Why you feel nothing

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Emotional numbness is a learned response. It's a protective coping skill you developed in an environment where a feeling wasn't fully safe. It can look like going blank when someone asks what's wrong, like feeling something physically, a tightness, a weight, but having no words for what it is. And if that sounds familiar, this video is going to explain exactly where that came from. A lot of people confuse emotional shutdown with being introverted or calm or just not caring. It's none of those things. What it actually is is a response your brain developed when feeling wasn't safe. And it shows up in ways most people don't immediately recognize as shutdown. Like watching your own emotional life from a slight distance, present but not quite inside it. Like you don't actually know what's going on. And it can also look like selective numbness. You can feel some things in some situations, maybe with specific people. Hold on to that. We're going to get into that. But certain emotions seem completely sealed off. And the emotions that feel the most inaccessible are almost always the ones that were most unwelcome in the family that you grew up in. So keep that in mind. There's actually a word for this specific experience of not being able to identify or name what you're feeling.

[00:01:14]It's called alexathyia.

[00:01:16]It's not a disorder on its own. It's a trait and it shows up at much higher rates in people who grew up in homes where emotions weren't welcomed or safe.

[00:01:25]Now, I want you to know that this behavior is learned. Not chosen, but learned. The way a child learns what is safe and what isn't doesn't happen through one big moment in their life.

[00:01:36]Most of the time, it happens through thousands of small interactions repeated over years. When a child brings an emotion to their parent and is met with warmth, the child's brain records, "Feelings are safe. Feelings lead to connection. It's okay for me to have feelings.

[00:01:55]When a child brings an emotion to their parent and is met with dismissal, irritation, or silence, their brain records something different, right?

[00:02:03]Feelings are unwelcome here. Feelings cause disconnection. It's not safe to feel. It's actually safer for me not to feel at all. As children, we don't make a conscious decision to shut down. The brain just does what it does with any response that keeps leading to a bad outcome. It finds another route. There are many environments that can lead to emotional shutdown, but I want to walk you through a few that I think are the most common. And the first is the family where emotions were explicitly dismissed. Like, stop crying. I'll give you something to cry about. You're too sensitive or it's not always that serious. [snorts] Why do you always have to be so dramatic? The message over time was direct, right? Your emotional responses are excessive and unwelcome. And so as a child, we learned to manage our feelings before anyone else has to say them.

[00:02:55]Another environment is the family where emotions were implicitly unsafe. So nobody said anything directly, not like the last one, right? But one parent's mood controlled the entire atmosphere of the house. So you learn to read the room the second you walked in. How are we doing? How's everybody doing? And you probably also learned to make yourself smaller and quieter so as not to tip something that always felt precarious, right? Like if I act in the wrong way, something bad could happen. And so your own feelings became a luxury that you couldn't afford when so much of your energy was going towards tracking the feelings of the adults around you.

[00:03:34]Another example is the family where your distress destabilizes the people you love. Now, this one is subtler, but I want to include it because it often produces a particular kind of guilt, and it usually looks like a parent who loved you genuinely, but couldn't tolerate your pain without falling apart themselves. So, when you were upset, it's like your mom would get so upset on your behalf, and you'd end up taking care of her. Or you learn that your feelings in general had the power to hurt the people that you loved. And so, you're like, "Wow, these are really out of control. I guess I should keep them to myself. And finally, there's the family where achievement replaced emotional life. I've seen this a lot with my patients over the years, but some families run entirely on productivity and forward motion. So, feelings, they weren't discussed.

[00:04:25]Problems were solved, not felt. And you learn to find your value in what you produced. Like, if you got good grades, you got more connection. or if you did really well at this one sport or event, got first chair, like all of that is how you got attention, how you got connection, your emotional life, that wasn't important. It's like stuffed down or it's kind of hidden. Now, all of these environments produce adults who have in one way or another lost access to parts of themselves because feeling safe, keeping the peace, and ensuring other people were happy took priority.

[00:05:01]The most common thing I hear isn't I want to feel more. I don't actually think I've ever heard that. Instead, I hear, "I don't understand why I can't feel." Other people seem to access their emotions without thinking about it. But for you, it can feel like trying to open a door that has no handle. Because emotional shutdown is not a conscious choice. So, it can't be undone by one, right? We can't just choose to not do that anymore. And it's often stored in our body in patterns of tension and reactivity that were set in place a long time before you had any language to help you describe it. So when you try to access a feeling that your brain has flagged as unsafe, something stops you.

[00:05:43]Like something inside is like we can't do this. And it's not stubbornness. It's not avoidance in the willful sense. It's protection. The same mechanism that kept you safe in childhood is still running in the background. Right? we had that blueprint. Our body and brain are still running from it. They're still building off of it. It just doesn't know that we don't have to, that our childhood is over. We can choose differently, right?

[00:06:07]We can re write our blueprint if we want. And there's also something worth understanding about how people move between what I'd call like flooding and shutdown. Everyone has a range of emotional intensity that they can handle and still function. Everybody's different. It's almost like resilience, right? So when something pushes past that range, our brain either floods which looks like overwhelm, panic, or emotional outbursts, like I can never do anything right. We can just melt down.

[00:06:38]Or on the other side is shuts down, which looks like this numbness, disconnection, and going blank like what we're talking about now. Many people who grew up in emotionally difficult homes, we swing between those two states.

[00:06:51]too much like panic, overwhelm, and then nothing. Flooded, then completely sealed off. And I want to bring this up because the reason that this happens is that learning to handle emotional intensity is not something that we figure out on our own. It's something that develops through repeated experience of being uh with a calm adult, which most of us probably didn't get, who could help us move through a feeling without becoming overwhelmed by it. Right? Right? It's like we had to have some emotional intelligence from our parent to help us learn how to manage emotions, not swing in this wild range. And so when that adult, that responsible person wasn't consistently available or maybe at all, the range of what feels manageable stays really narrow. So we're like, I can only handle if this is the amount of emotions I receive. And let me know if this makes sense because this is really important that like we never learned that we could have a a wide emotional range. I could be super excited and energized and like oh my god dancing around the house and that's not a bad thing. We never got to experience that. We probably were told like can you shut up or why are you making so much noise or you're always so dramatic. We were told that that was bad.

[00:08:05]So we also, you know, we only know how to like maybe shut down or stuff it deep, but that's not what we want to do all the time. And so we find that we can only handle like maybe 10% of this emotional expression in life. And so some when something pushes past that, the only options our brain knows are like shut it down, stuff it, or freak out, go the other way. And I I just feel like that's not something we talk about enough. We can feel like, but I shut it down, but then why do I have explode later? Has anybody else felt that way?

[00:08:36]That like, oh, I can stuff down all my emotions. I keep it together. I'm emotionally disconnected. I'm emotionally numb.

[00:08:43]been doing that my whole life. But then I had these outbursts and it's because our like window of tolerance kind of for emotions is so slim that when life happens because it does, we're pushed out and we either stuff it or we explode with it. And so it's like the only options our brain knows are those two.

[00:09:02]And so that range or window of tolerance as us therapists like to call it can widen, right? We learned to keep it slim so we can learn to expand it. But it takes time and it takes the right conditions to do it. And this is also why so many well-meaning efforts to just open up don't work right. You can't just be like, I just want to start talking about things. That's not going to work.

[00:09:23]If the conditions underneath it haven't changed, meaning like the belief that I have about emotions and my connection to them, I haven't challenged that. I haven't uh tried to even acknowledge what those beliefs are. then pushing harder and trying to get myself to to be more comfortable with emotions. It's not really going to help. It's honestly, unfortunately, going to confirm to our brain that this territory is dangerous, that we can't experience that, right?

[00:09:55]Because we're not really setting ourselves up for success where we can have good experiences with emotions and we can understand, oh, this is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable doesn't mean dangerous. It just means new, right? We need to have that understanding and that patience with ourselves as we kind of learn to expand it. It's like we're building a muscle, right? I hope that makes sense. Let me know. I'm happy to keep talking about this. But there's one more piece here that will catch a lot of people offguard when the shutdown begins to lift. Okay?

[00:10:23]So, let's say I've gone into a shutdown mode. That's all I knew what to do and then it begins to kind of lift and I can come out of it. The first thing that often comes up is not really relief.

[00:10:33]like I'm letting myself feel some feelings. You're like, "It'll feel so much better when I'm not in this shutdown all the time."

[00:10:41]Yes. But it often is pain that we feel.

[00:10:45]And I just want to kind of let you know, not to not to make you think that you shouldn't do this work cuz you should.

[00:10:50]But I al I just don't want you to think it's going to be like puppy dogs and ice cream. I wish that I could tell you that. But when we come out of shutdown, the feelings that we've been suppressing didn't just disappear. I know. I wish they would, too. But they don't. and they've kind of been waiting to be expressed or to be felt. And so when they start to surface, our brain, you know, accurately interprets it as like really [ __ ] uncomfortable. And so it'll pull back again. And that's kind of why we can try to come out of it and express and then be like, "No, no, I don't want to." And we kind of do this push pull, push pull as we try to figure this out. And you have to just be patient with yourself because it's it's going to take a little bit of time, a little practice. But like I said, anything we learn, we can unlearn. And I overall hear from people that they like expect reconnecting with their emotional life to not necessarily feel good, but to overall be good. And I yes, it is good for you, but sometimes it feels hard at first. It's almost like when I talk about like recovery, especially with eating disorders and stuff like that, that like at the beginning it feels worse before it feels better because it's going to be hard at first.

[00:11:55]We haven't done this before. It's going to be uncomfortable. we haven't been like feeling emotions really. And so when we start to feel them, they're going to feel good, bad, and everything in between. And that I just want you to know that's all normal. And it's part of why doing this with the proper support of like a therapist and good friends and people like that is going to matter. And none of this changes overnight. You know, we didn't learn it overnight, so it's not going to be changed overnight, but it can and will change. So let's talk about what we can do to get us reconnected with our emotions. And don't worry, these are not just like feel it.

[00:12:27]Instead, we're going to start instead of even thinking about it, we're gonna start with our body. I know you just cringed, but hang with me, okay? We're going to start with our body, not the feelings themselves. I don't even need you to name it. I don't even care.

[00:12:39]Because the most reliable route back to our emotional life runs through our physical sensation.

[00:12:46]Our body is where feelings live before they become thoughts.

[00:12:51]And the body is accessible even when the emotions themselves feel out of reach.

[00:12:57]Start by noticing physical sensations without trying to name them as emotions.

[00:13:01]Don't even tell me what you think it is.

[00:13:03]Just what does it feel like? Is it a tightness?

[00:13:06]Do I feel like a warmth come over me? A heaviness? A flutter?

[00:13:12]You're not trying to feel yet. Don't worry. You're just practicing being in your body again. And for people who spent years living mostly in their heads or just completely disconnected, this alone is like the real work. So take your time with it. And I also I saw this this brings my memory back to I saw this Tik Tok. It was beautiful. It was this woman being interviewed on some stage. I don't know her or where she was, but she said something beautiful. She said, "I want you to know that your body is not fighting with you. It's trying to communicate with you." And that reframe she went on to she said had so many great things to say, but that in itself was so powerful to me that your body's not trying to fight with you. It's trying to communicate with you. And it's it's only trying to help you. It's giving you information. It could be telling you when a person in your life is like not good to be around. It could be telling you when you're stretching yourself outside your comfort zone. It can tell you when you need to go to the doctor. It It's trying to tell us things. And instead of us trying to fight against our bodies and being like, "Shame on you, h mind over body, right?"

[00:14:17]We see it as a companion, as a partner.

[00:14:20]And I just Anyway, I really like that and hopefully you do too. Let's keep moving. Number two is I want you to name what you can without forcing what you can't. What I mean by that is that if all you can identify is that something feels uncomfortable, something feels off, something feels good or bad, that's all useful information. You don't need to know like, you know what, Katie, I'm feeling grief about my childhood. that could that's could be like 15 steps ahead. We just need to know something doesn't quite feel right. Something here feels heavy. Maybe that's a great start.

[00:14:56]That's honestly an amazing start. Being able to name what you feel in the moment is a skill. Most of us were never taught that skill. And so the good news is that it it does get easier the more we practice sitting with that sensation, taking our time figuring out what it's trying to tell us. And then maybe coming up with like it just feels uncomfortable or it feels tight in my chest or whatever. And I also want you to know that if this step has you stuck, I want you to try a tool. I wrote about it in my book, Why Do I Keep Doing This? Soft plug. And I didn't really give it a name, but for the sake of this video, let's just call it like the reality TV shortcut. Okay, hang with me. So, if you aren't sure what you're feeling at all, like any emotion word, you're like, Katie, I'm overwhelmed. It's confusing.

[00:15:42]This is amorphous. How am I supposed to tell this? I want you to watch some reality TV. I know you're like, you've lost your mind. Trust me on this. Watch some reality TV. And after about 15 or 30 minutes, I want you to journal about what emotions you saw expressed in the show. What were these people showing you on screen? Did you see anger, jealousy, love, excitement? Tell me what you saw and then tell me. So, write down the list of what you saw. Sorry, I've got a tickle on my face here. [snorts] I want you to tell me how you knew it was one of those things. And I know it sounds wild, but sometimes we can notice emotions in other people, just not in ourselves. And reality TV is so like dramatic. It's so over the top. So, you're more likely to notice emotions in those settings. Give it a try. Let me know if it helps. Moving right along to number three. Notice where you already feel safe.

[00:16:39]Reconnecting emotionally is going to require conditions or spaces where your brain feels safe enough to lower its guard.

[00:16:47]Right? Because this shutdown is protection. It's like I can't feel this.

[00:16:50]I don't wantm. Right? So, it's trying to protect us. So, pay attention to the relationships or spaces where you don't have to manage yourself. the environments where you feel your body [sighs and gasps] just settle slightly, maybe your shoulders drop down just a little bit, the moments when you catch yourself genuinely being present rather than like maybe hovering above your own experience, having a little dissociation. And if you aren't sure, remember that looking for neutral rather than safety could even be the key here.

[00:17:22]Like if even thinking of something or someone that feels safe just makes you nervous or you feel that reaction already, then let's look for things that just make us feel okay. If you're ever in a scenario where someone safe harmed us, we're going to want to look for neutral instead because safe itself can kind of trigger us. Okay, so maybe it's neutrality. Give that a try. Number four, let's move toward feelings in small increments, a little at a time.

[00:17:49]We're not flooding here. So, a conversation that goes slightly deeper than usual.

[00:17:54]Try to hang. Let yourself stay with a feeling for maybe 30 seconds. We don't have to redirect. We don't have to shut down. We don't have to do anything.

[00:18:04]Let it happen. I know it's uncomfortable. We're going to try to let it happen. We can watch something that moves us and not immediately change a subject, change a channel, switch over, right? If that emotion shows up, we don't have to shut it down. And you might want to do this piece in like private first. maybe watch a sad movie or TV show by yourself so that if that emotion comes up, you feel more free to let yourself feel it without worrying that someone's watching you or judging you or anything like that or that you have to manage, right? I don't want my emotions to hurt them. We don't want to have that. So maybe do that on your own.

[00:18:36]You're not trying to go from zero to fully open. That's not how this really works. The goal is to slowly build evidence that feeling is survivable.

[00:18:46]That's what we're trying to build. It's like we're putting a case together to prove to like disprove this old belief that we can have emotions and be okay.

[00:18:56]Moving on to number five. Consider working with a sematicbased therapist.

[00:19:00]And I want to mention this specifically because the work of emotional reconnection often hits a ceiling when it comes to pure talkbased therapy. I'm sure a lot of you felt that way. Like I've got some of the work done. I even personally felt this. EMDR was really helpful for that reason that I felt like I'd kind of reached a limit on like how how much better I could get, if that makes sense. It's like I talked about and talked about and talked about, I just didn't quite improve in the way that I wanted. And so, if you've done like me, you've done a lot of therapeutic work, you understand everything intellectually and still feel like nothing's actually shifted. This could be why the shutdown could be living in your body and so your body needs to be part of the process overall.

[00:19:42]So, sematic experiencing, EMDR, and other body- based approaches kind of work at the level where maybe this is actually living for you. So, at least look into it, see what's available in your area. And it could even, you know, you never know, it could be the breakthrough that you've been looking for. And I also think that maybe things like therapeutic yoga or even a self-defense class could help here, too, because it can get us moving through what we're experiencing. So, you can look into it. I used to I don't know if this even exists anymore. This is eons ago, but one of my good friends used to run um trauma-informed yoga and therapeutic yoga she called it. And her business used to be called redtent rising. I don't know if she's offering that anymore, but you could hunt down some kind of like therapeutic yoga.

[00:20:26]Also, in the hope for recovery, hope number four recovery.org, they offer some of those things, too. So, check it out and see what you can find. The part of you that shut down was doing its job.

[00:20:38]It was an accurate read of an environment that wouldn't allow for your feelings. And it protected you from the cost of trying to express them anyway.

[00:20:46]The problem is it's still running. It's still happening in the background, right? Causing us to behave in ways we don't want to. And so the cost for us now is different than in childhood, right? In childhood, it could have felt like it just kept us safe. It was what made our family work. It's what kept us connected.

[00:21:04]But now it could be different. It could be the distance from people that you want to be close to. It could be the sense that you're watching your own life kind of from the outside.

[00:21:16]It could even feel like the exhaustion of not knowing what you feel or why. And I know for a lot of us that can be uncomfortable in and of itself. So understanding where the shutdown came from doesn't undo it automatically, but it does change the question from what's wrong with me to what did I learn and what do I want to learn instead?

[00:21:39]That's a much more workable place to start from. If that childhood piece hit super close to home for you, the video I released last week on emotionally unavailable mothers talks specifically about the grief that can come from growing up with a parent who couldn't meet you emotionally. A lot of what we covered today overlaps with that. So, I'll link it here if you want to check that out. And if this is your first time on this channel, every week we talk about where these patterns come from, why they made sense at the time, and what it can actually looked like to change them. If that's what you're looking for, make sure you hit that subscribe button. I release new videos every week and I'd love to have you here. Thank you so much for watching.

[00:22:14]Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.