I was an actor in New York. Yes, that’s right—I didn’t emerge from the womb asking people how they felt for a living. I had dreams of being on Broadway, and after years of work, I finally got invited to the final callbacks for the lead role in a Broadway musical. For this final audition, I was going to wear my grandfather’s vintage pinstriped suit. I planned on changing into it at the audition studio to make sure it looked crisp. But while walking down 43rd Street, half a block from the audition, the suit fell out of my hands and into a pile of Central Park carriage horse manure. Terrified that I’d smell up the room and ruin my chances at the role, I rushed to the bathroom and tried to scrub out the stains before putting the suit on and walking into the audition.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t get the part. I got some generic feedback about how I didn’t have the right look. But I don’t really remember much of that part—the days and weeks afterward are a blank spot in my memory. And while I can recall the moment I dropped that suit on 43rd Street like it was yesterday, I can’t remember how I felt about not landing my big Broadway break. I can barely remember finding out I didn’t get it. The whole experience is a fog, as if the details and the feelings attached to them have been swallowed up together. When I reach back and try to remember how I felt about losing out on this role, the only thing I feel is… nothing.
What is emotional numbing?
Emotional numbing is a sense of being disconnected from your feelings. You might have a sense that something matters to you but not be able to feel much about it. Sometimes we disconnect like this in response to stress that threatens to overwhelm us. If we feel less, we can keep moving forward.
I see this often in work with clients—when moving towards a memory that holds a lot of charge, they’ll often just go blank, fuzz out, or suddenly be unable to recall details. I think of it like the villain from that ’80s movie, The NeverEnding Story: the Nothing. If you’re not an ’80s kid like me, the Nothing threatens to consume the magical land of Fantasia. It grows as people lose their hopes and forget their dreams. That’s the image that comes up for me when I try to describe my experience of it. I start to feel the big feeling coming on. Sometimes I even experience it for a moment. But as it threatens to overwhelm me, the Nothing swoops in so that I can move on.
While I invented my own ’80s fanboy name for what I’m experiencing, researchers have been exploring this topic for some time. There’s a related experience called alexithymia, which is difficulty identifying and describing our own emotions. Imagine being asked how you feel about a certain topic, reaching into wherever emotions live in us, and just hitting a wall. From the inside, it can be really hard to distinguish between “I don’t know how I feel” and “I don’t feel anything.”
Why do men go emotionally numb?
Emotional numbness isn’t unique to men, but we do seem to have a corner on the market. And that makes sense given the messages we receive about what is and isn’t acceptable to feel. Psychologist Ronald Levant uses the term normative male alexithymia to describe a pattern found in many men who experience difficulty identifying and expressing emotion—particularly those emotions tied to vulnerability or intimacy. He believes this pattern is rooted in the way men are socialized in our society.
Those of us raised as men learn these messages early and often. We inherit them and gift them to each other: “Don’t cry. Don’t be so sensitive. Don’t let them see you care.” I honestly can’t remember where I first received this message. I’m tempted to chalk that one up to the Nothing, too.
But my Nothing isn’t a villain from a kids movie. I think of him as a part of me that learned to perform a job. And he performs it very well. I suspect the Nothing is the reason I’ve been able to succeed at grad school, to switch careers, to build a private practice. But the Nothing doesn’t discriminate between the pain of the story and the importance of the story itself: A friendship ends, and we convince ourselves it wasn’t that important anyway. A dream falls to manure (literally), and we find something else to want.
In my experience, the Nothing doesn’t just take away the disappointment. It also makes it harder to remember how much we cared. I wish that I could have given myself the time to really feel the disappointment and the sadness of seeing my dream slip through my fingers. My experience feels incomplete in my mind, like a book without the final chapter.
What helps when you feel emotionally numb?
Sometimes in the middle of a session, a client goes blank. It’s not like they fully check out of the room, but they’ll be dipping their toe into an emotion and then just lose connection with it. When that happens, I’ll often invite them to notice what happens as they get closer to it. And sometimes they can’t. Sometimes the details are fuzzy, or there’s simply nothing there, and they get frustrated. That’s okay.
Noticing we can’t connect is a good place to start. Sometimes that blankness is doing a job, too. Rather than forcing our way through it, we can get curious about what feeling it might be protecting. And maybe, just maybe, that curiosity gives way to a name: sorrow, regret, grief. The point isn’t to choose the emotion we think we’re supposed to have. It’s to explore if we can connect with even the faintest sense of “Yes, that’s it.”
I think about younger me walking down 43rd Street with my grandfather’s suit, so excited and scared about what might happen next. I wish I could go back and tell him: “I see how much this matters to you. Whether you get the role or not, I want you to remember how much this matters. Don’t let that be taken from you.” We don’t have to convince ourselves a dream didn’t matter just because it didn’t come true. Sometimes, nearly 20 years later, we can give ourselves the chance to write about it and remember that it mattered.
