inappropriate emotions

These are a bitch. I fucking hate them. Hate them so much. Hated myself so much over the years because of them. Always knew they weren’t my fault on some level but was powerless to turn them off.

This is the volume switch I wanted for my entire life. Turning down the brain. Lowering the intensity. But it’s not the brain; it’s the juices.

So I think of us as having 2 emotional landscapes: the neuronal and the hormonal. Weirdly enough the neuronal is both faster and slower; it’s electric so fast but not as powerful; when you see a bear you need chemicals pumping around your body to fire your muscles up and get your heart pounding and whatnot. The brain just doesn’t have the oomph.

So let’s say that the brain is the controller and the juices the guns. The brain is the ship and the juices the cannons.

Let’s say you see a snake. Argh! Stomach lurch! That’s your juices. Oh! But wait. It’s a stick. That’s your brain. 

So your brain registered it in a lower region with low-resolution, triggered a sympathetic nervous fight-or-flight system response, and then cancelled the response when the higher-resolution processing had been done. I think rsd is a truncated version of this; it's happening so fast that we never get to high-res.

Actually.. running with rsd the dopamine droputs are causing you to go full prairie-dog every second. Emotionally think ‘where am I’ and then re-encode.

So maybe your emotions are just out of whack. Or maybe they are not ‘inappropriate’ but rather ‘appropriate in the micro’. Maybe you saw a snake in that split second; a micro expression that you didn’t like. Maybe that’s what you’ve registered.

With medication (aripiprazole in particular) my dopamine signalling seems more regular and the inappropropriate emotions have… dare I say… disappeared?

One troubling thing with these emotions is that they are totally unpredictable. You can’t tell what kind of inappropriate response it might be. Anyway loose thread…

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