A person who is emotionally numb tends to feel mentally blank, detached from others, or disconnected from their own identity, interests, and feelings. Some may mask this by pretending to have feelings different from their own, oftentimes by acting happy or joyful.
Being emotionally numb means your emotional experience is lower than expected, dampened, or completely missing. In situations where you might be expected to experience joy or sadness, you may feel empty or detached instead. This feeling isn't positive or negative; instead, it's absent of emotion.
The word anhedonia means, very simply, without pleasure. The condition can present in many ways, depending on the type of anhedonia you may have. Generally, though, when you have anhedonia, it means that you feel a sense of numbness or lack any kind of emotional feeling.
The easiest way for you to numb your emotional response is to control your surroundings. Make sure that you are not triggering extreme emotional responses in the first place. If you know that certain people, places, and activities bring out the worst in you, try to stay away from them as much as possible.
Why People Emotionally Shut Down. Trauma, prolonged stress, anxiety, depression and grief all contribute to feeling emotionally shut down.
Causes of Selective Mutism
Anxiety disorders or being too anxious because of stress. Poor home and family relationships. Early psychological problems that were not addressed properly. Low self-esteem issues.
Raymond DePaulo, Jr., M.D., co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center, describes emotional numbness and helps people to distinguish between the numbness caused by depression and that from medication side-effects. He also assures anyone experiencing it, that it WILL go away.
It can cause a disconnect in identity and perception, and people may become emotionally numb. An example might be if a person experiences a traumatic event but has no feelings about it.
The opposite of emotional numbness is hyperarousal – feeling a sense of heightened, exaggerated or intense emotions.
Distance yourself from your feelings—imagine they are being felt by someone else, and then be objective about them. Every emotion is, in essence, equal to every other. Don't try to promote one feeling over the other—they are both there for a reason. Practice pure rational thinking.
People with alexithymia can feel love when it's strong enough. They just can't describe or express it in a way that provides others with emotional validation.
One of the key signs that you're emotionally detached is that you aren't open or forthright with others regarding your emotions. You tend to keep things very private, hidden, and under wraps. Even if you're feeling sad or hurt, you never open up about this to others or let your true emotions show.
Result: The experience of trauma produces very intense emotions such as overwhelming fear, horror, and anxiety, and these reactions can linger for a lifetime. Many trauma survivors also report restrictions in their emotional experience - a phenomenon most commonly referred to as emotional numbing.
Emotions: The Hidden Symptoms
Not everyone with ADHD experiences extreme emotions. People with ADHD hide their emotional problems because they are embarrassed or ashamed of the way they feel. Emotions are impossible to measure, so researchers ignore them.
Detachment can often result from emotional dysregulation, an overlooked symptom of ADHD, which is the impaired ability to control your emotional responses.
Differences in emotions in people with ADHD can lead to 'shutdowns', where someone is so overwhelmed with emotions that they space out, may find it hard to speak or move and may struggle to articulate what they are feeling until they can process their emotions.
When you lose the ability to feel or express any emotions, this is called flat affect. If you feel numb only to positive emotions but are still able to feel negative emotions, this is called anhedonia. Anhedonia is a common symptom of depression and shows up in a lot of mental health conditions.
What is emotional blunting? “Emotional blunting” is a term used to describe having a limited or muted emotional response to events. This could be different from the reaction that you'd typically expect. With this symptom, you may also have difficulty accessing the full range of emotions that you're used to.
Not wanting to fall in love can sometimes signify a problem with esteem, attachment, anxiety, or another issue. You might feel anxious about becoming attached to someone and potentially losing them. Or you might have low self-esteem and struggle with feeling that you are unloveable.
It affects your confidence and self-awareness, as well as how you interact and communicate with others. You may feel numb or disembodied at times - unable to connect to your bodily sensations, express your emotions or maintain feelings of intimacy.
For some people, shutting down emotionally is a response to feeling overstimulated. It doesn't have anything to do with you or how they feel about you. If your husband or partner shuts down when you cry, for example, it may be because they don't know the best way to handle that display of emotions.
Fear and Anxiety: Yelling can create a sense of fear and anxiety, causing individuals to shut down as a way to protect themselves. Past Trauma: Individuals who have experienced past trauma, such as abuse or neglect, may be more prone to shutting down when yelled at.
Stonewalling, one of the Four Horsemen, is Dr. John Gottman's term for one or both partners shutting down when feeling overwhelmed during conflict. Rather than confronting the issue, someone who is stonewalling will be unresponsive, making evasive maneuvers such as tuning out, turning away, or acting busy.
When a Trauma response is triggered, the more primitive part of the nervous system dominates. This is geared towards shutting down, protection and survival. Because it is a passive defensive response we may feel helpless or hopeless.