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Emotional amnesia is a peculiar phenomenon in the psychology community. It is typically associated with dissociative related disorders (DID, OSDD, USDD/UDD, Depersonalization, and Derealization just to name a few examples).
Emotional amnesia can be described as feeling an emotional disconnect between what is happening around you. Another way to describe it is when the person doesn’t feel like it’s their “authentic self” experiencing different events that occur (regardless of how big or small the events are). Some people have described it as “I am looking back on a memory, but I felt like I was in a movie theatre experiencing it from the backseat. It didn’t feel like I was genuinely ‘in’ the moment and experiencing it as other people should.”
For people who had some kind of trauma in their past, this could be a possible symptom, especially if you experience an event that triggers a part of your brain to remember the traumatic event. For example, I grew up in a family that was not the healthiest when it comes to properly express a healthy amount of emotions, regardless of the scenario. I feel like I regularly experience emotional amnesia because even with the people I love, I feel like I am not experiencing it as I should. I feel like a lot of my emotions are severely numbed. It’s there, but nowhere where it should be. It could be that the proper amount is there, but something in my brain…
