I Didn’t Know I Was Numb Until I Began to Feel
There is a strange thing about numbness. You don't necessarily know you're numb.
I certainly didn't.
I was functioning. Living my life. Getting things done. Showing up. Laughing, creating, mothering, working, moving through the world. From the outside, I don't imagine many people would have looked at me and thought, Marie is disconnected from herself. And the truth is, I wouldn't have thought that either.
What I can recognise now is that somewhere underneath all that functioning there was a kind of void. A disconnection. Parts of me were alive and expressive, absolutely, and other parts were simply not available to my awareness. But I didn't know that then.
I didn't have the language for it. I didn't walk around thinking, I'm numb. It was only when I began to feel more that I realised how much I hadn't been feeling and that distinction matters.
Perhaps this is one of the stranger things about being human: we can only recognise some internal states once we have experienced something different.
We can live inside patterns of contraction, disconnection or shutdown for so long that they don't register as patterns at all. They simply feel like who we are. We adapt. We compensate. We become extraordinarily capable. We build lives, raise families, create, work, love, travel, achieve and contribute; all while parts of our inner world may remain beyond our conscious awareness.
Not because there is something inherently wrong with us, but because this human organism is constantly responding, learning and adapting to what it experiences. Until we begin developing a relationship with that organism from the inside, we may have no reference point for recognising what it has learned to filter and what has become automated.
You can function beautifully and still be disconnected from yourself
We tend to imagine disconnection as something obvious. Perhaps someone withdraws from life. They can't function. They lose interest in everything. They know something is wrong. But disconnection can be far more sophisticated than that.
We can be capable, productive, social, creative and outwardly successful while having very little relationship with what is actually moving inside us.
We can become extraordinarily good at reading a room while barely being able to read ourselves.
We can know what everyone else needs and have no idea what we need.
We can smile when something hurts.
Move quickly to the positive.
Explain our feelings rather than actually feel them.
We can have a beautifully articulated story about what happened without necessarily being in relationship with what happened inside the body and because this way of operating may have been with us for years, perhaps decades or a lifetime, it doesn't necessarily feel like disconnection.
It simply feels like me.
The strange thing is, I didn't know
A great deal of my own work happened behind closed doors. I can look back now and recognise that shame was woven through much of it. But I want to be really clear about this: I had no fucking idea it was shame. I wasn't walking around thinking, I'm ashamed of what happened to me. I’m ashamed of my mistakes. I'm ashamed of this part of myself. My body is shutting down because I don't feel safe.
Nothing was that neat. I only have those words now because I know the difference. At the time, it was simply the way my body operated. When I moved beyond what was familiar; socially, independently, intimately, in relationships, in being seen, something would happen in my body. What I can now recognise as a nervous-system response would begin. I would contract. Shut down. Disconnect. Have a smile on my face and walk away. But here's the important part:
I didn't know I was shutting down.
How would I? If you have lived inside a particular internal state for long enough, there isn't necessarily another state available against which to measure it. It was normal. The mind could keep going. I could talk. Smile. Work. Socialise. Achieve. Have relationships. Raise children. Travel. Create things. Be adventurous, even. And underneath all of that, my body could have its own thresholds around how much exposure, intimacy, uncertainty, feeling or visibility it could meet before something began to close.
I didn't call that shame. I didn't call it a nervous-system response. I didn't call it numbness. I didn't call it disconnection. I called it nothing, because I didn't know it was happening. And perhaps many of us do.
We give names to the things we can perceive but what about the things happening beneath our current level of perception? We may call ourselves shy, independent, strong, overly sensitive, easygoing, driven, private, a people-pleaser, an introvert, someone who “just doesn't do emotions” - without ever becoming curious about what is actually happening in the body beneath those identities.
This is where the inquiry becomes much bigger than emotional numbness.
What if some of what we believe to be our personality is also adaptation?
What happens when we begin to notice the body beneath the biography?
The contraction before the thought.
The holding of breath before the explanation.
The subtle disappearance of sensation.
The impulse to please, retreat, perform, control, fix or leave before we've consciously registered what we're responding to.
We don't need to immediately label any of it. Perhaps the beginning is simply becoming interested enough to notice.
I thought I knew what feeling was
For years, I could talk about emotions. I could understand things intellectually. I could analyse myself, explain myself, work on myself. But understanding a feeling and feeling a feeling are not necessarily the same experience. Feeling happens here. In this living organism. A tightening in the throat. Heat moving through the chest. A trembling belly. Pressure behind the eyes. Energy moving through the legs. A contraction. An expansion. A sensation that doesn't yet have a name.
Before sadness.
Before anger.
Before fear.
Before the mind has built the magnificent novel explaining why we feel what we feel, there is movement.
Sensation. Energy. Life happening inside the body.
Learning to remain present with that movement changed my relationship with myself. Because slowly, what had been numb began to have texture, and once I experienced greater connection, I could recognise disconnection. Once I experienced greater feeling, I could recognise numbness. Once I experienced what it was like for my body to remain present rather than disappear beneath me, I could recognise the shutdown and only much later could I look back at some of those old contractions and say: Ah. There was shame there.
Not because somebody gave me the label and I fitted myself into it. Because eventually, I knew the difference from the inside.
What if the void isn't empty?
This is something I wish I'd understood earlier. What feels like emptiness isn't necessarily empty. What feels lacklustre or uninspired may have something moving beneath it that we simply haven't learned to perceive yet. Sometimes we simply haven't yet developed the sensitivity, capacity or attention to perceive what is there.
We spend enormous amounts of time learning how to navigate the world around us, yet most of us receive remarkably little education about navigating the world that runs through us.
We learn how to achieve. Communicate. Behave. Succeed. Fit in. Perform. Build relationships. Build careers. Look as though we've got it together. But who teaches us how to sit inside our own body when something uncomfortable begins moving? Who teaches us how to distinguish sensation from the story we immediately attach to it? Who teaches us to recognise when we're overriding ourselves? Who teaches us how to stay? I suppose this is part of the vision that sits underneath so much of the work I share in the world.
What might become possible if we understood ourselves as intimately as we learn to understand the external world? Not just our thoughts, personalities and stories, but the whole living organism through which we experience being human; body, mind, emotion, energy, spirit and awareness.
Imagine if we learned to recognise contraction and expansion. To feel when we're overriding ourselves. To notice when our breath changes, when our body disappears from awareness, when sensation becomes too much or too little. Imagine learning to stay curious about an emotion before immediately constructing a story around it. Not so that we can endlessly analyse ourselves. Quite the opposite.
So that we can become increasingly available for life.
Because as we develop the capacity to perceive ourselves more clearly, choice begins to appear where once there was simply an unconscious response. And for me, and the humans I work with, this is where self-understanding begins to become self-governance and self-expression.
We are no longer simply being driven by patterns we cannot see. We are developing a relationship with the extraordinary organism through which our life is being lived.
Numbness doesn't always look numb
Maybe you're reading this and thinking, I'm not numb. I feel plenty. Perhaps you do. I'm not interested in convincing anyone that they're secretly disconnected.
But there is another question worth sitting with:
How much of yourself can you actually feel? Not explain. Not analyse. Not improve. Not spiritually transcend.
Feel.
Can you feel what happens in your body when somebody disapproves of you?
Can you notice the moment you contract before your mind explains why?
Can you recognise when you're saying yes while something inside you is saying no?
Can you stay present with sadness without immediately trying to turn it into positivity?
Can you experience sensation before deciding what it means?
Can you feel pleasure without needing to earn it?
Can you be with yourself when nobody else is there?
Can you receive the full body release or sensation in ecstatic presence?
These aren't tests. They're doorways. Because one of the extraordinary things that ripples through the experience is that, as my capacity to feel expanded, so did my capacity for life. And it wasn't only the uncomfortable feelings that had been muted. There was more joy available too. Intimacy became textural. More pleasure. More discernment. More creativity. More truth. More life running through the vessel of subjective experience and perhaps this is why I no longer see coming home to ourselves as an abstract spiritual idea.
It is deeply embodied. We come home through the organism; through sensation, breath, movement, attention, awareness and our willingness to meet what is actually here. For me, coming home isn’t a single revelation. It is a gradual restoration of relationship. Feeling an experience fully and not immediately running or intellectually framing it. Breathing in a compliment or criticism without deflecting or denying. Moving the body through irritation or elevation and allowing the senses. Listening to other or self without judging its experience. Becoming curious about sensation, the good the bad and the ugly and learning to stay present when the old impulse was to leave a scene, a relationship, a conversation.
Sometimes we discover that what we thought was a void was not an absence of life at all.
It is life waiting for us to become available enough to lean into it wholly.
Why do I feel numb?
There isn’t one reason a person may experience emotional numbness or disconnection. Sometimes it can accompany prolonged stress, difficult life experiences, trauma, depression, nervous-system responses or other physical and psychological factors. In my own experience, I didn’t recognise numbness while I was living inside it. It was through developing greater awareness of sensation, breath, movement and my own internal responses that I began to recognise the difference between connection and disconnection.