Not wanting to fall in love can sometimes signify a problem with esteem, attachment, anxiety, or another issue. You might feel anxious about becoming attached to someone and potentially losing them. Or you might have low self-esteem and struggle with feeling that you are unloveable.
Whether you haven't felt love yet, have lost love for a partner, or identify as aromantic or asexual, not feeling love can be normal and healthy. Your motions may not be in your control and judging yourself for not feeling something can be counterproductive. There is nothing wrong with you.
The mental health conditions most often associated with emotional numbness are depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Emotional numbness can also come up in some dissociative disorders, which are connected with a personal history of trauma.
Low self-esteem can be brought on by one's family life, school, bullying, and more. When you don't believe in yourself, you don't know why anyone else would. Therefore, if you don't love yourself, you feel incapable of receiving love from others.
Some mental health examples include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, or even obsessive compulsive disorder. When someone is under distress due to an imbalance of emotions, then they are less like to show their partner affection.
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).
Past abuse, neglect, and trauma can contribute to emotional detachment. 1 Children who grow up in abusive situations may use this detachment as a way to cope.
Signs of emotional unavailability include fear of intimacy, trouble expressing emotions, and commitment anxiety. “It's not something you can fix for them, nor is it something they can quickly and easily change about themselves for you,” Jernigan says.
There are many reasons you may feel unhappy: you may be going through a stressful time at work or school; you may be too hard on yourself; or you may be experiencing a mental health condition like depression or anxiety or substance abuse.
Ziskind recommends working on self-care activities and self-love skills, which can help address emotional detachment and rebuild a strong relationship where it matters the most: with yourself. This can happen with yoga, painting, art therapy, and animal therapy.
An ongoing lack of healthy communication, like unwillingness to discuss your concerns, might indicate that you no longer love your partner. If you dread conversations with your partner and feel irritated by everything they say, it could also signify a change in feelings.
Some people are simply shy while others fear rejection. Others may be keeping secrets because they're ashamed of something. 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.
Depersonalization-derealization disorder.
This involves an ongoing or episodic sense of detachment or being outside yourself — observing your actions, feelings, thoughts and self from a distance as though watching a movie (depersonalization).
Being emotionally numb means your emotional experience is lower than expected, dampened, or completely missing. In situations where you might be expected to experience joy or sadness, you may feel empty or detached instead. This feeling isn't positive or negative; instead, it's absent of emotion.
These associations were again independent of childhood maltreatment and earlier PTSD symptoms. Given that the vmPFC plays a key role in emotion regulation, the authors suggest that overactivation of this brain region may disrupt emotion regulation processes and lead to feelings of detachment following trauma.
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.
Emotional detachment can be frustrating to deal with, especially if you have ADHD, as you may have difficulty self-regulating your emotions.
Some people, known as dark empaths, understand the feelings of others but don't feel these feelings themselves. They might act like they care, but deep down, they don't feel sympathy for you or have a desire to help. They use their understanding of your feelings to manipulate you.
Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by self-absorption, grandiosity, exploitation of others and lack of empathy. The tendency to elicit admiration from others is epitomic, but it is manipulative and finalized to take a personal advantage.
Because empathy is partly a learned behavior, you may not be as empathetic if you didn't experience much empathy while growing up. Also, if you were alone much of the time, you may not have had the opportunity to practice empathy. This, too, can lead to a reduction of empathetic expression.
When a woman lacks intimacy in marriage, it can have a significant impact on her emotional and physical health. The lack of physical touch, emotional connection, and sexual intimacy can lead to feelings of loneliness, depression, and low self-esteem.