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Emotional numbness
When feelings seem muted, distant, or absent altogether.
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Emotional numbness is one of the more common forms of dissociation. It can feel like watching your own life from behind glass — you know something should feel a certain way, but the feeling itself seems muted or missing.
This can look like
- Difficulty feeling joy, sadness or excitement, even at significant moments
- Going through the motions of daily life without much felt sense of it
- Struggling to answer 'how do you feel?' because nothing comes up clearly
- Feeling flat or 'grey' for stretches of time
Numbness is not the absence of feeling — it is usually feeling turned down, as protection from something that would otherwise be too intense.
