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Emotional Numbness — When you Shut Down Your Emotions to Stop you from Feeling
One of the common impacts of being in an unhealthy relationship is numbing our emotions. This can happen not only in toxic relationships but also when we’re simply used to shutting down our emotions as a way to protect ourselves from painful feelings. It often happens with men, especially because we’ve been raised to tough it out and act “manly” and we hold those beliefs so firmly as if our manhood is at stake.
Throughout my life, one of my earliest memories of being told to act ‘manly’ is of a moment when I was crying because I didn’t want to go to school. I still remember my mum telling me, “Stop crying, you’re a man.” Some of those messages came from a place of care — believing that if you’re seen crying as a man, you’ll be the laughingstock at school and people will stop respecting you.
These subtle, innocent, and seemingly caring messages, even when they don’t come from an unhealthy environment, can still leave a lasting impact on your inner belief system.
So, men — even from an evolutionary perspective — tend to lean toward shutting down their emotions and adopting a stoic, tough, and macho attitude. Men are also more inclined to approach various situations logically, even when those situations require our emotional to act out.
As a result, we grow up seeing tears or sadness as a sign of not being manly enough to handle a situation, and other men may even label you as weak. It’s just a survival mechanism we’ve consciously and unconsciously picked up to protect ourselves or to adapt to the dynamics of society.
On the other hand, women express themselves more or talk about it more, but men “man up” and go on with their lives — mostly grinding, overworking, overachieving, overcalculating this and that investment — while their emotions are not at the top of their agenda. That’s why it’s very common to hear a man jokingly say, “Nowadays, I’ve learned not to feel, and I can’t even feel the insults of my partner.”
Emotional numbness, in that sense, acts as a protective measure — it actually helps one avoid feeling the painful emotions or sensations as they’re happening in the moment.
It’s quite contradictory: buried pain or numbed-out pain ends up acting like a shield from more pain. (psst! that’s when you know you’re problem is beyond logic comprehension. )
Emotional Unavailability
It’s one of the reasons you might say your partner is emotionally unavailable — they’ve simply lost touch with their emotional core and are just going through the motions. You may find yourself playing with your kids but not really feeling any pleasure in it. You might convince yourself that life is “fun” and enjoyable with your family, but there’s still this nagging feeling of emptiness and hollowness.
You may be successful, and your relationship and life may appear stable, but there’s still a disconnect somewhere — and you can feel it. That’s what emotional numbness can look like. It can be sneaky, but there’s a strange absence of deep feeling. As you go through life without addressing it, you’ll start to notice it more and more — especially when the things you used to enjoy no longer feel enjoyable.
Another thing that can be mistaken for numbness is indifference. It’s easy to confuse the two, but they are actually different elements on the same spectrum.
With numbness, the body experiences emotional overload — something like, “I will be overwhelmed; these emotions will cripple me, so let me shut down.”
On the other hand, indifference is more about being unbothered or less triggered by situations because you have clarity and inner peace within yourself.
So, indifference is about clarity and it’s a conscious choice while emotional numbness is a heavy unconscious feeling developed by your mind to protect you from feeling.
You may think you’re indifferent when, in reality, you’re feeling numb as a way to protect yourself from experiencing painful emotions and sensations.
Be Honest with Yourself and Listen to You
That’s why it’s important to be honest with ourselves and recognize how emotional numbness might be keeping us in unhealthy relationships or distancing us from the people and activities we once enjoyed.
It’s mechanizing us to operate without seeing the beauty of existence. It’s sucking us dry of the wonder of reality.
So, man up and break those barriers.
You can be a man who feels and a man who faces the truth, not a man who shields or hides behind past emotions.
Make the manly choice of living consciously and not being driven by unconscious forces you picked up from the environment or from your forefathers.
Dealing with Emotional Numbness
It’s not hard to overcome; you just have to explore the root of it all through therapy — not journaling. Understand what led your mind to pick that coping mechanism in the first place and why it chose that emotional defence.
Once that is broken, you will go from being a man with walls to a man with boundaries. The man is not being taken away from you; he’s being upgraded to meet the changing times of society — a man who can feel sad, lonely, and unmotivated sometimes, but those feelings don’t throw them into depression.
Instead, he faces them and lets them pass through like the wind, deeply convinced that emotions (both good and bad) are part of life — and it is through feeling that the man within him grows.
“Manliness is not about suppressing emotions, but having the strength to feel and express them.” — Unknown
So, your emotional numbness is not a permanent state, and it doesn’t have to be if you’re ready to dismantle the defences and be free from the beliefs and identities you’ve been fed.
You don’t need to amass more and more defences through success, books, or risky adventures — you’ve got to break them, and then something new will arise.
Note from the Author
If you’re ready and you’d like my help with healing, finding peace in life and breaking free from these toxic patterns, then you can book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH CALL with me HERE. Happy healing 💙💙. Feel free to share and comment! Use this information with caution, it comes from my own thoughts & bias, experiences and research😊.
References & Recommended Reading
