13 Ways To Connect with Emotion Safely if Feeling Numb or Dissociated

I want to talk in today's video about how we start to feel our emotions again. I've talked in other videos here about dissociation, emotional numbness, and the how-to of how to start feeling again is the thing that confuses so many of us. Because it's not really like you can read that in a self-help book, you know, because the self-help book will give you intellectual ideas and the problem with dissociation and emotional numbness is that we're already in our head all the time. So the intellect, you can read interesting ideas about that, but then it becomes, okay, there's no emotion up here. The emotion is all down here. So how do I get out of this and into this? And this can be quite frustrating. And so I'm going to do my best here to kind of give you pointers, I guess. You know, personally, for me, this has been my journey too, is to become someone who lives more from here rather than up here all the time, which I'm much more comfortable most of the time. But I've learned in my own therapy and in my own practice too, that therapy really needs to take a somatic, have a somatic element to it. It has to have body work in it because otherwise it just becomes too intellectual, too dry for us. So we want to bring the feeling back in. Now, the first thing I would say about this is that, why are we not feeling in the first place? And there's very, very good reasons for that, to feel numbness, to feel dissociated. And essentially it's to do with trauma in the past somewhere. I'll talk about maybe the roots of that, but it's not, you know, we didn't get dissociated or emotionally numb because we had all these wonderful, fantastic, beautiful, joyful, blissful feelings all the time. And we just decided to think I'm bored with that. It's typically because we were in a lot of pain that we start to feel numbed out from our feelings. So once that numbness or once that pain is experienced, and if it's an ongoing pain, we have something like complex trauma, we build up this layer of defenses around that so that we can drown out that feeling altogether. And we're kind of just living from here up at that point. Everything is intellectual. People will even say things like, I think I'm feeling this way. You know, it's kind of an intellectual interpretation of an emotion. Or another example would be, I had an intellectual sense that that was funny, but I'm not really engaged with that emotionally. So I'm going to give a few pointers here in terms of, okay, what can we do? What is the, the how to solve it, I guess. But I want you to use this information and start to apply it in practice in your life, whether that be in your own personal practice or with a therapist or something like that. So we get to the point where we're ready to start doing some of this somatic work, some of this body work. When something inside us decides, and whenever that day comes is different for everybody, but it's almost a tiredness of not feeling. We miss being in touch with our own feelings. So there's this goal that somewhere inside us starts to call out for, I want to reconnect with my emotional body again. Life itself can bring us to that point. But whenever that happens, it's an unconscious choice. Usually we don't even make it consciously, but that's very important because prior to that, the goal had been to hide away all feelings, but there's a sort of a, we realized that life becomes quite, it's living in black and white. So we want to reconnect with those feelings again. And when that happens, life itself, I think, kind of opens us up to it. So the first thing I'm going to say here is, yes, there is a part of us, we have to accept that a part of us will not want to go in to the body again, because that's where a lot of this pain is. But we have to be very patient with ourselves when we're doing this. This is not like a 30 days to a new you type approach here we're taking with numbness or learning how to feel more again. This is going to take a lot more patience. And this is something that's going to deepen our ability to go in and feel more and more and more and more all the time over a period of time. So, you know, it's all about that ability to feel more. Now, this is not about feeling good. That's one thing I should definitely highlight here. It's not about feeling good. Someone said to me before, they said, it's not about feeling good. It's about how good we are at feeling. So we're trying to develop the capacity to feel again, given that it was trauma that stopped us from feeling to begin with. So the first thing I'm saying is, yes, a part of us will not want to do this. So we have to be very, very patient with ourselves. Now, the second thing I'm going to say here on the how to's of how to feel again, is that it's kind of a fake it till you make it thing. Now hear me out on this. I'm not saying that you fake emotions or try to force emotions. What I'm saying is, it's really important that even if we're not feeling our emotions fully, there's this boring word I keep using again and again, and it's called self care or guilt free play. And I think this is a huge, huge role in this whole thing of starting to feel again, because this is what it looks like to self parent, to treat yourself as if you felt you were valuable and important, even though maybe you don't feel that at all. So this gives us a kind of a model of what it looks like to create a space of safety or to create a self nurturing environment for us. And that's very, very important because the emotions are also are almost going to play catch up to this sort of environment we've set up for ourselves. If our life is full of stress, if it's full of anxiety, if it's full of maybe, you know, triggers and toxic relationships, it's much less likely that we're going to start to feel safe enough to even begin to feel again. So the second thing is to prioritize self care and me time. And this is going to sort of give us an example of what it's like to have a sort of a template for self love, even though the emotions may be not there. So that's a practical part of that. Now, if you want to learn more about that, my book on procrastination kind of shows you the how to's that is certainly to establish guilt free play in your life. So that's the second thing. It's kind of a fake it till you make it, but prioritize self care and guilt free play. So maybe we've got that done where we're going to be patient with ourselves. We're going to set up a life in which these emotions can start to stem forward. The third thing I would say is all about our breathing. Breathing is a huge, huge part because we're trying to go back into the body. We're trying to get out of here. And if we're coming into the breath more, this is everything. This is the gateway back into our body, into our emotions. So there's all sorts of different types of breathing you can do. A really good one is holotropic breath work. And that's quite an intense one, but it can really sort of move a lot of things in the body itself because it's quite an intense form of breathing. So you can look up that holotropic breath work, but really any sort of breathing exercises you can start to do. The one I use, I typically use just on a daily basis is just to breathe in slowly and really let the stomach go all the way out and hold it for a few seconds and then slowly exhale. Now, if you do that for even three or four breaths, nice and slowly, what we're trying to do is, especially if you've got anxiety of any type, is to slow down your breathing. But any breath work at all you can do. There's so many resources out there for that, but I definitely highly recommend looking into holotropic breath work. Really what the breathing is going to do, it's going to change the focus from the external world and all the dramas and stories and struggles we have, which is, you know, we turn to this thing up here to help us with all that, right? We strategize and we make plans and everything. The breathing is going to bring us back in here where the focus is the simplest way to stay focused on what's happening inside of the body. So it's going to anchor our focus. So breathing is huge. You know, if you were to, someone asked me in a recent video, you know, what do I mean by body work? And I just basically told them to keep it super simple and just focus on breathing. Focus on breathing and don't even think of it as meditation or anything like that. Just simple, closing your eyes, going in and doing breathing work in your body. It's going to make you feel better too. But the main thing here for what we're working on is it's going to bring us into the internal focus. It anchors the focus in the body. Now, if we're talking about numbness and dissociation, the fourth one I'm going to say here is a huge one. And I'm going to say that the fourth tip here is you feel your numbness. Feel your numbness. I've said this in other videos, but with dissociation, we have this thing of, well, there's nothing going on inside me. There's just nothing happening at all. And that's never true. We want to start treating the numbness or a void, some people describe it as, as a thing in itself that's worth paying attention to, that is worth feeling into. We can feel into the nothingness of that, which is a scary thing. But once you start to do that, the numbness again, is just a safety mechanism to stop us from going deeper into feelings. And to feel into that numbness itself can be quite intimidating. But if that's where we are, and there's other things, typically more to the surface, even than the numbness, it can be a lot of frustration and anxiety. But I'm going to move on to that now in a moment. But the first thing is to just, even if you do come in contact with some numbness and you're almost feeling into that numbness, that's a good thing. You breathe into that numbness, you stay focused on that numbness more and more. Really what it's looking for is our undivided attention. Okay, so feel the numbness is the fourth tip here. The fifth thing I'm going to talk about is to allow or to embrace frustration and some mild anxiety when you're doing this type of body work. I'll give you an example of what I mean by this. If someone had told me, you know, five years ago, you know, you got to start to feel your feelings more. Even if someone had told me something like do more body work, breathing exercises, I would have rolled my eyes. And I would have said, yeah, right, you know, come on, give me a break. Maybe I'll do talk therapy, but that's as far as I would go with that. So it's interesting though, right? Because the thoughts of me sitting down to do those exercises made me feel frustrated. And I never, I never really looked at why am I so resistant to doing this? Okay. So there is a layer of kind of frustration around this. So you got to really expect and allow and embrace some sensations of frustration. I've found sometimes doing body work in therapy with people, there can be that mild frustration when we go more into the body. And it's just kind of an anger at ourselves. You know, it's just an anger that it's there. It's a layer of protection. It's like, don't go there. You know, let's go back up here again, where it's a bit safer. So expect that embrace a little bit of frustration with this and give yourself a break. If you're feeling that again, we just, whatever shows up is all we're doing. We're just paying attention to whatever is there. And it's that frustration. And maybe a little anxiety as well is completely, it's actually what we're looking for in this. And it's actually part of the plan, the healing plan in this. The next thing I'll say is embrace giving up. Okay. Because you'll notice maybe with dissociation or emotional numbness, there's also this associated feeling of hopelessness. Like it's, I'll never feel anything again. It's never going to work. Right. So what we want to do is actually, if we work through the frustration, we might, we might say, we feel like throwing our hands up and say, there's, this is pointless. It's never going to work. And I'm giving up effectively. And the funny thing happens is as soon as you kind of give up trying to feel, because that's actually what we're trying to do. We're trying to feel, and that's actually not going to work. Feeling is spontaneous. We're just trying to drop our defenses to it. But give up, embrace giving up. I can't do this. You know, throw your hands in the air and just relax. Cause that actually helps us to surrender into relaxing. Now I can relax. I don't actually have to accomplish anything here at all. So relax, surrender, give up, embrace giving up. And that's actually a part of you're on the right track with that. The next thing I'm going to say here is, and this is really important. Place your hands on any part of your body in which you feel anything at all, whether it be a piece of that frustration, even that numbness, whatever it might be. So that could be, you know, you start to just place your hands gently on your body, wherever you might find some kind of feeling. And this is really helping you stay focused on whatever movement is happening inside your body. It can be for different people. It's, it's different places. So quite a lot of it is going to be in your torso usually, right? It could be in your stomach here. It could be sometimes it's in shoulders. Quite often it's here, just placing your hands on whatever, wherever you feel something like this. And when you're maybe doing that breath work, it's basically, you're kind of telling yourself I'm here. I'm here for whatever it is that's coming up right now, whatever wants to be felt. So that's really, really important. It's a really kind of self-soothing thing. And it's a, it's a thing that kind of emphasizes I am here to give you my full attention and to feel into whatever this is going to be. Okay. So that's a huge, huge tip there. And that one, the next one is a little bit maybe coming out of left field here, but there's a reason in Hollywood, they add music to all their movies and it's to make them more emotional, make you connect with them on an emotional level. So this tip number eight is let music teach you, let music teach you. So I want you to start maybe listening to music a little bit more often, maybe invest some time in listening to music, finding music that you relate to, or that moves anything in you on an emotional level. Again, I was quite resistant to this for a long time, but music, I really think it's a profound thing to think of music as a teacher. It sort of has a vibration to it that resonates with something inside us that that's beyond here, beyond the intellect, beyond the rational mind. And the more you can listen to music again, when you're doing some of that breath work or just time by yourself to sit down and to feel into whatever you're resonating with. In fact, you can use music to kind of show you where you're at emotionally. Sometimes it can kind of be an indicator of that. I mean, if you're listening to, you know, Scandinavian death metal or something, right? There's nothing wrong with that. It's probably just showing you where you are emotionally. And maybe you're connecting with some kind of an anger with that or something. I don't know. But maybe if you're listening to softer music, you're feeling into some of those more soft emotions. But it can really be a great way to facilitate feeling into those feelings. So I would definitely think about incorporating music into your own healing. Now, the next one, number nine here is embrace all emotions just as they are. I think this is the biggest tip of them all, to be frank. Embrace all emotions just as they are. Change nothing. Again, I'm repeating myself here a little bit, but it took me a long time to get this. This is not about feeling better. This is just about feeling what's there. We're not there to change our feelings. That's what self-help is. That's what God knows so many things in life teaches to change our feelings. That feeling is not good enough. This feeling doesn't feel right. Therefore, I should get rid of it. I should do something to change it. What we're doing here is we're just going into feel whatever's there. And that's going to be quite often. It's going to be painful emotions, painful emotions. But I'm going to give you a really great way to think about that because that sounds quite hopeless and dark. It isn't, I assure you. But for now, I'm just going to say embrace all your emotions just as they are. The next tip here, number 10, is to prioritize interpersonal relationships as well as alone time. So we are going to need alone time and we're healing here. You're going to also notice that the more you go into feeling, you probably are going to start to reprioritize certain things in your life. Maybe before we were, for good reason, we had boundaries with interpersonal relationships. But I'm not saying to give up alone time because that's essential. But you will probably start to spend more time around other people the more you start to go into your emotions and your healing. That could be just to have support systems around you. But I've noticed that we kind of come out of goal-related things a little bit more. Not that we drop them, but interpersonal relationships typically take on more and more importance the more we go back in touch and start to feel more and more. So that's a good thing. So trust that if that's the case for you personally. Now, this next tip is kind of relates to number nine again. But this one is, realize that we're not trying to fix the pain, only to connect with the pain. So again, all these layers of defensiveness around going into field things are because there was some kind of initial pain there. Now, we could think, well, we're going into to fix the pain, to get rid of the pain, and the pain will be gone. The paradox of change is that as soon as you can go in and be with something and not need it to change, it tends to move and shift. But really, what we're talking about here is we're not going into fix. We want to get rid of the word fix from our vocabulary. We're just going into connect with whatever is there. Something that's really useful in this is the whole idea of the inner child, that way of thinking about this. It's like, you know, I sometimes say to people, if you're in a room and a little child comes in and the child is really, really upset, you know, you wouldn't say to the child, I think you should go and meditate for half an hour, or you should do some CBT exercises and really work on yourself. You, hopefully, you put your arms around that child and try to comfort them and tell them it's okay, and you sit with that child in the pain that they're in. We, when we sit, we realize there's this inner child there, so we go in to reconnect with that child, not to fix it, but to sit with it in the pain that it's in from some of the traumas that we were carrying. We're not there to fix it. You know, probably a lot of the trauma comes from attempts from other people, maybe authority figures or caregivers or whoever, to fix the child. That can be the trauma itself, so the last thing that the inner child needs is for us to go in and start fixing it. It just needs us to connect with it, to empathize, to feel what it's feeling, without fixing it, without changing it at all. And if we can do that, that's super, super important. So the next thing I'm going to say here is don't overanalyze the roots of your trauma. It's often way more complicated than any of us can imagine. So we like to put on our Freud caps, you know, and go in and figure out, well, why do I feel like this? The truth is, we do. That's the most important thing. We're feeling, we're in pain when we start to reconnect with these, with our body and go into this, into these feelings again. We'll find some pain in there, and it's painful. I mean, it doesn't feel nice, but the thing that makes it unbearable is that the pain is there and the defensiveness means, the layers of defense we have around it means we never actually connect with it. This is the real distinction I want to make with this. This will help you to help it make more sense. When we are in pain and we're disconnected from it, the pain is still there. We're just not consciously aware of it all the time. We're numbed out to it. That can become unbearable. We're still suffering an awful lot with that. But when you reconnect, when you connect with the pain that's inside, it's actually very, very livable with. It's the disconnection from the pain, leaving that pain inside all by itself and alone and abandoned. The reconnection with it means, yes, it's still painful, but I can totally live with this. It's actually a very beautiful thing. You actually can come to see the pain as quite beautiful, and then it starts to really begin to heal once we reconnect with that pain. But again, we're not going in to fix it or get rid of it. We're going in to just be with it the way it is, not to change it at all. So we're going in to feel it. We're not going in to theorize necessarily too much about where it came from. Quite often, a lot of this pain we're carrying is not even our own. It can be intergenerational trauma. It could be coming from our great-grandparents and their parents and their parents before them. It gets passed on from one generation to the next. Yes, it can be our own traumas that we experience in our own life, but quite often it's remarkable to see. If you look through a family tree, for instance, huh, it seems to be a pattern here. Abuse, alcoholism, going back generations in a family. So we're there to feel it necessarily, not to theorize about it too much. The last thing I would say is, just on tips about this, is if you can start to reconnect and you begin to say, okay, look, I am carrying pain here inside myself and emotional pain. I'm carrying maybe some trauma here. Start to realize that really cultivate a daily practice of going in and being with that because we can kind of fall into this unhelpful thought of, well, I'm having a good day today, so therefore I don't have to go in and connect with this, with what's going on inside myself. But if we're carrying trauma, it really is kind of something that does require ongoing daily check-ins with ourselves. It's not something that we can just say, oh, it's fine. I feel fine today, so therefore I can just ignore that. And especially if we're feeling dissociated or numbed out, we really want to start making it a daily practice of just going in and feeling whatever it is that's happening inside the body because these things take time. Remember I said it takes time to heal these things. It's not just you make contact with the feeling. It feels good to reconnect with that feeling, even though it's a painful one. And we want to start doing it habitually, doing it all the time. And the thing is, we want to do that habitually because we've been in the pattern of avoiding it and not feeling it for so long. It's quite easy to slide back into that again. So we want to make it kind of a routine. So those are a few tips, guys. I hope they're helpful because I think the main thing to emphasize in all of this is to be super patient with ourselves, right? Because again, the numbness, the dissociation happened for very, very good reasons. It didn't happen because we were having a great time. It happened because we were in pain. But more than that, it happened because we were in pain and we were alone in our pain. We didn't have that support around us. So therefore we developed this, I'm just not going to feel that. You know, for that time in our lives, it was appropriate that that happened. But now this thing comes into us again where we say, I really do want to reconnect with my emotional body once again. That goal comes in and then everything starts to change. We don't really, I mean, these tips, I hope they're helpful. But personally, I feel that life itself, once that goal is in place, life, like Jurassic Park, life finds a way. Life finds a way to open us up to go in and start to feel these feelings again. But certainly the breathing work, the attitude of I'm not going in to fix anything. I'm just going in to feel whatever is there. I think those two things are very, very key in our healing with this. So I hope that's useful information, guys. Be patient with yourself and trust that once you want to reconnect with yourself, it will happen. Take care and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.