Depression Can Feel Like Numbness

There’s a widespread misunderstanding that depression is limited to persistent sadness. And it is true that depression often does involve persistent feelings such as of sadness, grief, loss, and hopelessness. But depression does not always involve these feelings, or only these feelings. In fact, when people are depressed, they can sometimes experience it as the absence of feelings: like an emotional numbness.

When you are experiencing depression of this sort, it can be difficult to describe. If someone asks you how you are feeling, you may struggle for words, because what you may be feeling is the absence of feeling. A numbness spreads out across you making it difficult to feel. Perhaps there is a diffuse weight you are carrying. Numbness and heaviness. You may feel frustration and agitation beneath the surface—overwhelm with people or circumstances that make demands of you. When people who love you express love and care, even this may feel like too much. You feel numb and heavy, and you may want to be left alone. At the same time, you may not want to be left alone. You may feel both at once.

This numbness isn’t rest. It isn’t peace. Quite the reverse. You are suffering, even if the suffering is numbness, even if it doesn’t translate into feelings that people in your life might understand better, like grief and sadness.

When you are in this kind of depression, it can be difficult to access empathy. First of all, it can be challenging to give yourself empathy—to recognize that you are suffering and that you need and deserve loving care from yourself. You may feel like a slug. It’s so hard to motivate yourself. In this sluggishness and slowness, you may fall short of your expectations for yourself as a worker, friend, partner, parent. Guilt around this adds to the weight. And because you are feeling numb, it can be difficult to grasp that you are suffering and that deserve care. It’s hard to hold on to the loving, caring part of yourself. Your inner voice may speak harshly toward yourself: you may beat yourself up. Which adds to the weight you are carrying.

And it can be hard to feel empathy from others, too. They may see that you are suffering, but when you are numb it can be difficult to describe your experience to them. You may find that you struggle for words to describe what’s going on within you, and that the people you’re talking with also struggle to be able to understand. You may yearn for empathy and support. But trying to bring people into your inner world right now can be exhausting, frustrating—even impossible feeling—and you may at times give up on the effort. In those intervals between contact, you may feel even more alone in your numbness and suffering.

Therapy can be a deeply important support in these circumstances. In therapy’s empathic and containing environment, you can begin to understand more fully what you have been going through, and traverse the pathway toward relief. Our work together can support you to move out of the numbness and weight that you have been carrying, and into a more emotionally flexible, present, and expansive experience of yourself and your life.

If you find that you have been feeling emotionally numb and weighted down, either on their own or along with feelings of sadness and grief, I invite you to call me at (510) 500-9722 to talk about how depression therapy can help.