Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you go numb
When someone says they feel nothing, find out where the nothing reaches. All the time, or only towards good things, or only here, in this conversation, when criticism is in the air?
The three answers point in quite different directions. Numb everywhere, day and night, is worth taking to a doctor. Numb to good things while the bad ones still land is its own pattern. Numb only when your partner is upset with you is not really an absence at all: it is something arriving so fast that everything shuts before you feel it. Asking the question gently, without any suggestion that the person is exaggerating, usually gets you a clear answer.
Qur’an and Sunnah
There truly is a reminder in this for whoever has a heart, whoever listens attentively (Quran 50:37). Attentive listening is offered as a second route in, which is a kindness when the heart itself feels unavailable.
إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَذِكۡرَىٰ لِمَن كَانَ لَهُۥ قَلۡبٌ أَوۡ أَلۡقَى ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَهُوَ شَهِيدࣱ
There truly is a reminder in this for whoever has a heart, whoever listens attentively
Qur’an 50:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
These states can be measured rather than guessed at. A meta analysis found that difficulty identifying and describing feelings, and dissociative disconnection, were both markedly elevated in schizophrenia, which establishes them as real and measurable states rather than vague complaints. That was one clinical group, so it says more about the states being real than about how common they are anywhere else.
O'Driscoll C, Laing J, Mason O. (2014). Cognitive emotion regulation strategies, alexithymia and dissociation in schizophrenia, a review and meta-analysis.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Where the numbness starts and stops tells you what it is doing there.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The same sentence lands completely differently depending on who says it. If nothing stirs when it is described second hand, let the person it belongs to say it to you directly.
Ask what is happening in the body right now, in the moment it happens, rather than asking afterwards what the feeling was.
Pulling back makes you harder to reach, which makes people give up on reaching, which looks like proof that nobody was coming. The loop closes itself.