The High Cost of Numbness

Complete control over emotions—isn’t that a skill most people desire? To stoically withstand the smirks of fate, to avoid inner torment, to never bend or break under life’s blows. To be an invincible samurai with an unbreakable poker face.

Living without emotions seems advantageous:

• You can conduct business with composure: “Nothing personal, it’s just business, baby.”
• You can stick to logic and organize your life perfectly. Do what’s important, necessary, and right. Get into the right college, marry the right person, work where the pay is good.

But why, then, does that inner melancholy appear? An emptiness that nothing can fill… A sense of lack, deprivation, and an unending hunger.

The price of numbness is high—a life lived halfway. It’s as if smells and sounds have suddenly disappeared. They used to be there, but now they’re gone. You can live, but something is always missing. It’s as if an important part of your personality has frozen.

How Emotional Numbness Begins

The decision to stop feeling can come at any age. For some, it happens in childhood. For a child, shutting down emotionally and freezing becomes the only way to survive. To avoid going mad from pain and terror, they “turn down the volume” of their feelings—and leave it that way for life, for safety’s sake.

As adults, these people can’t find satisfaction; nothing fulfills them. They’re always searching for something. Once they realize what’s missing and can’t find the lost part of themselves, they start to slowly relearn how to feel joy, pleasure, and genuine desire.

Others make the decision to suppress their feelings as adults, in response to pain, loss, or disappointment. “Never again!” they say. “I won’t love, I won’t let anyone into my soul, I won’t trust, I won’t be that fool again. That’s it, thanks, it hurts too much. I know it’s bad in there, and I’m not going back.”

And so begins life in a spacesuit, armored with self-protection, denying oneself the right to feel anything—while carrying a huge emptiness inside.

The Risks of Being Alive

Being alive is a big risk.

• We’re afraid of feelings. They make us vulnerable.
• Many of us have learned countless tricks to avoid entering the emotional zone or experiencing feelings fully:
  • Quickly distract yourself and start doing something—anything.
  • Instead of recognizing and allowing yourself to process what’s happening, dissipate the tension through action.
  • Switch to something else and get lost in busyness. This helps avoid facing strong emotions and important personal questions.

Society often says, “Staying busy is the best cure for depression.” Many people become almost addicted to their activities, unconsciously trying to leave no time for “unnecessary thoughts.”

• Drink, eat, smoke. Quickly relieve tension without even realizing what triggered the anxiety that arose a second before the urge to consume something—drink, eat, or inhale.
• All forms of addiction—alcoholism, smoking, overeating—are habitual defense mechanisms against emotions that a person prefers not to acknowledge or experience. They’re ways to react to emotions.
• Buy something. “Swallow” another “must-have” item to temporarily silence emotional hunger and “feed” your anxiety.
• Have sex. In this case, your own body or your partner’s becomes just an object for manipulation. The other person’s role as an individual is minimal—they’re simply used as a calming drug.
• Find someone to attach to. Just as a child seeks a mother to care for and fill them with love, many adults look for a parental figure outside themselves. Like baby birds in a nest, their mouths are always open, waiting for constant help, support, and involvement in their lives. This often leads to disappointment and complaints that “he or she doesn’t care about me, doesn’t value or love me.”
• React to shame, fear, or guilt with aggression. An aggressive outburst helps release steam and relieve tension, but the problem that caused the tension remains unsolved. All the energy is wasted. Just as the body raises its temperature to fight harmful microbes, the psyche raises tension to solve a personal problem. But instead of using that energy for awareness and resolution, the “temperature” is lowered and the steam is released into nowhere—until the next episode.

The Consequences of Not Feeling

The habit of not fully recognizing feelings leads to an inability to detect psychological threats. The need for medication, food, cigarettes, or alcohol increases.

Sometimes, people can’t even hear their own anxiety. They think everything is fine—they just want to drink or eat—and don’t notice their anxious thoughts and feelings. As a result, they can’t take action to change their situation.

Our emotions are not just mental reactions—they’re also physical. Every emotion is accompanied by specific bodily sensations. The body is deeply involved in experiencing every emotion. When we suppress our psyche, we force the body to express those emotions for both mind and body, leading to psychosomatic symptoms.

If a person can’t allow themselves to process emotions mentally, they’ll have to process them physically. All psychosomatic symptoms are repressed, “forbidden” emotions. Repeated often enough, they lead to psychosomatic illnesses.

Doctors identify a list of purely psychosomatic diseases, known as the “Chicago Seven”: hypertension, coronary heart disease, bronchial asthma, stomach and duodenal ulcers, ulcerative colitis, hyperthyroidism, and diabetes. In these illnesses, the psychosomatic factor is dominant. More and more psychotherapists believe that the decision to get sick or not ultimately lies with the individual.

Sometimes, psychological defenses against emotions are so strong that a person doesn’t even allow their body to get sick—to process repressed feelings in any way. Then, like a boiling pot with the lid screwed on tight, an explosion occurs. Sudden deaths from strokes, heart attacks, or a cancer diagnosis at the final stage in seemingly healthy and young people are always a shock.

The price of numbness is life itself.

We Are Made to Feel

For some reason, we are made to feel. This ability and trait cannot be separated from us. It’s our nature.