You Feel Everything and Nothing at the Same Time
Someone who loves you is sitting next to you. They put their hand on yours. You feel the weight of it. You don't feel the warmth. You're in the room, technically. But there's a layer of glass between you and everything.
You've felt this for so long that you've started to wonder if it's just who you are.
It isn't who you are. It's what your brain learned to do to keep you alive. And the fact that you're still doing it means no one ever taught your nervous system it could stop.
The Brain's Most Efficient Survival Mechanism
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's most cited researchers on trauma, found that dissociation exists on a spectrum. At one end: temporary. Your mind steps back when a moment becomes too much. You go a little distant, get through the conversation, come back online afterward. This is adaptive. It's your system managing a load that briefly exceeds capacity.
At the other end: chronic. Your nervous system doesn't step back and return. It goes offline and stays there. The signal that was too painful to receive gets permanently suppressed, and the suppression becomes the default state. Van der Kolk's research, published in The Body Keeps the Score and confirmed across decades of clinical work, found that the chronic version doesn't protect you. It traps you.
The distinction matters because the two states feel similar from the inside. In both cases, you're managing something too big to process fully. But in temporary dissociation, you come back. In chronic numbing, you don't come all the way back. You get close enough to function — you go to work, hold conversations, make plans — but the felt sense of being present, of being in your life rather than watching it, stays out of reach.
Why the Brain Cannot Selectively Numb
Here's the mechanism that makes chronic numbing particularly insidious: the brain cannot turn down the volume on one signal without turning it down on everything.
When pain, fear, or overwhelm persists beyond what the nervous system can manage consciously, the parasympathetic shutdown response activates. Heart rate drops. Breathing shallows. Awareness narrows. The body's alarm system quiets. The relief is immediate.
But the system that quieted the pain is the same system that processes warmth, connection, pleasure, and meaning. You can't selectively mute distress and leave the rest intact. Van der Kolk wrote that traumatized people become "experts at ignoring their gut feelings" — and the expertise spreads. It applies to everything.
This is why people who have numbed to protect themselves will sometimes describe being unable to feel anything about things they know they should feel something about. Good news lands flat. A moment that should feel warm feels muted. You watch other people respond emotionally to things and register it intellectually — that should move me — without being moved.
That isn't damage. That's efficiency. Your system learned to suppress input at the source, and it's very good at it now.
What Goes Dark With the Pain
Dissociation in its sharper forms — depersonalization, derealization, the sense of watching yourself from outside — is the dramatic version of this. But chronic numbing is more common and, in some ways, harder to address because it doesn't feel like a symptom. It feels like personality.
What gets blocked alongside pain: the felt sense of connection. The ability to receive affection without a processing delay. The capacity for spontaneous pleasure — not the kind you can decide to have, but the kind that arrives on its own when you're present enough to let it. The experience of being moved.
Somatic approaches to trauma are built on the recognition that these losses are neurological, not motivational. You don't feel warmth when someone touches you not because you don't want to feel it but because the signal is being intercepted before it reaches consciousness. The fix is not deciding to feel more. The fix is teaching the nervous system that some signals are safe to receive.
The Turn That Doesn't Happen in Your Head
The reason numbing persists even after people "understand" their trauma is that understanding lives in the cortex and the problem lives in the brainstem. You can have complete intellectual clarity about what happened, why it happened, how your nervous system responded, and what it cost you — and still feel nothing in the moment that calls for feeling.
This is why van der Kolk argued, and the clinical evidence supports, that healing from chronic numbing is somatic before it is cognitive. The body has to be taught that sensation is safe. This doesn't happen through insight. It happens through repeated, titrated experiences of sensation that don't lead to the overwhelm the system is protecting against.
One entry point: locate the feeling in the body before you try to talk about it. Where does the feeling live? The chest? The throat? The stomach? Put your hand there. Notice the sensation — tight, hollow, heavy, warm. You don't have to do anything with it. Just make contact.
This sounds small. It is small. That's exactly why it works. It's small enough that the system doesn't trigger a shutdown. And over time, repeated small contacts teach the nervous system that it can receive something without being flooded.
Going numb wasn't weakness. It was the best solution available. The path back isn't forcing yourself to feel — it's making feeling safe, one small moment at a time.
Photo by ICXOD via Pexels.
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