Shutting down emotions can be a normal part of human experience, as a coping strategy in stressful situations. Under high stress, it allows your body and brain to protect itself from perceived threats or harm.
When trauma and chronic stress become overwhelming, our nervous system tends to move into a shutdown state. Counsellors often refer to it as dissociation, a common response to traumatic events.
Emotional detachment occurs when people willingly or unwillingly turn off their connection with their emotions. This may be intentional, such as a defensive mechanism on emotionally draining people, or unintentional due to an underlying condition or medication side effect.
You're trying to work through an issue, but suddenly someone shuts down and goes unresponsive. This reaction is known as stonewalling. From the outside, it can feel like that person has shut down emotionally. If you're the one shutting down, however, you may be inwardly dysregulated.
(figuratively, intransitive) To emotionally withdraw into oneself as a defense mechanism; to block out external stressors. I can't talk to him about the accident; he just shuts down anytime I try.
Being cut off from your emotions can have a devastating impact on your personal life and relationships. It affects your confidence and self-awareness, as well as how you interact and communicate with others.
Many people suffer from shutting down when they are upset. There is no one cause of this behavior. It could be a self-defense mechanism, it could be an inability to process negative feelings, and it could be due to dissociation. These are just a few reasons why someone may shut down when they are upset.
Shutdown dissociation includes partial or complete functional sensory deafferentiation, classified as negative dissociative symptoms (see Nijenhuis, 2014; Van Der Hart et al., 2004). The Shut-D focuses exclusively on symptoms according to the evolutionary-based concept of shutdown dissociative responding.
Eye contact is broken, the conversation comes to an abrupt halt, and clients can look frightened, “spacey,” or emotionally shut down. Clients often report feeling disconnected from the environment as well as their body sensations and can no longer accurately gauge the passage of time.
The Duration of a Nervous Breakdown Varies by Individual. A nervous breakdown is not a diagnosable mental health condition, and that means there are no official criteria to describe it, including duration. These mental health crises are highly variable, lasting a few hours for one person or weeks for another.
Regular physical activity can help ease depression and anxiety by releasing feel-good endorphins. Focusing on the activity will also take your mind off your worries. Even small amounts of daily activity — as little as 10 to 15 minutes at a time — can make a tremendous difference in your emotional well being.
Keep the conversation light and avoid personal questions: This will help to ease the person into opening up more. If they're not ready to talk, that's okay. Just let them know you're there for them when they are ready. People who shut down can be difficult to communicate with but it's important to try.
Silent treatment abuse is a form of emotional abuse in which a person refuses to communicate with you in order to control or influence your behaviors. Taking time to cool down after an argument is healthy, but shutting off communication for a long time, especially in order to control another person, is a form of abuse.
Usually, signs of dissociation can be as subtle as unexpected lapses in attention, momentary avoidance of eye contact with no memory, staring into space for several moments while appearing to be in a daze, or repeated episodes of short-lived spells of apparent fainting.
Findings revealed that therapists have strong emotional and behavioral responses to a patient's dissociation in session, which include anxiety, feelings of aloneness, retreat into one's own subjectivity and alternating patterns of hyperarousal and mutual dissociation.
Symptoms of Dissociation
“Blanking out” or being unable to remember anything for a period of time. Experiencing a distorted or blurred sense of reality. Feeling disconnected or detached from your emotions. Feeling like you're briefly losing touch with events going on around you, similar to daydreaming.
Dissociation usually occurs due to trauma, such as: abuse. sexual assault. a natural disaster.
In extreme moments of traumatic stress, a person might suddenly “space out.” Whereas they seemed fully present, talking, and participating, they suddenly become vacant, staring into the distance. At such times, they are likely to need help reorienting.
Zoning out is considered a form of dissociation, but it typically falls at the mild end of the spectrum.
When our sympathetic nervous system has kicked into overdrive, and we still can't escape and feel impending death the dorsal vagal parasympathetic nervous system takes control. It causes freezing or shutdown, as a form of self preservation. (Think of someone who passes out under extreme stress.)
Pushing people away is one way of avoiding intimacy. In fact, this avoidance can act as a defense mechanism for people afraid of getting hurt in relationships. This could be because a past relationship ended badly, perhaps with rejection or even bereavement.
Closed-off qualities can be down to certain character traits, like being shy. Or something may have happened to make a person more cautious, like certain experiences or even traumas. For example, when someone has experienced heartbreak they might find it harder to let another person in again.