People who are aromantic, also known as “aro,” don't develop romantic attractions for other people.
Low self-esteem can cause feelings of repulsion toward love or relationships. If you do not feel attractive, valuable, or loveable, you may subconsciously feel that others will not see you in this way. Low self-esteem can be improved through self-care and practices that increase self-compassion, like meditation.
It might be you have a personality disorder, which refers to consistent patterns of thinking and behaving you would have had since adolescence that are markedly different from the norm. Because you think and feel differently than others, it makes it hard for others to understand you and be in a relationship with you.
Parents, teachers, peers, society, and culture affect how people feel about kindness, empathy, compassion, and helping behaviors. Some conditions may play a role in a lack of empathy such as narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Apathetic means uncaring. It's an adjective form of apathy—the state of not caring. It can also mean the absence or suppression of emotion or passion. Apathetic is especially used to describe people with a lack of interest or concern about things, especially those that others find important or exciting.
It is common that when someone is experiencing a disturbance in their emotional and mental health, they may not demonstrate as much affection as they would at other times. Some mental health examples include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, or even obsessive compulsive disorder.
Emotional detachment isn't an official condition like bipolar disorder or depression. Instead, it's often considered one element of a larger medical condition. Conditions might include personality disorders or attachment disorders. Emotional detachment could also be the result of acute trauma or abuse.
When you lose the ability to feel or express any emotions, this is called flat affect. If you feel numb only to positive emotions but are still able to feel negative emotions, this is called anhedonia. Anhedonia is a common symptom of depression and shows up in a lot of mental health conditions.
Schizoid personality disorder is one of many personality disorders. It can cause individuals to seem distant and emotionless, rarely engaging in social situations or pursuing relationships with other people.
If you have schizoid personality disorder, you may be seen as a loner or dismissive of others, and you may lack the desire or skill to form close personal relationships. Because you don't tend to show emotion, you may appear as though you don't care about others or what's going on around you.
Feeling emotionless can often be a symptom of mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic disorder so it's not something to dismiss or downplay. In these cases, seeking the help of a professional is crucial. So remember you don't have to work through this alone.
Closed-off qualities can be down to certain character traits, like being shy. Or something may have happened to make a person more cautious, like certain experiences or even traumas. For example, when someone has experienced heartbreak they might find it harder to let another person in again.
Shutting down emotions can be a normal part of human experience, as a coping strategy in stressful situations. Under high stress, it allows your body and brain to protect itself from perceived threats or harm.
Stress at home, school or work, relationship changes, illness, or fatigue may be the cause. However, when a person is incapable of feeling or is able to turn off emotions seemingly whenever they want, this could be an indication of emotional detachment disorder, or EDD.
“The fear of intimacy can be caused by different reasons including abuse or neglect, medical problems, fear of abandonment, or religious beliefs. Sometimes, it can even be a combination of issues and securing the help of a professional is necessary.”
Of course, there can be many different reasons why we may find it difficult to receive love. It could be past trauma, unfamiliarity with receiving, feelings of unworthiness, and much more. Regardless, it is very common to feel resistance to receiving love in compliments, affection, accepting help, and more.
It might be challenging for you to show affection because your own family wasn't very affectionate. Or, you may have trauma to work through that makes expressing affection hard. It's also possible that you just naturally aren't someone who expresses their love for others through affection.
When trauma and chronic stress become overwhelming, our nervous system tends to move into a shutdown state. Counsellors often refer to it as dissociation, a common response to traumatic events.
Being emotionally unavailable describes someone who is not open to discussing or sharing their feelings. They can be evasive, flaky, or hard to read. "They're scared of intimacy," explains licensed couples therapist Brooke Sprowl, LCSW, CNTS.
The main reason they can't talk is they're too stressed, or their anxiety levels are too high in that social setting that no word comes out of their mouth. People with selective mutism literally can't speak in certain situations. The disorder literally means 'being mute in selective situations. '
Negative social experiences and overreliance on social media can make it more difficult to feel emotionally linked to other people. Sometimes a lack of connection might be related to the presence of a mental health condition such as anxiety or depression.
Shyness, introversion, and social anxiety may make people put the brakes on connecting with others. If a person has poor self-esteem or mental health issues, they may also struggle to connect. If this sounds like you, you may need some extra support to start feeling your best.
What causes a feeling of emptiness in romantic relationships? “Emptiness” is often a symptom of unresolved pain. For example, somewhere in your past relationships, an emotional wound was left unhealed. Such wounds are most often caused by someone intimately close, such as a parent, a sibling, a friend, or a lover.
Feeling empty is a common experience for most of us, which is why the phrase "dead inside" feels so relevant. However, there are certain contexts where this feeling may point to more serious problems than just feeling empty. It may be connected to life dissatisfaction, trauma, depression, or a combination of things.