Disclaimer: This is kind of dark (I write about being sad). If you want something lighter, click here.
When someone is sad, in some ways, is it a subconscious invitation to be sad too?
When you are sad, I am sad too. Last month, wait, two months ago, I think I told you I had a major depressive episode. There were several triggers, or events that pushed my body/mind into a state of panic. This isn’t about those, it is also not not about those. The events were, as a list, nothing special at the time, but reflecting on them, they were something. A contagion in their own right.
Who was sad first? Are they to blame?
I blame myself for our recent infection with doom. But it could have been you, I just had not seen the signs. With the understanding that emotions are contagious and outside of my perception, it could have been me. Or someone else. There are so many reasons to be sad at this moment.
I sunk into depression. So deep I thought about hospitalizing myself. One of the many privileges that I have is seeing a psychiatrist once a week. She prescribed an intervention which was a new med. After convincing myself to take it that evening after meeting with her, miraculously the next day, I felt relief.
When I had M and she was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis, I made a commitment to fight for her. In this moment, fighting for her looked like stabilizing myself back on the tightrope, hair-thin as it is, to be in the same reality as her. At that moment, I wanted to be stable. It was not about me anymore, it was about what she deserved, what I wanted for her. I thought about this while I swallowed a substance that I will never really understand how it works, what it does, what the long-term effects will be.
There was, in this moment a clear “before” taking the new med and “after.” The before part somehow, the intense heaviness of the world was passed to Josh, my partner. It was not intentional, I tried to hide it from him for as long as I could.
In theory, I don’t believe any other person wants the people they love to be sad. Maybe you do, but I would be missing some vital part of the context. I want the people I love to be well. To find purpose and joy. To have just the right balance of pain and relief. I don’t want to give them my depression. That would never be my intention. And yet, I did it.
Two values at odds with each other: being true to yourself & not wanting to bring others down. But there is a breaking point, when all the pretending to be fine somehow radically shifts one’s ability to function. Bodies no longer eating, sleep never coming, etc.
Is emotional contagion just a by-product of empathy?
It is hard to tell, where you begin and I end, or I start and you end. The areas of our ability to perceive have evolved into conscious and unconscious. Our focus being on what one could argue the culture has found important throughout an unimaginable amount of time. This morning I was talking to a friend about looking at a tree being a collaboration of life. An exchange of resources that were all mostly outside our comprehension.
Somehow, without intending, Josh caught my sadness. Then, as if nothing we both consciously did, we were both deep into it. Drowning in the abyss of a reality that we both didn’t want to be in and yet couldn’t get out of. The cues were subtle. Actually, I couldn’t tell you what they were.
How do you not let other people’s emotions rub off on you?
They say it is our mirror neurons that are to blame. But why? I can theorize that perhaps something like fear was a good thing to have as a contagion when, say, running from a lion-like we all would survive without thinking if our collective parasympathic nervous systems connected without thought, our bodies moving away from danger in tandem.
But we are not in that kind of danger, at the moment, we are both the danger and the savior for each other.
Without cue or one that I could recall, one-day last week, I could tell that Josh was doing better. And because he was doing better, I could do better too. I don’t have any answers, just that it’s complicated being with humans.
I would love to tell you that we over here are doing a little bit better. We are. I hope it rubs you the right way :)
We all have neuroception (edited), where we subconsciously pick up on cues of safety or danger from the nervous systems of those around us. I do not think you can “give” people emotions. That implies responsibility. To stop the contagion, you need strong emotional boundaries - a strong sense of where you end and I begin. We all do the best we can. My autistic daughter and I basically share one, symbiotic nervous system so in order for her to feel safe and not meltdown, I need to stay in my parasympathetic despite extreme stress/ shutdown. Sometimes this task is impossible. But I try to remind myself that everything I do to tend to my own nervous system is actually helping her, even if it feels “selfish”, like leaving her in distress so I can see my friends. So, I think we are going to impact each other, for the good and the bad, but boundaries are like sandbags against the storm surges.
I think emotions are contagious. Let's look at an example: fear.
If you walk on a street,and suddenly a group of people passes in the opposite direction, running and screaming like their where in panic or terrified, our first reaction would be confusion and fear, and surely some people start to run with them too