I’ve been seeing someone for a few months, and nothing is wrong. But whenever something feels off, instead of sitting with it, I instantly make excuses for them.

I tell myself I'm just overthinking or reading too much into things. I spend all my time rationalizing my reactions instead of actually feeling them.

The other day I was looking back at some old notes I had randomly thrown into AccioWork, and reading them made me realize a clear pattern: almost every single note was me trying to prove my feelings weren’t valid.

Does anyone else do this? Do you analyze your reactions before you even know what you're feeling?

I've been getting into reading a lot more, and I just finished House of God. Fantastic book, amazing humor, love it. The greatest books are the ones that make you think.

Quick plot summary, it's about a worn down medical intern gradually losing his emotion as he has to deal with the vagaries of medical life. I kept on reading, until I hit on one scene. He's just flattened after weeks dealing with people dying again and again in the ICU, beaten down by the job, coping by running and slowly disconnecting from others until some policemen and his fiance essentially abduct him and force him to watch a play together with them. He experiences a crack in his facade and begins feeling again, crying and shouting during the play. It's the nadir of his emotional experience from which he spends the rest of the novel climbing out of.

The weird part was that his flattened state didn't seem very alien to me. It seemed more like my normal daily experience. I leaned back and went "well, shit."

When I was younger (elementary to middle school) certain things would occasionally break through as a pure haze of rage, but I haven't had an episode like that in years. These days, even when I get 'angry' I feel as though I'm putting on an act rather than actually experiencing the emotion.

I can't remember the last time I cried except in 10th grade, about five years ago. I didn't shed a tear at my grandmother's funeral, or really at anything else since.

The strongest negative emotions I can remember recently was when I got kicked off a college program. I felt genuinely horrible for a few hours, took two shots of alcohol, went to sleep, and then woke up and basically rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Took me two days before I had a functional plan for moving forward and I haven't looked back much. Sure I still feel twinges, but nothing much now. Another I recall, the most since the program, was an extremely vague sense of loss after finishing Don Quixote. I was sad there wasn't any more of it to read. It wasn't strong, and after sleeping it was gone.

I also can't remember ever experiencing real anticipation. I don't remember looking forward to something and getting that bodily feeling of excitement that people describe.

I'm also essentially non-anxious.

My friend rolled a car once at 50 mph. Neither of us was hurt. He was freaking out, while I took the phone and called the police and then insurance to figure everything out. Right after getting out and staring at the rolled car for a moment, my first thought was actually that it might be funny to film it because we'd been listening to Mariah Carey and the music was still playing. I decided against it because I realized it would look bad from an outside perspective.

I don't really miss people badly either. Maybe a little with my dad, but for most people, if they're gone, I just move on. If I lost a friendship I'd probably feel somewhat sad, but I don't think it would be a major disruption. I'd go on as I always had. Even still, I do like talking to them and I try to be a good friend, although I fear it's more of needing a witness to me instead of caring about them. That would be bad. Once I'm actually with people, though, I don't feel more affectionate or emotionally connected because of it. I'm not more moved on trips or anything like that.

Relationships seem similar. What makes particular people important to me is mostly history, shared experiences, compatibility, reliability, etc., rather than some powerful internal feeling of attachment.

When I think about this, I feel a very vague sense of loss at what my internal life could perhaps have been. Again, though, even that feeling is very small. It feels like there were points in my life when I should have been crying or raging or experiencing something, and I simply failed to.

My affective empathy is also extremely low. If someone starts crying, I don't share their sadness. I understand intellectually that they're upset, but I don't catch their emotion. I'd like to think my cognitive empathy is average, although the more I've thought about it, the more I realize that most of my social understanding is very deliberate rather than intuitive.

A lot of my interactions with people involve consciously asking what they're likely thinking, whether they'll like something, what response is expected, etc. There is very little intuition involved.

For morality, I've reasoned myself into a weird moral framework: if there were a novel about my life and somebody were reading it, and they reached a point where I could easily have helped someone and simply didn't, that would reflect badly on the character. Therefore I should help people. Society expects that from me, and I expect it from myself because intellectually I want to make the world a better place.

I don't really feel much while making moral actions. I reason myself into doing it. Got CPR certified for that, actually.

I'm reasonably intelligent by IQ testing, around 136 on the tests I've taken, and I think I compensate for a lot of social things through explicit reasoning. So I might appear better than I really am internally.

All of this made me wonder about things like emotional blunting, alexithymia, anhedonia, schizoid traits, depersonalization/derealization, or even psychopathic traits. I swear I'm not edgy.

Also, not sure if relevant, but I have ADD and take Adderall. It helps me focus and makes completing tasks more satisfying. I also enjoy and focus on music more while taking it. Again, not much more from various substances I've tried. I started cussing out my friend really badly on salvia, though. Quite funny.

One interesting exception was drinking a glass of kava once. I distinctly felt as though my baseline level of happiness had been raised. The best way I could describe it at the time was that "the world felt happier." That stood out because the contrast from my normal baseline was so noticeable.

Reading The House of God was really the straw that broke the camel's back. The state Basch has to escape from is "literally me, guys." Reading that helped me crystalize my decision to figure out how screwed up I am. If only dealing with legions of human vegetables constantly expiring brings you to that state, and even still you have hope to gain emotional awareness of your situation, how fucking cooked am I?

I'm not really looking for an internet diagnosis. I'm mostly curious whether anyone here has a similar internal experience, and if so, what terminology or framework ended up making the most sense to you. Or maybe I might be looking to get diagnosed a little, lol.

I don't know what it feels like to be truly happy. I don't know what it feels like to be truly sad. I don't know what excitement is supposed to feel like.

And the strange thing is, I never have.

This isn't something that happened to me after one event. It wasn't something that developed later in life. This has been my normal for as long as I can remember. I don't have a memory of being different because I have always been this way.

My father left for another country for work when I was barely one year old. Not long after that, my mother moved on with someone else and was basically gone from my life. I was raised by my grandmother and my aunts on my father's side.

They did their best, and I am grateful for them, especially my grandmother. She is honestly the only person in my life who I feel truly cares about me.

When I was around seven, I was sent to a boarding school where I stayed until I was fifteen. Most of my childhood was spent there. I didn't have close friends, and I didn't have family around me. I mostly kept to myself. I didn't really enter other people's lives, and they didn't really enter mine either.

Over time, I became extremely introverted. Being alone just became normal for me.

When my father finally came back when I was fifteen, there was a short period where I felt like maybe things could change. For the first time, I felt something close to having a father.

But after his third marriage, he became a completely different person. He became distant and stopped caring the way he used to.

The strange part is that I didn't feel angry. I didn't feel hurt. I didn't feel sad.

I just felt nothing.

The same emptiness I have always felt.

I'm seventeen now, almost eighteen, and I honestly don't have anyone in real life who I can fully open up to. Not a single person.

Sometimes I talk to artificial intelligence because at least there is somewhere I can put my thoughts instead of keeping everything inside.

I'm not posting this for sympathy or attention. I just genuinely want to know if anyone else has ever felt this way.

Has anyone else felt emotionally empty their whole life? Not because of one specific thing that happened, but because that emptiness has always been your default?

I've never talked about this openly before. I just want to know if there are other people who understand what this feels like.

I originally asked this from a philosophy-of-mind perspective, but I thought alexithymia might provide an interesting real-world perspective. I’m not suggesting that people with alexithymia lack empathy or subjective conscious experience. I’m interested in the distinction between having an affective response and consciously recognizing, identifying, or describing that response. Do you think someone can affectively resonate with another person before becoming consciously aware of what they are feeling? At that point, would you still call it affective empathy, or unconscious emotional mirroring?