Numbness Means You Don't Feel Safe

I don’t remember when I first noticed my numbness. It must have come on gradually, because by the time I realized I wasn’t feeling anything, it had already progressed to subsume entire parts of me.

I couldn’t make myself care about anything. It was like parts of me had gone missing, a little at a time, replaced by a detachment that felt foreign to me.

For most of us who experience numbness, the feeling is more like a non-feeling, conspicuous for what it lacks.

There is no joy in numbness. There is no excitement or hope. Just a bleak monotone of ongoing shutdown.

Numbness makes us feel shut down because it is part of the freeze stress response. Fight, flight, and freeze are the body’s survival responses to stress. Freeze is when we can’t get away, and so we shut down. When we shut down and collapse, we go numb. It’s how the body adapted to protect itself.

We just stop feeling, because of the stress. It’s too much for our system, so we turn our feeling off.

Most of us feel emotionally numb because of the chronic stress of COVID. Our nervous systems have experienced such a prolonged period of activation, without being able to escape, that we just shut down.

For going on two years now, we've had to deal with the pandemic. And I can tell you with the weight of my public health expertise that until we create global health equity, the pandemic is here to stay.

Knowing that this is ongoing, with no end in sight, adds anger and helplessness to the stress.

It's normal to feel overwhelmed at the weight of things and go numb.

Here are some of the signs. Numbness looks like not caring about your work or being of service in the world anymore. Numbness looks like neglecting your social connections and caring relationships. Numbness feels heavy in the lower belly, or like your stomach or throat is frozen. I’m sure some of this sounds familiar.

Numbness is one of the basic survival patterns of the body. When our body perceives danger that can’t be avoided, we don't think about it — we just freeze.

Our nervous system decides that the stress can't be escaped and so we literally play dead. We hold our breath or our breathing becomes shallow. We stop moving, fearing we might be pounced on at any second.

Numbness doesn't feel like nothing; numbness is a horrible feeling. We're immobilized because our body doesn't see a way out and has given up, in a state of desperate collapse.

When we think of numbness as part of a stress cycle, we experience more agency in ourselves. When we see it as the body’s survival mechanism, we can have more compassion for ourselves.

In aid work and changemaking, numbness can create cynicism and burn-out, which are big challenges for doing service-oriented work. Numbness can make us think or feel like we don’t care.

When we're numb, we're not paying attention or fully present. Our body is trapped in an ongoing stress response. Numbness and freezing happen when we don't feel safe.

For me, this is the access point.

When we look at numbness as a freeze response, we can explore why we don't feel safe. What’s going on? Why do we not feel physically safe or emotionally safe? There are many different ways that we need safety.

Maybe the numbness is because of something that happened long in the past. This is an indicator that there is unresolved trauma or stress in the body. Underlying trauma shows up as numbness.

This is especially true for sexual trauma, which I know a lot of us have experienced. Unresolved sexual trauma shows up as sexual numbness. Not knowing this can cause a lot of misunderstanding and pain in relationships.

Not feeling anything is the body's way of protecting us, when it doesn't see any other options. When we recognize numbness for what it is, a protection mechanism, we can stop trying to override it and push through.

Trying to push through numbness only makes it worse. We can't force ourselves to feel safe.

This is important for changemakers and aid workers to hear. We can’t push or force ourselves to feel safe. Either we feel safe, or we don’t.

In fact, as you may know from experience, trying to force the body will only create more numbness and shutdown. Again, this is especially true with sexual trauma.

For decades, I had so much numbness around my sexuality because of sexual trauma. Like many survivors, I thought the numbness would always be that way. I did therapy and that helped, but I still felt like it was with me in my body.

It wasn't until I started doing trauma-informed embodiment practices that things began to change. And once the numbness started moving, things improved quickly.

I could feel, during my embodiment practices, my body slowly coming home to her aliveness. Even when I experienced just moments of it, coming back to my body felt miraculous. Those short moments of aliveness propelled me to continue my trauma resolution journey.

I learned what safety meant to me and how to create safety for myself. I learned how to feel fully again.

Things shifted when I started to see the numbness as a signal, pointing me inwards. Numbness was a sign that some part of me needed care and support. I needed to take a close look at where I was overriding my own needs for safety and security. So, I did.

I saw how quick I was to dismiss my own needs because of work. I thought being an aid worker meant being tough. I thought that showing leadership meant putting myself in the middle of it all.

Danger is part of the job description of being an aid worker...or is it? After paying attention to my numbness, I wasn't so sure anymore.

I know it might sound controversial, but I believe that we can be of service without sacrificing our ability to feel deeply. I believe we can do our work in the world while caring for ourselves and meeting our own needs.

I say this while acknowledging that aid work and changemaking have a massive issue with unresolved trauma in the workplace. We need to build cultures at work where we support each other – and get professional support — for us to process our feelings. Let’s work on that.

At work, we are often rewarded for being shut down. Numbness gets normalized. The flat feeling of collapse can often be mistaken for stoic professionalism. But this doesn’t make us smarter or more adaptive.

Numbness doesn’t make us better changemakers, it limits our ability to create impact.

We need to start to listen to the numbness. It will tell us what we need to feel safe again.

I don't have a solution, only an invitation to start to inquire into the places within you where you might not feel anything. Make friends with those places and see what they need.

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If this resonated with you, I hope you’ll consider sharing it with someone who might benefit.

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I people people with somatic trauma resolution. Get in touch to learn more about my work.