Largely unavailable

What this means

Your answers sit near the top of the scale, which means very little is currently getting through in either direction. Feelings are hard to locate, harder to say, and another person's emotion registers mainly as something to get away from.

That is a heavy way to live and it is usually not experienced as a choice. From the inside it often does not feel like avoidance at all. It feels like there is nothing to report. Many people at this range describe watching themselves say the reasonable thing while whatever is actually happening stays somewhere they cannot reach.

Two different states produce a score this high and they need different responses. One is protection: the feelings are there, and there is a well-built rule against letting them out, usually laid down somewhere it was genuinely unsafe to be readable. The other is numbness: the reaching happens and finds nothing. Flatness that covers everything, not only the difficult feelings but pleasure, interest and anticipation too, points somewhere other than availability. It overlaps with depression closely enough to be worth a conversation with a doctor rather than a plan to open up more.

It is also common at this level to have concluded that this is simply who you are. That conclusion is the most important one to hold loosely, because it is the one that prevents the small repetitions that do work. Access is a skill sitting under a strategy, not a missing part.

The relational cost is usually well established by now. The people close to you have probably stopped asking, which removes the pressure and also removes the practice. Quiet is not the same as resolved.

What to do next

The honest recommendation at this score is to involve someone else rather than doing this alone, and a therapist in particular. A shutdown this complete usually has a history behind it, and history is what therapy is for.

If that is not available right now, keep the first steps very small and internal. Once a day, one word for the state you are in, said to nobody. No explanation, no action. That is the whole exercise, and it is the part that has to come back first.

Do not measure progress by conversations, and do not set yourself a test you will fail. Whether you can find the word at all is the measure that matters for now.

If alongside this you have had weeks of flatness, lost interest in things you used to enjoy, or noticed changes in sleep and appetite, please raise that with a doctor.

Lovon is here to talk to in the meantime, including at the hours when this is loudest. It is support alongside that conversation rather than instead of it.