when that emotional vacuum is created. In addition, that emptiness goes hand in hand with a brutal dependency. If you think you need another to be complete, you will always depend on someone external to fill that gap.
And what happens when that person leaves our lives? That the emotional emptiness it leaves is so great that we sink, we are halfway again.
With all this, what we really do is look outside for what we believe we lack in ourselves . Something quite ironic, because depending on others to fill our gaps causes us to need them to feel good and happy.
