There is nothing that could be worse than feeling angry or hopeless. Emotional numbness can develop from various problems and cause serious damage.

You’re not alone if you can’t cry at the funeral. You’re also not weird if you can’t laugh or smile on happy occasions. There is something else going on inside you when you feel unable to feel. This is emotional numbness, and it has many recognizable symptoms. There are reasons why you may not feel, and there are also ways to treat this problem.

He explained the meaning of emotional numbness and dissociation
First, what is emotional numbness? It is a condition that results from years of building emotional blockades toward others and denying ourselves the right to feel.

Simply put, emotional numbness is a result of dissociation. They are not one and the same, separation is a state, while emotional numbness is what is caused by this state.

When you distance yourself from an emotion, you separate yourself from the situation associated with the emotion. For example, when someone dies, if you are emotionally numb, you may not be able to cry. This does not mean that you are heartless. It simply means, well, it means many things. Let’s keep reading.

What are the symptoms of emotional numbness?

1. Feeling distant
   One sign that you may be experiencing emotional numbness is your mind disengaging from certain situations. Sometimes, you feel like you are in your body, while other times, you may feel like you are floating above it, looking down at yourself. It’s not necessarily an OBE (out of body experience), but more like watching a movie about yourself. Something is wrong if you are constantly viewing things from outside yourself.
2. Lack of participation
   You watch others do things, but you can’t seem to join in. As for your hobbies and interests, you also leave them behind. There is no desire for past hobbies or interests. When it comes to others, you either want to watch rather than join, or you simply don’t want to be around to do anything. This doesn’t matter to you.
3. Living a “flat” life.
   It’s kind of hard to explain a “flat” existence, but he lives a life full of daily movements. When you start living a flat life, you do the exact same thing from day to day, moment to moment. It’s not negative or positive, it’s just movement.

4. Inability to love or hate
   What’s worse than getting very angry at someone? It wouldn’t mean not caring one way or another about anyone or anything. When you feel emotionally numb, you cannot feel love or hate.
5. You are empty inside
   Some people become so numb, they turn into an emotional fog, a smoke that dissipates into nothing. Unfortunately, the lack of feelings becomes so deep that it eats away at the hole in your heart. But even at this level, emotional numbness can be overcome. It starts with finding the why. Which brings us to our next thoughts. What happened?

What are the causes of emotional numbness?

There is not just one thing that steals our feelings. No, there are many reasons why this happens. For this reason, it can be difficult to identify the roots and help individuals develop normal emotions. I experience emotional numbness at times, but I definitely don’t stay there. The numbness I feel usually stems from deep roots in childhood. Unfortunately, this is the numbness that I still often return to with certain triggers. It happens to a lot of us. Going into this problem, there are reasons.

1. Childhood trauma
   The most common reason people experience emotional numbness is childhood trauma. These events can be one or more of the basic violations that occur during development. For example, if you have been sexually assaulted, you may grow up and dissociate spontaneously during normal intimate situations. You can be a married woman and have a fairly healthy intimate life, yet you can still disconnect yourself from your partner emotionally at times.

Physical, verbal, mental, and certainly emotional abuse can also lead to emotional deficits such as numbness. It just depends on how you respond to treatments, or whether you have had any treatments in the past. Some people never tell anyone else about going through these things. What’s worse is that some people can’t even remember because of some kind of disconnection that developed during the period of abuse.

2. Use of materials
   Drug abuse has its own category. This is because substances such as drugs, alcohol or other things can dramatically alter the mind in a completely different way. With other types of abuse, the abuse generally comes from outside influences, but with drug abuse, after any initial outside influence, the abuse continues as self-injury.

It’s called addiction, and these addictions, usually derived from an initial starting point, can cause numbing sensations. Sometimes, as with medications, these substances can cause immediate emotional numbness due to their chemical content. The same can be said about alcohol. Think of it this way, alcohol greatly numbs the skin, often preventing you from feeling the extent of certain pains or injuries. It can do the same for your brain. As with other addictions that don’t seem to fit into any neat category, emotional numbness can come from an inability to “kick the habit.”

3. Psychological illnesses such as anxiety or depression
   The cause of this emotional numbness can come from childhood trauma, genetics, domestic violence, adult trauma, or anything else that forcibly alters the mind and emotions. You may be born with a predetermined destiny to inherit depression.

Anxiety can come from domestic violence. PTSD can come from war trauma and any other event or part of your life that triggers fear. From mental illnesses like anxiety or depression, you can experience symptoms and one of these symptoms is emotional numbness.

Take panic attacks for example. When I have these attacks, I have trouble breathing, my heart rate increases, and then I have all kinds of random abnormalities in my behavior. Sometimes, I feel numb. My skin will itch, or I won’t be able to feel anything. The worst part was that I would become emotionally numb for several hours afterward. I can’t laugh, I can’t smile, and I feel like a fragile piece of paper floating in the air.

Individuals with mental illness experience symptoms of emotional numbness, and they experience this in different ways—more ways than I can explain in an hour.

4. Medicines
   Some medications can also change the way you think and even the way you feel. In fact, one of my medications takes away the intensity of my emotions. If you take more or less, the amount of feelings lost varies. That’s logical. Some of these medications are used to treat anxiety, while others are used to treat manic states resulting from bipolar disorder.

There are also medications prescribed for physical problems, the side effects of which not only cause headaches, nausea and the like, but can also cause emotional numbness. When I take any kind of narcotic pain reliever, I seem to lose a little emotion. Yes, these medications cause a change in mental state, but they can sometimes temporarily remove the ability to feel joy or anger.

5. Loss of a loved one
   You may also experience a lack of emotion when someone close to you dies, especially when it is a mother, father, or sibling. When a companion dies, it can be even more difficult. Learning to live without someone close to you who has spent years, or even decades of their life in your company, can have a devastating impact.

It may be so terrible that you forget how to feel sad, loved, or even angry. Losing a loved one can cause many different emotions, and this includes not being able to feel any emotions at all. I’ve been through this too, on more than one occasion. I also witnessed a dying relative live in denial about his impending death. This was especially hard to watch.