Nobody sits you down and tells you that you have gone numb. There is no moment where it happens. You just notice, on an ordinary Tuesday, that you got through the whole day without ever really being in it.
You did the things. You replied to the messages. You said you were fine and you half meant it. And if someone asked what you actually felt at any point between waking up and going to bed, you would not be able to answer.
Then you carry on, because everyone around you seems to be living the same way.
We stopped calling it a problem
Numbness has picked up a lot of friendly names. Tired. Busy. Fine. Having a bit of a weird one. Just a lot going on at the moment.
And we have built whole rituals around not feeling much. The bottle of wine on a Friday. The four hours of scrolling that pass like ten minutes. The calendar kept so full that nothing has a chance to catch up with you. None of it looks like a crisis, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to spot. A crisis announces itself. Numbness just quietly becomes the temperature of your life.
I lived that way for years. From the outside there was nothing to point at. Inside I was running from myself, and I got very good at it.
What being numb actually feels like
It rarely arrives as sadness. Sadness has texture to it, something you can put your hands on. Numb is flatter than that, and much easier to explain away.
It can look like:
- watching your own life from somewhere slightly behind your eyes
- something good happening and noticing you should feel more about it than you do
- crying at an advert and feeling almost nothing about the thing that is actually hurting
- being asked what you want and having no real idea
- knowing you are not okay and not being able to say what is wrong
- reaching for your phone before you have even registered the feeling that made you reach
If you read that and felt a flicker of recognition, that flicker matters. Something in you is still awake in there, still keeping watch.
Your body did this on purpose
This is the part I wish someone had told me sooner.
At some point, feeling everything was too much. Maybe it was grief. Maybe heartbreak, or years in a relationship that slowly asked you to be smaller. Maybe nothing you could name, just a long stretch of holding it together for everybody else. So your nervous system turned the volume down, because turning it down was the only option available at the time. It kept you upright. It worked.
The trouble is that the body does not have a separate dial for each feeling. Turn down the unbearable ones and joy goes quiet too. Wanting goes quiet. Excitement, desire, the sense of what is actually yours, all of it gets muffled at the same time.
Numbness is a kind of intelligence. It has just outlived the moment it was built for.
Why understanding it does not shift it
You can know all of this. You can be the most self aware woman in the room, able to trace exactly where it started and what it is protecting, and still feel nothing at all.
That was me for a long time. I questioned everything, read everything, sat through models of therapy that never quite reached the part of me that actually hurt. Insight lives in the thinking mind. Numbness lives lower down, in the body, in the breath, in a nervous system that has not yet been given a reason to believe it is safe to feel again.
Which is why the way back is a body thing.
Where the way back begins
Breathwork was the door for me, and it is why I do this work now.
If Breathwork is new to you.. when you breathe fully and continuously in this particular way, the level of carbon dioxide in your blood gently lowers. As that shifts, your body moves out of its everyday mode and into a different state. In that state the body can release what it has been holding, sometimes for years. You do not need to relive anything, or analyse it, or find the right words for it. Your body knows what to do when it is finally given the space.
What comes back is usually smaller and stranger than people expect. Not a breakthrough with music swelling underneath it. More like feeling the cold of the water on your hands at the sink. Laughing without deciding to. Crying in the car and not being frightened of it. Wanting something out of nowhere and knowing that it is yours.
Numbness is what living by default feels like. Days that happen to you rather than days you chose. And so the way back is not about trying harder to feel something. It starts with taking back the smallest choices that are genuinely yours: how you breathe, how you move, where your attention goes, what you say yes to on a Thursday evening. Choose those honestly, and often, and feeling begins to come back on its own.
You have been carrying this far longer than you should have had to. You are allowed to set it down.
If you are in Jersey, or anywhere
I work with women in Jersey and online through Conscious Connected Breathwork, movement and the mindset work that makes the change actually happen. You can start with a 1:1 session, come to one of my events in Jersey, or walk the longer road through The Becoming, a ten week journey for the woman who is ready to stop living at arm’s length from herself.
Wherever you start, you are so welcome here.