The warmest of welcomes to you as you wonder about and explore feelings and the challenges that can come with them.
I've found there to be a whole variety of reasons for why we feel in the ways we do or why we can't actually feel all that much at times.
From feeling or sensing on a natural level or what some may call a soulful level through to feeling what our chemistry's doing through the side effects it produces, sometimes how we feel can depend on which angle we're coming from. For example, we could be feeling what could only be described as a soul destroying lack of a sense of joy in our life. On the other hand it's helpful to know that there may be certain structural abnormalities in our brain that may be preventing dopamine uptake (with dopamine offering a sense of joy). You could say the first is a natural experience, whereas the second is a chemical or biological experience. This leads to the question 'Why does a lack of feeling exist for me; could it just the way I'm wired or does it go deeper than that?
I've found quite a lot of my feelings have developed over time through a whole variety of experiences. As a mother, I had to learn to feel or sense in far more constructive ways than I did when I was single and without kids. A lot of my senses developed through motherhood, with a sense of empathy being one of them. In some ways I was very self focused as a kid, which does nothing in the way of leading to the development of a sense of empathy toward others. I never learned to make deeply felt connections until later in life. My ability to feel more has come with experience. On the other hand, I can recall the story of a paramedic with high functioning autism who simply didn't have the ability to feel for others at all. With a truly brilliant analytical mind, he had to develop the ability to appear like he cared for people facing traumatic experiences. He learned to act like he cared so as to be able to calm and help a patient through a sense of connection. His passion was to help people and acting like he cared was a skill that he knew helped them.
Whether we can't feel much at all at times due to a lack of experience, neurological factors, pure exhaustion or some other reason, it always pays to wonder. I found one of the ways I've been able to develop a sense of feeling relates to often asking the question 'If I could give this feeling a name or label, what would I call it?'. With us being somewhat conditioned to give a typical name to certain feelings, such as sadness, anger, happiness etc, the challenge becomes about giving certain feelings specific names. For example, while I could say 'I feel sad' or 'I feel sadness', it may be more accurate to say 'What I'm sensing is what completely lost and alone with no sense of direction feels like' or 'I'm feeling a saddening lack of guidance'.
Btw, sometimes it can be hard to feel for others because they're not articulating well enough for us to be able to fully understand how or what they're feeling. As I say, being able to feel or unable to feel can be based on so many different reasons.
