Mindfulness and feelings of emptiness
pp. 125-151
in: Fabrizio Didonna (ed), Clinical handbook of mindfulness, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
The feeling of emptiness is a common symptom or phenomenological experience found in clinical practice with several kinds of disorders.What is, however, more difficult is finding two patients who describe this experience in the same way. Patients report different experiences: "I feel an emptiness inside," "everything seems empty," "I feel like I"m falling into a great emptiness," "nothing makes sense because of the emptiness," and many others. Though at first sight they may appear to be very similar, some specific and distinctive characteristics surface on closer observation. The diagnoses that comprise these manifestations can be multiple and are recurrent in relation to a series of disorders: from common depressive episodes to personality disorders, even in comorbidity with other pathologies.