What to do when emotional hurt turns to numbness. 

Why are you feeling nothing? Because, deep down, you’re trying not to. 

A brain scientist has found that people feel even the most intense emotion for only up to 90 seconds.* Easy, right? And then it passes. Emotions are a chemical process that only lasts up to a minute and a half. After that, it’s your thoughts and beliefs that keep you in the loop of an  emotional state. There can be several waves of it, but until you allow yourself to feel it, an emotion will linger and stay with you. 

So why don’t you just allow yourself to feel your pain and let it go? Because it’s really painful. You get scared of the painful memory itself, you remember the intensity of it, and you don’t want to re-experience that. Paradoxically, though, when you try to avoid it at all costs, it actually keeps you back. You cannot fully let it go until it’s expressed. 

It can feel as if the hurt comes out of nowhere, and when it does, it might feel like it’s blown out of proportion. The good news is, when you experience that, you’ll know that’s the hurt that needs to be felt. 

 

Feeling empty stems from pain avoidance

I call this emptiness “the void,” meaning that empty feeling, that heaviness, that general feeling of not wanting to exist. You’re in a state where feeling nothing can be worse than feeling the pain. You may feel that something is wrong with you, fundamentally, like you’re ruptured. You may even feel ill-equipped to be a human being, as if you don’t deserve a spot in this world. The void is all of that, and the hurt of not belonging. 

 

Pain avoidance is a big part of our biological makeup. Humans have evolved to seek comfort and avoid pain at all costs. Sometimes, when you start to feel even a little pain, the presence of pain makes you not want to feel anything at all. Therein lies the challenge.

It can take a long time to understand the connection–the reason for your pain. Sometimes, it’s unrecognizable. But more often than not, it has to do with your body’s memories of pain–all the pain you’ve carried since your body was formed, from those first experiences when you were a child, a teen, or living with traumatic unprocessed events. The hurt is often associated with something specific that happened, that cut deep. You may often cover it with protectors and try not to feel it — it’s natural to want to numb them out in some way. Until you can no longer go on numbing.

The problem is that even though you suppress it well at times, it is still there. It’s kind of like sweeping it under the rug — the memory may not be seen, but it’s definitely still there. And it actually gets worse, because it grows. Fear begins to build up alongside it. 

You may think the worst thing is to feel pain, yet in trying not to feel it, you still feel the pain and it’s stuck. 

Recognizing what it’s like to live in the void 

Often, people who’re living in emptiness — in the void — are functioning as islands unto themselves. They may have what we call an “avoidant” personality. They may be experiencing an ongoing issue with a parent or a friend, or it could be through anything. 

Questions I often hear from people experiencing this emptiness include: 

• “Why am I not excited about anything?”  
• “Why am I not finding a relationship?” or 
• “Why am I not feeling attracted to people?”

In fact, it’s not that they don’t have these feelings, but that they may have to somatically dig to find that it comes up in the course of therapy. Once they feel safe, the more they can start to trust, and then start to feel again. 

 

Where the void begins: A lack of attachment

When you experience the void, this certain kind of emotional pain that’s existential in nature, you certainly don’t understand where it comes from or why it is there at all. In essence, it’s what therapists recognize as often stemming from a lack of attachment figures or adequate support growing up. 

You have a lot of pathways created in the brain, so you’ve learned to stay away from these moments. Even when it is not rational to believe that you are helpless and incapable of dealing with an emotion today, perhaps you’re reminded of a time earlier in life when you didn’t have the ability to deal with a feeling. You might want to shove that memory somewhere, stuff it down, or ignore it. 

It’s kind of that thing that you remember as a really, really big thing — it hasn’t translated that you’re an adult now. When you’re hurt, you may act like your inner five or eight year old sometimes… because you are stuck in that experience. 

 

When feeling triggered or threatened emerges 

For example, you might think of a mom who butts heads with her daughter all the time. While she’s an adult, she’s reacting as a child would, in response to her daughter’s behavior. Then her husband essentially has to serve as a go-between to take care of two young girls. 

Why would you need to be defensive toward a kid? Why feel threatened? Because you are activated. 

If this mom went through intense abuse as a child, and she has not processed it, then she’s stuck with that memory — a super painful feeling of being abused. Even though she’s an adult and technically in control, she’s feeling victimized while letting her daughter run the show. 

You can see from the side, it’s absurd to fight over authority. Clearly, the mom’s the adult.  Yet the more she’s fighting with her daughter, the more she’s losing it, activating hurt and pain.

The story is that she’s helpless to it, to that feeling. She says nothing’s wrong, but when a big wave of emotional pain hits, she’s feeling deep in it. 

 

Filling in the void: The importance of processing emotional pain  

Unfortunately, with many people, there’s a certain subconscious resistance that keeps them seeking numbness. Sometimes you might not want to accept that you need to look at your past hurts. You don’t want to dig to the source because it’s super painful, to be in a time you didn’t have the tools or support you needed. 

As a therapist, I like working with people that are curious and want to touch on these emotions, but I understand that it’s super scary. However, it’s most scary to deal with these feelings alone — when someone isn’t there to help you process it. 

What happens in therapy is that you develop a relationship with the original hurts. The idea is to create a relationship and detect and identify the inner child who is experiencing the pain or the part of you that is experiencing the pain. 

Adulting that part is a concept out of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. That’s what I’ve found in mature adulthood; that I must find an aspect of myself that can handle my “inner children” or parts that have been hurt in the past.  You can learn how to mature and how to work with it. This can help you show up more fully to life itself. 

It is said that you don’t change your issues but you can change the way you feel about them. The acceptance changes everything. It’s ironic that acceptance is what brings change, but it does, once you finally give up the resistance that is keeping you numb. 

 

Conclusion

You may have found some relief as you’ve read this article, in starting to connect the dots and understand the reason for the void or emptiness you feel. There’s something nice about knowing the reasons for feeling emptiness.

However, it’s tricky, because in order to fully heal, you have to go through the process of figuring it out for your specific circumstances.  Ultimately, it goes back to your unique life experiences, encounters with trauma, and early attachment experiences (or lack of such experiences). 

I have often worked with this situation as I’m working with and relating to clients. When they do the work with me, they see and feel what’s happening — with support and skills to really feel the pain at last, then encounter the healing around it. It helps to process these deep hurts in the presence of someone else, and especially a trained therapist. After the initial challenges of allowing an emotion to be fully embodied are overcome, they feel a huge amount of relief.   

If you’re feeling sad and empty, and wondering what’s wrong with you, the answer is that absolutely nothing is wrong with you. Yet there are clear ways to deal with this predicament and begin to feel better. 

 

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If you feel that you’ve been living in “the void,” please reach out for help. Contact me at counseling@mayagoan.com or 716-934-8835 to set up a consultation. 

 

 

 

* See Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s Ted Talk at  https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight?language=en