Why Don't I Feel My Feelings?
The Pattern
Something significant happens, the kind of thing that should produce a clear emotional response, and you notice you do not feel much. Or you notice a vague something but cannot name it. You watch other people cry at things that leave you dry-eyed and you wonder if something is missing in you. Or you feel the feelings but they arrive delayed, hours or days later, when the context has already changed. This is not emotional flatness by nature. This is emotional flatness as a learned protection. Alexithymia, literally 'no words for feelings,' is the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing emotional states. Research by Graeme Taylor and colleagues found alexithymia to be significantly more prevalent in people with trauma histories, and particularly in those with histories of emotional neglect. When a child's emotional expressions are consistently ignored, minimized, or punished, the channel between felt experience and named experience does not develop fully. The feelings happen in the body but the bridge to awareness and language is narrow or absent. Emotional numbing is a different but related phenomenon: the active suppression of feeling as a protective mechanism. When emotional expression was chronically dangerous, the system learned to intercept the feeling before it reached conscious awareness. Over time this interception becomes automatic. The person is not choosing not to feel. The feeling is being routed around consciousness by a protective structure that has been running so long it no longer needs instructions. The disconnection between body and naming is often most visible in the body. The person who says they do not feel anything is frequently carrying significant physical signals: tightness in the chest, constriction in the throat, heaviness in the stomach. The body knows. The pathway from body to language, mediated by the insular cortex and right hemisphere, was the part that got interrupted.
Origins & Context
Bessel van der Kolk's research on alexithymia in trauma survivors found that people with histories of early relational trauma often showed reduced activity in brain regions associated with interoception, the perception of internal body states, during emotional tasks. The body was not failing to produce signals. The system was failing to register them.
Jonice Webb's work on childhood emotional neglect identifies emotional numbness as one of its most consistent sequelae. Emotional neglect, the failure of caregivers to notice, respond to, or validate a child's emotional experience, does not produce dramatic symptoms in childhood. It produces a quiet, pervasive sense that one's inner world does not matter, and over time the child stops checking. The inner world continues to operate but without witnesses, and eventually without the individual's own attention.
Peter Levine's somatic work identifies the freeze response as one source of emotional numbing. The dorsal vagal shutdown described by Stephen Porges produces a state of dissociation from both feeling and sensation. In this state, the person is present but not fully inhabiting their experience. The numbing is not psychological distance but neurological: the system has downregulated to the point where both pain and pleasure are muted.
You are not unfeeling. You are disconnected from your feelings, which is something that happened to you, not something that is true of you.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
People tell you that you seem unaffected by things that would upset most people. You have come to see this as a strength, a kind of resilience or equanimity. But there is a difference between genuine equanimity and the absence of access to your own feeling states. Genuine equanimity feels like something. The numbing feels like nothing.
You know what you think about a situation but cannot tell what you feel about it. When someone asks how you feel, you answer with a thought: I think this situation is difficult, or I think I should feel sad. The feeling itself is not available, or it arrives in a translated, intellectualized form.
You are more moved by fictional characters than by your own life. You cry at films but not at real events in your own experience. The emotional distance required by fiction, the fact that it is not about you, lowers the threat level enough for the feeling to actually arrive.
You experience emotions physically before you name them and sometimes without ever naming them. Crying without knowing why. Anxiety in the body before the mind produces a cause. The emotion has a bodily expression but no cognitive label, which leaves you confused about what you are experiencing.
Named in the Literature As
Named in the Literature As: Alexithymia (Sifneos, Taylor), Emotional Numbing (Judith Herman), Dorsal Vagal Shutdown (Stephen Porges), Childhood Emotional Neglect (Jonice Webb), Interoceptive Deficits (Bessel van der Kolk). Related entries in this library: why-i-feel-safer-in-my-head-than-in-my-body, why-i-feel-disconnected-from-my-body, why-i-cannot-keep-the-insights-i-have-in-therapy, emotional-neglect
Nikita's Note
For years I thought I was just not a very emotional person. Stoic, maybe. Steady. I was proud of it. It took a long time to recognize that what I was calling steadiness was actually a very old silence: the silence of a child who had learned that her feelings were not particularly interesting to the people around her, so she stopped looking for them too.
The feelings were always there. Learning to find them again required slowing down enough to notice what was happening in my body before I tried to name it with my mind. They were in the tightness in my throat and the weight in my chest long before they ever became words.
From the work
You are not unfeeling. You are disconnected from your feelings, which is something that happened to you, not something that is true of you.From Was It Abuse? by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in Was It Abuse? — available on Amazon.