I feel like I get nothing emotionally out of socializing with people. Even when I'm around close friends and family, I basically feel nothing. This makes it so I don't even go out seeking social events anymore and have a lot of difficulty making friends. I know that I have to go outside and interact with people instead of staying in my bedroom 24/7 like some kind of hermit if I want to be a healthy and well adjusted adult, but I have no drive to do so. It's not even a social anxiety issue or a lack of social skills. When I am around others, they even tend to like me. I feel like some kind of sociopath for not being able to like them back though.
Does anyone else have this issue? Is there anything I can do about it? The past several years of my life since I stopped beating myself up my emotional state has been basically a flat line. I feel live I'm incapable of truly living as opposed to just continuing to exist.
Just to rule out depression induced anhedonia - do you still find pleasure and joy in your interestes? Do you actively seek out things you do like, interact with those things, and find it satisfying?
I can feel some amount of satisfaction, but not really joy. I can feel interest in an activity (e.g. video games, programming, reading), but I can't remember the last time I felt happiness as an emotion. At most I'll feel a sense of contentment or complacency.
I would suggest you investigate depression as a potential underlying cause of what you are experiencing. One of the key symptoms of depression is struggling or being unable to find joy and excitement in things: sports, books, machines, people, you were previous interested in.
I actually was diagnosed with depression several years ago. I even went to a mental health eval to see if there was anything that could be done about my treatment resistant depression and if I had autism. The evaluator only focused on my substance use (too much alcohol and marijuana, but not enough in my mind to deem me an addict) and was pressured into going to an inpatient rehab for a month. I haven't toked or drank in about a month and a half but don't really feel any different.
I'm sorry the evaluator was being a prat. It's shocking how many of them still don't recognize "substance use" as self-medication in the face of the failures of the medical industry.
I'm lucky that the facility was nice as far as rehabs go, but having to sit through people constantly praising the 12 steps, saying that anyone who is in the rehab must be there because they're an addict and their life is unmanageable was incredibly invalidating.
I would say this describes schizoid pd, not sociopathy. But I did feel like this for a long time before getting on antidepressants. It was just the depression in my case.
I have tried various antidepressants and am on a few currently. They blunted the negative, but didn't bring out the positive.
That sounds right. Anti-depressents won't make you "happy", but if you're on a medication that is effective for your conditions and needs it should allow you to experience joy, happiness, and satisfaction that were being blocked by depression. The medication doesn't create happiness, but rather removes negative symptoms to create a place where happiness, joy, and excitement become possible.
