This week on the podcast, Ginger Simonton, PhD candidate, and I talk about about how to deal with emotional detachment. In the psychiatry world, we call the state of emotional detachment, congruence. What is congruence?Psychological congruence is someone’s ability to feel and express their inner emotions in a consistent manner with their outer world—their speech and body language.As an example, have you ever smiled when you’re talking about something sad? Or felt very emotional, yet had a flat face and still posture? Have you ever felt angry, but pushed it down and developed a headache? These are incongruent speech and behavior patterns.  Incongruence happens when we’ve lost touch with our inner world, our emotions that are represented with bodily sensations. Many of my patients experience emotions, but have a hard time expressing them with words, so they shove them out of their experience.Emotions are unavoidable.We experience them all the time, whether we know it or not. Common terms for pushing them out of our awareness are suppression, denial, repression, and other defense mechanisms. We may think we can suppress our emotions, but they will come out in one way or another—sometimes through physical pain and illness.There is extensive research on how the body processes emotion, and how that affects us physically. One of my favorite books on this subject is The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk and The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio.As psychotherapists, our job is to help people reconnect to those emotions, and be able to experience them in healthy ways. People bury so many of our psychological problems in our bodies that we don’t even feel comfortable in our bodies anymore, and we prefer to be numb.People further push unwanted emotions out of their experience through use of drugs, alcohol, and other addictions like porn, gambling, movie binging, or mindlessly scrolling forever on social media. How do we develop incongruence?But we don’t start out as emotionally disconnected, or incongruent. As children, we express our emotions as we feel them. If we are happy, we giggle, smile, or stick out our tongue as we work on a project. If we are sad, we cry. If we are angry, we bite, yell, spit or claw. If we have disgust we spit things out, push things away and protest against putting things in our mouth!  If our emotions are mirrored back, and our caretaker acknowledges them verbally, them we optimally will be connected to our bodily responses from a young age. This is why I always recommend starting any discipline or high emotional moment with kids by empathically mirroring their emotions in words, and adding meaning to why they might feel such a way.To get along with others, most kids, over time, develop a normal adaptive way to conceal emotions, which helps function in family and friendships. We learn that there is a context for truly sharing what is going on, and this is a good thing. Sometimes suppressing strong emotion until later is helpful!Stronger issues develop when repeated messages invalidate or shame our experience, or trauma moves us away from being congruent with our inner experience. It is also possible that there is no one who an individual connects with enough to be congruent around.For example, if everyone you know would shame or attack you, it might not be a good idea to bring out your deepest thoughts and emotions. These kinds of households often have heavy drugs or alcohol, severe mental illness, or predators.We are meaning-making creatures. We assign meaning to events in our lives, and that meaning becomes our guiding belief and principle, especially in key developmental periods in childhood.These meanings shape how we are going to interact with the world. Although unconscious and out of our awareness most of the time, when we live out of congruence without ourselves, it leads us to form these earlier, shaping meanings.  How incongruence develops:A trauma oc