Emotional Numbness: The Sneaky Leech
Where It Starts
In my family, there was a lot of yelling and door slamming. From an early age, I took on the role of peacemaker. While my brother poured gasoline on the fire, I tried to prevent or extinguish it.
Family dinners were often excruciating; you could have cut the tension with a knife.
Sometimes my brother would kick me as hard as he could under the table, hoping my reaction would provoke my father into banging his fist and exploding.
Even though it hurt like hell, I learned to sit there without flinching.
Eventually, I learned not to feel much of anything at all.
What It Feels Like
Like a sneaky leech that attaches itself where we can’t see or feel it, emotional numbness can creep in under the radar and suck the joy out of life.
Research suggests roughly a third of US adults experienced some form of emotional suppression in their childhoods. Not surprisingly, these kinds of early experiences are strongly linked with difficulties connecting to and feeling one’s emotions as an adult.
People describe this phenomenon in different ways:
empty
burned out
disconnected
just going through the motions
It often comes with things like fatigue, apathy, and a creeping sense that nothing really matters anyway.
This isn’t laziness or a lack of caring or gratitude. It comes from a response that once helped us cope, and even survive.
Trying to Feel Again
What started out as adaptive can gradually dull everything else too—the good along with the bad. So we start looking for ways to feel again.
Some turn to drugs and alcohol.
Some bury themselves in work, and the endless pursuit of “success.”
Some jump out of planes or buy obscenely expensive watches.
Since childhood, my crutch has been physical activity, especially in nature. As I got older, this expanded into things like wilderness marathons and cold plunging.
I always assumed I did these things because they are fun and provide many benefits–physical fitness, mental toughness, camaraderie. While all this is true, I only recently realized there’s also a deeper reason:
They enable me to feel things more deeply than I can in the rest of my life.
For example, ironically, the last thing I’m (metaphorically) feeling when I’m in that freezing water is numbness. Physically, my body is tingling and pulsating. Mentally, I experience a surge of emotions that tend to include things like gratitude and, rarest of all for me, pure joy.
Finding the Cracks
The good news is that emotional numbness can be reversed.
This sneaky leech can be detected and gently removed, and our emotional blood can be replenished without our having to relive the past or drown in pain.
The first step is simply to become aware of and carefully study our emotional numbness. When and why did it start? How does it work? Where are the cracks in its armour?
Then we can begin to exploit those cracks by noticing when and where we are able to feel at least something. Perhaps hearing a certain piece of music, seeing a spectacular sunset, or witnessing some egregious injustice stirs something that we can build on.
There’s no quick fix for this. But if you pay attention and do the work, things will start to shift, perhaps slowly and unevenly at first, but steadily.
It’s something to truly look forward to.
