If I am Numb, How Can I Feel?

Understanding your emergency shutoff switch—and how to slowly turn feelings back on.

Dear Kathy,

You suggest being in touch with my feelings. The estrangement blogs on Substack talk about sadness, anger, resentment, grief, fear—all of it. Sometimes my estrangement is so overwhelming that I can’t tell what I am feeling. I’m not even sure I CAN feel. If being in touch with my feelings is supposed to help, what if I am numb?

And WHY am I numb? I was never good at naming my feelings. Now, I either feel numb or like I am drowning. Can you help me sort this out?

— Confused, Troubled and Numb

Dear Confused and Numb,

You are probably experiencing emotional overwhelm from having too many feelings at once. If you were never very good at identifying your feelings, and now you are flooded with them, your numbness may come from overload. Estrangement often brings a deluge of cascading responses. Picture yourself under a waterfall with the water pounding over you. Estrangement can be an emotional version of that pounding, surging, relentless stream.

You shared that you were never very good at naming your feelings. Learning to know what we are feeling—to identify what we are feeling, name it, get to know that feeling and work with it—is a lifelong challenge for many of us.

Why Feelings Go Incognito

There are three main reasons why we have trouble naming our feelings:

• A Breakdown in Connection: The psychological term for having “no words for emotion” is alexithymia. When this happens, your body can be having physical feeling responses—your heart is racing, you may be tearing up, in other words using the language of the body. However, the language of your body is not connecting to the language of your mind. You have no words.

• A Learned Defense: If you grew up in a home where your feelings were dismissed, ignored, or met with, “Stop crying,” you learned very early that having emotions was unsafe or even dangerous. You may not have had help understanding what you were feeling, or how to learn from emotional experience. To survive, you built a habit of suppressing feelings. Decades later, those neural pathways connecting your physical body to your conscious awareness have lost strength and may need to go to an emotions gym.

• The Subconscious Shield: Sometimes, your mind draws a line for self-protection. When an emotion-filled experience like estrangement is too threatening to bear, your subconscious may step in to shield you. You may wind up numb or begin to intellectualize to keep you from drowning in the impact. The numbing is protecting you.

The Contribution of Parenting

Those who raised us are our first teachers about our emotional life. Our body shows us what we are feeling with physical surges of sorrow, anger, disappointment, joy, desire. The first people who help us translate those surges into words and teach us to be emotionally aware about ourselves and others are our caregivers. A number of my readers are parents, so you will also know this from teaching your own children about their emotional lives.

When we are babies, if we show a feeling, and our caring adult can help us, they will name the feeling and offer help. They give us words: “You are sad or mad or disappointed”—whatever their best guess is about the feelings you are expressing. They also may offer solutions, like, with a baby, soothing the baby, or with a young child, offering words and possible solutions.

“You were so excited about your ice cream cone that you were swinging it around. Then the ice cream fell off on the ground and you were so mad and disappointed. First, let’s see if we can take some breaths to calm down. Then, let’s see if there is any more ice cream.” We offer words, self-soothing, and a possible solution.

You don’t say what your parents did to try to help with your feelings. Not all parents can. Learning to know what you are feeling and how to work with your feelings helps us function in the world. Not being aware can make things harder during emotional stress.

Feeling numb in the face of estrangement may seem disabling to you. Whether you felt the need to estrange, or your close other (child, sister, friend) felt the need to estrange you, it helps to know what you are feeling in order to unpack your internal experience. This, in turn, should help you metabolize your experience.

What I mean by metabolize is to digest and process—turning the thoughts and feelings into understanding and ideas for yourself in the face of your estrangement. This, in turn, could help you better understand your estranged loved one.

If you find you are struggling to feel your feelings, to know, name and express them, I want to offer some explanations and suggestions.

How Do Feelings Happen in My Body?

It helps to understand the ways feelings show up:

• Physiologically: Feelings happen in the body. You might find yourself crying before you even have a conscious thought about why. Your fists might clench and your blood might course before you register the word: Anger.

• Mental Functioning: Your brain may quickly engage with thoughts, sometimes swirling, about what is going on. Typically, emotions emerge as more raw experiences, and are often more black and white. Remember a moment when a song or a movie scene affected you. You were instantly smiling or crying. Then the feeling became more nuanced, perhaps even bitter-sweet. Feelings evolve from their initial moment and can become more complex.

• Mixed Feelings: Emotions are rarely one feeling at once—this ups the level of challenge when trying to understand your feelings. Consider the sibling whose sister made the baseball team when he didn’t. He might feel a dizzying mixture of emotions all at once: proud of his sister, envious that she gets to play, ashamed that he didn’t make the cut, angry at the coach, and embarrassed to sit in the stands.

Sorting through a crowded experience of emotions requires a feelings vocabulary and emotional facility. If your caretakers couldn’t give you those words, you aren’t failing at feeling—you just haven’t been taught the language yet.

Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist known for her work on emotional regulation, often reminds parents—and adults looking to heal—of a fundamental truth:

“To a child, an unnamed feeling feels like a dangerous ghost. When we name the feeling, we take away its power to terrify. The same is true for the child still living inside you.”

To move out of numbness, treat yourself with the same patience, perception, and compassion you would offer a child who is learning something new.

Getting Better at Knowing What You are Feeling

As a therapist, I, of course, recommend psychotherapy to help you be more in touch with your feelings. But, therapy isn’t for everybody. Here are some other options if you haven’t found therapy helpful, don’t have the time or resources, or feel therapy isn’t for you:

• A Two-Second Reset: Before doing any big emotional work, focus on slowing down and establishing safety. Put both feet flat on the floor until you feel your muscles anchor. Place one hand on your heart and one on your belly, and take just one breath where your exhale is longer than your inhale. Tell yourself: “I am safe in this room right now.” Take more similar breaths to help you slow down if one is not enough. Thank you, Dr. Becky, for this model.

• Conduct a Body Scan: Take time to slow down and conduct a body scan. You can find guided body scans on the internet. Pick one that you feel is your frequency: pacing, language, length and good closure.

• Journal to Express and Metabolize Your Thoughts: Make one entry where you write the facts of what is going on. Read your entry and then write your responses to what you just wrote. Be compassionate towards yourself as you write and respond.

• Explore Somatic Practices: Take expressive movement classes or begin a yoga practice that helps you focus on your breathing and your body. Look for gentle, slow approaches to opening your body that are specifically designed to help your nervous system safely reconnect with your physical sensations.

• Start Group Work: Find a support or therapy group designed to help you process your experience with others. Be sure the approach is open, supportive and at a comfortable pace.

____________________________

So, Dear Confused and Numb,

You have asked a brave question. To know your feelings better is a challenging journey. Please be sure you have enough support from friends and family, and that your helpers such as your yoga instructor or support group leader are compassionate and kind.

You will need to feel safe as you open up to a world of feelings that you have, for good reason, shut off until now.

The world of feelings is vast, rich, painful and joyful. I wish you well on your journey toward more fully feeling.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #40