Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

by Lori Gottlieb

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

This is something I see so much in the therapy room. People come in, and they’re in pain, and understandably they want to stop feeling they pain. So they say, essentially, Help me not to feel. But it doesn’t work that way. If we numb our feelings, it’s not that they go away. They just come out in other ways, and the more we try to suppress them, they stronger they get. Numbness isn’t at all “nothingness.” Numbing is what we do when we feel flooded by the intensity of our feelings.