Emotional Numbing
Challenge
Are you feeling numb?
Do you currently have an inability to express strong negative or positive emotions?
Are you experiencing a lack of interest in activities that others find enjoyable?
Do you feel distant from others or have the tendency to withdraw from friends and family?
Are your emotions only being felt in the body as sensations, but not by the mind?
Emotional numbness is a defense mechanism employed by the mind to avoid intense and overwhelming emotions such as fear, hatred, jealousy and grief. It may also be caused by extreme distress, anxiety or nervousness. When you become emotionally numb, you lose the ability to feel and experience your emotions on a psychological and emotional level. In this sense, emotional numbness is often clinically connected with dissociation, which is the disconnection from one’s memories, identity, environment, body, or senses.
Options
There is hope. There are effective, evidenced based treatments for helping you deal with emotional numbness.
There is a lot we can do to support, guide and assist you to improve your ability to cope and manage these problems. To find out more about how Northside Psychology may be able to help, get in touch with our team here.