What We Get Wrong About Numbness
The numbness set in during the worst of my trauma. My body refused the simple pleasures I used to enjoy — the warmth of sunshine on my skin or the gentle ache of tired muscles after a workout. Nothing got through the heavy shield my nervous system built to protect me from feeling all the pain.
I should have been worried, but the numbness spread to my emotions too, slowly paralyzing my optimism and draining the color from life. I was an observer watching life pass me by while I watched helplessly from a distant outpost.
I believed the numbness meant I had lost my capacity to feel. "Maybe forever…" I told myself, sinking even deeper into the dullness of despair.
When numbness takes over, it’s normal to think our ability to feel is gone for good.
But this is a mistake.
Numbness isn't the absence of feeling. It sets in because we don't feel safe, for long enough that we can't sustain the high levels of stress and overwhelm. After a while, our nervous systems shut down.
Numbness is a protective mechanism to keep us from experiencing ongoing pain.
It’s an adaptative response to chronic stress or trauma. Our nervous systems need a way to turn down the distress, so we can function. With numbness, we’re still stuck in survival mode, but the numbness takes less energy to sustain than the overwhelm. From the body’s perspective, numbness is strategic.
Numbness covers over unprocessed pain by limiting our ability to feel. But when we don’t feel the pain, we also restrict the good feelings.
Numbness is an indiscriminate tool, but an effective one.
Numbness disconnects us from our senses so we're not taking in what's happening around us. Because our sensing systems are dulled, our decision-making abilities become distorted and we're less powerful. Numbness keeps us from achieving our goals and desires because we can't feel the pull of our aliveness pointing us towards what matters. And numbness distances us from the people who matter most, because our surface area for connecting in relationships gets smaller and smaller when our bodies don’t allow us to feel.
Why to be Careful with Numbness in Trauma Healing (PTSD & CPTSD)
I was determined to heal my trauma and talk therapy wasn’t helping. So, I dedicated myself to a daily embodiment practice, exploring traditional tantric and Daoist meditations and somatic trauma resolution tools.
It took weeks of experimenting, but my sensations started to return. One day, breathing in the center of my chest, I felt a flutter across one shoulder to the other. And instead of pushing myself to feel more, I paused.
I continued my embodiment practices daily, consciously fighting the urgency I felt to get through the numbness quickly. The thaw had begun, and I knew I needed to take it slow. Feeling too much, too soon, threatened to overwhelm my nervous system again and pull me right back into the black hole of nothingness.
I wanted so badly to lean into intensity. I knew that trying to push or hurry my process would only make the numbness stronger.
Instead, I found every way I could to support my nervous system in a gentle, ongoing process. Like they say at NASA, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
So, I slowed down my fitness routine. I traded social media for short walks outside. I even went to bed earlier.
It was hard but necessary, because underneath the numbness was the unfelt pain that my body couldn’t fully process before. Slowly but surely, it was able to surface.
That's all trauma is: stuck physical and emotional energy that the tissues in our body hold onto because it's too much to process at the time. We create a protective barrier around the stuck energy (biochemical energy from the nervous system, not woo-woo “energy”) until the body feels safe to heal.
That’s why underneath the numbness is a backlog of past experiences that need to be digested. They don't need to be remembered cognitively or understood for the lessons they taught us. Mental processes don't heal trauma because trauma is held in the body’s tissues. Only working with the body — slowly, safely, and purposefully — allows the stuck physical and emotional energy to process and resolve.
When the protective barrier of numbness starts to thaw, we need to slow down and pace ourselves, because shifting numbness lowers our shields. We need to navigate what’s there slowly and safely, so we don’t retraumatize ourselves.
It’s easy to try to chase a quick resolution, as if the burden of unresolved trauma that our bodies have been dutifully carrying for so long is a problem to be solved as soon as possible.
When I’m working with clients on trauma healing, I explain what numbness is, so they understand why we need to go slowly. Our tendency to push is deeply engrained. Culture teaches us to override our physical needs in service of our goals, but our bodies pay the price.
Working with numbness allows us to rewrite that story.
Even if we don't have unresolved trauma, it's likely that chronic stress has created some level of numbness that impacts our ability to achieve our goals, express ourselves in the world, and deepen our relationships.
Here are some ways to work with it safely so that instead of pushing and overriding our bodies' natural defenses, we can work with numbness and make our nervous systems into our allies.
How to Slowly (and Safely) Move Out of Numbness
1. Recognize that there's a good reason the numbness is there.
Numbness is an adaptive survival response to ongoing overwhelming experiences. It’s your body’s best effort to keep going, through unbearable challenges. I invite you to meet it with respect and understanding. Don't push it away, shame it, or make it wrong. We want to befriend it, not go to war.
2. Explore embodiment practices that connect you to your body.
Many of us have meditation or self-reflection practices, but I find that it’s rare for people to know how to connect with their bodies in the same focused, intentional way. Embodiment practices strengthen the body-mind connection and expand our capacity for feeling. They have a myriad of benefits and are one of the surest pathways to trauma healing that I’ve experienced. Reach out to me if you’re curious about how to create an embodiment practice. I’m thinking of doing a free workshop and I will, if there’s interest.
3. Go slowly and titrate your experience, so you can feel when your numbness starts to shift.
When working to bring feeling back to your body, I encourage you to take small steps and go a little at a time. Titration means taking small bites of an experience so you can digest and settle, before doing more. There is deep wisdom in this way of navigating, because the slowness gives us space to notice subtle yet significant changes.
4. Pause after a shift, to support your nervous system.
After any achievement, it’s normal to want to push on and achieve more. Instead, when you feel any amount of numbness begin to thaw, I invite you to give your body time to rest. Pausing communicates safety to your nervous system and gives you time to notice and explore the new experiences without immediately layering in more.
5. Celebrate your strengthening body-mind connection.
Celebrations, even small ones, release dopamine which is a neurotransmitter responsible for neuroplasticity. When we celebrate, we give our brains and nervous systems extra support to grow and change. Plus, we rarely give ourselves enough credit for our learning and our healing journey. Celebrations are one of my favorite tools to create internal safety, as we notice and take joy in our achievements.
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If we mistake numbness for the absence of feeling, we push against it, try to feel more, and risk overwhelming and even retraumatizing ourselves.
But when we listen to what numbness is trying to tell us, about the burdens of stress and trauma we carry, we can support ourselves to heal.
The good news is that, when we make it safe for the body to feel what it's been trying to avoid, we welcome back the good feelings too. We turn back up the volume and the contrast on life, in all its wildness and splendor.
Right under the numbness is the pain that’s been waiting for us to be brave and ready enough to heal. And underneath the pain is the aliveness and joy we’ve been longing for all this time.
I want that for all of us.
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