Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you go numb
A therapist repeating what your partner said is information. Your partner turning to you and saying it, in their own voice, is an event. That is why so much of couple work is arranged so the words go across the room rather than through the middle. If you are the one saying it, keep it short and say it to them rather than about them, and give it a moment before anything else happens.
True believers are those whose hearts tremble with awe when God is mentioned (Quran 8:2). Hearts are described as responsive to being addressed, which is what makes who says a thing matter so much.
الأنفال
إِنَّمَا ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَ ٱلَّذِينَ إِذَا ذُكِرَ ٱللَّهُ وَجِلَتۡ قُلُوبُهُمۡ وَإِذَا تُلِيَتۡ عَلَيۡهِمۡ ءَايَٰتُهُۥ زَادَتۡهُمۡ إِيمَٰنࣰ ا وَعَلَىٰ رَبِّهِمۡ يَتَوَكَّلُونَ
true believers are those whose hearts tremble with awe when God is mentioned, whose faith increases when His revelations are recited to them, who put their trust in their Lord
Qur’an 8:2read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Deliberately raising arousal can bring feeling back. In a small controlled study, people with depersonalisation showed blunted physiological arousal, and using biofeedback to raise it reduced their sense of being disembodied and numb. The sample was small, so treat it as a promising line rather than an established one.
Schoenberg PL, Sierra M, David AS. (2012). Psychophysiological investigations in depersonalization disorder and effects of electrodermal biofeedback.. Journal of trauma & dissociation : the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Words from the person you are attached to reach places that the same words from anyone else do not.
This needs a partner who can be steady while it is said; if the room is not safe yet, that comes first.
Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.
If a medicine has taken the edge off everything, including the good things, that is worth raising with whoever prescribed it. Taking the sharpness out of pain is one thing. Feeling nothing at all is not a way to live.
Ask what is happening in the body right now, in the moment it happens, rather than asking afterwards what the feeling was.