The Link Between Trauma and Emotional Numbness
Some people walk into therapy not in distress, but in absence. They’re not in crisis, not crying uncontrollably or filled with dread. They may not feel overwhelmed by circumstances, but they don’t feel quite alive, either. They might describe themselves as fine, even functional, but disengaged and unable to feel much of anything. Joy feels distant. Sadness doesn’t register. Moments that should carry emotional significance fall flat.
People may refer to this experience as “emotional numbness.” The term itself is problematic, as it suggests a deficit, a failure to feel, as though affect simply failed to develop or has gone missing. Or the experience can be dismissed as “just who we are,” as if our personality was not shaped by our mind’s attempts to navigate and resolve the challenges we faced through our life.
In psychoanalytic therapy we don’t assume this numbness to be a failure, but wonder about the role and function it might play in how we relate to ourselves and to the world. Emotional shutdown, especially when it is embedded as part of who we are, is not a random glitch or merely a reaction of our nervous system. It is usually a process that develops quietly through our life to defend ourselves from internal anxieties and conflicts, or protect ourselves from unbearable pain or fear.
Rather than being a failure, emotional detachment is often a highly organized psychological solution. It arises not from passivity, but from the active, unconscious operations of the mind, as we attempt to maintain coherence and cohesiveness in the face of the unbearable, unthinkable, and unsayable.
Emotional Numbing as Defense
Emotional numbing is not just a byproduct of trauma but one of its primary sequelae. When the capacity to contain and metabolize affect is compromised or overwhelmed, the psyche protects itself through disconnection. This disconnection is not simply from other people or the outside world, but from our own internal states.
Emotional numbness becomes a form of defense not against reality itself, but against the psychic consequences of fully registering it. A child who grows up in a world where their feelings evoke no response or provoke rejection or violence, might come to associate emotion with futility, hopelessness, or danger. Feeling becomes something to manage, suppress, or avoid, leading to a kind of psychic insulation. The walls we build to feel safe, I often note to my patients, might disconnect us not only from others, but from parts of ourselves.
This process may begin early in life, particularly in cases of complex trauma, where overwhelming experiences are chronic and relational in nature. When a child’s emotional expressions are met with neglect, intrusion, or volatility, they may internalize a basic incompatibility between feeling and safety. Over time, feeling itself becomes fraught, associated not with aliveness, but with dysregulation, exposure, or rejection.
The mind, in turn, adapts. Not by removing affect entirely, but by dissociating from it, repressing it, or neutralizing with a wide range of defensive maneuvers: repression, splitting, disavowal, denial, projection, among others. These are not chosen consciously, but neither are they random. They represent our mind’s attempt to resolve a profound conflict: the wish for emotional connection and aliveness on one hand, and the need for psychic survival on the other.
As we become adults, we might continue or even deepen our reliance on these defenses. They become part of our personality and our character, impacting the relationship with our emotions and with others. The mind is not merely a passive container for trauma; it’s an active, creative participant in its own organization. That includes the organization of feeling and of not-feeling.
The Role of our Internal World
Emotional numbness can reflect a compromised internal world, one populated by early “objects” (the mental representations of our caregivers and other people in our life) who were unreliable, frightening, or emotionally unavailable. If one’s primary caregivers could not tolerate affect, then the developing child may internalize an organizing principle: feeling is dangerous.
This internal object world shapes the ways in which our emotions are handled. Through process of identification and internalization, we may come to treat our own emotional states with the same dismissal, contempt, or withdrawal they experienced from others. What begins as an external relational dynamic becomes an internal structure. In this way, emotional numbness is not only a defense against pain but also a relational position.
This position includes how we relate to our feelings, needs, and desires. An insidious consequence of chronic numbness and emotional disconnection is the erosion of self-recognition. The absence of feeling can result in a profound sense of dislocation, emptiness, or fogginess that persists regardless of our circumstances. Sometimes, the problem is not that emotions are muted or scarce. In fact, numbness can be the result of too much emotion that cannot be contained within our thoughts and feelings.
In these cases, the aim of trauma therapy from a psychoanalytic perspective involves the development or restoration of the patient’s ability to know, represent, and contain their internal experience.
How Trauma Therapy Can Help: Reintroducing Contact
Working with emotional numbness in trauma therapy is delicate work. The symptoms that may bring someone to therapy —emptiness, disconnection, a lack of feeling— are the same defenses that were put in place to keep overwhelming experience at bay. The task is not to challenge these defenses prematurely, but to understand their origins and respect their necessity.
Psychoanalytic therapy provides a space in which these protections can be gradually examined in the context of a reliable, attuned relationship. The therapist’s task is not to provoke feeling, but to remain receptive to its absence, to allow numbness itself to speak. Over time, our muted longings, sadness, anger, or disappointment might start taking shape. As we listen, people might feel puzzled, frustrated, or even ashamed. While uncomfortable, those experience can be the beginning of psychic contact.
What is recovered is not only the content of affect, but the capacity to feel. This is a developmental achievement that takes time, not a sudden breakthrough or a process that can be shortcut from the outside. It involves the restoration of a psychic container strong enough to hold what was once too much to bear. The point may not be to feel more intensely, but to expand the range of what we can tolerate, understand, and use.
The process can be disorienting. Listening to our own experience involves reconnecting with wishes, conflicts, or desires that we kept hidden from ourselves. Emotion is not just something we experience, but something that organizes our sense of self. As a result, through this process we may question who we are, perhaps for the first time, a necessary step to think about who we can become.
Numbness is not failure. It is a structure with history, purpose, and consequence. It is a clue that something has been held in suspension, waiting for the conditions under which it can re-emerge. Therapy helps create those conditions, not by delivering feelings to the person or by merely imparting a new vocabulary, but by helping people reestablish a relationship with the parts of themselves they had to leave behind.
If you are interested in starting trauma therapy with one of our Chicago therapists, please feel free to drop us a line.
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Photo credit: Nate Neelson