Emotional numbing
A reduced capacity to feel emotions, especially positive ones such as love and joy, often after trauma, chronic stress or depression.
What drives it
Turns down the volume on all feelings to avoid unbearable ones; it protects against pain at the cost of joy and connection.
How it shows
Work
Reacts to good news and bad news with the same flatness; describes the job as 'fine' with no enthusiasm; disengaged from team wins; cannot recall feeling excited about work.
Relationships
Partners say 'you don't seem to care'; the person agrees they love their family but can't feel it; little interest in sex or celebrations; going through the motions.
Self
Knowing you should feel something and feeling nothing; things that used to move you no longer do; a grey, cotton-wool quality to life.
What tells it apart
Isolation of affect: Isolation of affect strips feeling from specific painful topics while the person remains lively elsewhere; numbing flattens feeling broadly, including pleasure.
Dissociation (including depersonalisation and derealisation): Numbing reduces feeling while the self and world still seem real; dissociation brings unreality, detachment from the body, or lost time.
Anhedonia: Anhedonia is loss of pleasure and interest in rewards; numbing is broader, dulling negative emotions as well, and tends to follow trauma.
A test
Ask whether the person can still feel joy, love or sadness, and since when they have felt flat; a broad reduction after trauma or a long stressful period points to numbing.
Questions to carry
- Since when has the person felt flat, and which feelings are missing besides sadness?
- Which feeling have I not had in a while, and when did I last have it?
How strong the research is
moderate. Well established as a symptom of PTSD and depression and as a side effect of some antidepressants; mechanisms are debated.
Where it comes from
Robert Jay Lifton, 1967 (psychic numbing); DSM-III, 1980; Brett Litz, 1992