Emotional Numbness

It is as though someone were slowly turning down the volume of your inner experience. First the quiet tones become inaudible — the small joys, the fleeting touches, the tingle before something new. Then the loud ones disappear too: the anger, the grief, the longing. What remains is silence. Not the good kind of silence — but one that feels like cotton wool. Like fog. Like a room without walls, where you stand and nothing reaches out and nothing reaches in.

On the physical level this numbness can also show itself bodily — as a numb feeling in the skin, in the fingers, in the face, in the mucous membranes. Medicine then examines nerves, blood flow, neurological causes. And that is right and important. But the psychosomatic perspective asks additionally: why does your system shut down sensation? What is so overwhelming that your body has decided to throttle the receiving channel?