Becoming Numb

If you ever have a filling at the dentist, a wound stitched up in the ER, or a major surgery, anesthesia is always given first to numb your body to any pain during the encounter. Sometimes it’s localized to a specific area and other times it affects the whole body (putting you to sleep).

Anesthesia is amazing for the purpose of eliminating the pain that we would otherwise feel during a procedure. The caveat is that it doesn’t only numb pain, it numbs all physical feeling. Any nerve in the surrounding area of injected anesthesia will become numb.

When you can’t feel your lips, mouth, or face it’s tough to do a basic task like eating. (This scene from “Christmas with the Kranks” is a good visual and always makes me laugh.)

Loss of feeling also means the inability to enjoy things like the embrace of a loved one or the warmth of the sun on your skin.

Basically, when you cease to feel anything you cease to experience life!

Thankfully, the numbing effects of anesthesia only last so long. Unless it continues to be injected, anesthesia eventually wears off and restores all sensation to the body, allowing you to get back to living.

When it comes to internal feelings—our emotions—the numbing effect is much the same.

In the moments that painful emotions present themselves we would love nothing more than to numb their sensation in our life.

Loss, heartbreak, unmet expectations, trauma, all produce feelings that we would rather live without; so we concoct our own “anesthesia” in an effort to numb the painful effects of these situations.

Stress eating, binge-watching tv, spending sprees, drinking and partying, and substance use are all coping mechanisms we use to distract and numb ourselves from what we don’t want to feel. But, as soon as the intended effects wear off, we’re right back where we started; the only way to keep the pain suppressed is to continue the application of these numbing agents.

On top of all this, we also start pushing others away and cutting off close relationships for fear that they might bring our emotions back to the surface and hurt us all over again.

After long enough, a person becomes entirely numb. They no longer care about the things they used to (or anything for that matter), there is nothing that brings them joy, they have no dreams for the future, and they are alone.

When we try to numb ourselves to bad feelings we also become numb to all feelings. It’s not just pain, but happiness, that diminishes. It’s not just fear, but excitement, that fades away. No one ever plans to block the good feelings, of course, but that’s just the nature of the beast. In choosing to numb our pain we choose to forfeit life.

There are times though, some of them beyond our control, that the feeling of pain is too intense to live with. It is so overwhelming that we have to become numb for the sake of survival…

I’ve been reading through the book Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. In it, the main character has had to numb herself to avoid feeling the immense pain of her past. As the story progresses though, it becomes evident just how much this emotional suppression is negatively affecting her present circumstances.

{{{Content Warning: Below, I share some of the details of the main characters story, which includes sexual abuse. While the story is fictional, the content mentioned is a reality for many people who may be triggered by reading about it. If that’s you, I would suggest stopping here; or, at the least, proceeding with caution and awareness of said content and your ability to read it un-triggered. }}}

In Redeeming Love (a fictional retelling of Hosea and Gomer), God tells a man named Michael to go and marry Angel—a prostitute. He shows her unconditional love while she shows him stubbornness and unfaithfulness. But the story begins long before their marriage, back when Angel was just a little girl.

Angel’s mother was the mistress of her father—a man who had another life and family elsewhere that got all of his affection. By age 8, her mother had passed and she was left with a poor uncle who sold her off to a man that would be able to raise and care for her. This man didn’t care for her at all though; he used her for his own sexual pleasure.

When Angel was old enough to try and make it on her own, she ran away. But she ended up in back-to-back relationships with abusive men. Angel eventually escaped these men but, with no money or possessions to her name, she began working at a brothel.

It’s at this point that Michael passes her in the street and hears God tell him that she is the woman he’s to marry.

As they start their marriage, there’s a persistent struggle between Michael and Angel. He is only trying to show her love and doesn’t understand the walls she has put up; she is only protecting herself and has no understanding of real love and healthy relationships.

Angel was unwanted by her father, sold by her uncle, and then used by every other man she had known. No man had ever genuinely cared for her before, so why would Michael be any different? She couldn’t risk opening up her heart and her emotions to someone who might hurt her again.

Angel’s lifelong traumas pushed her to a point where she had no choice but to numb all feelings; she couldn’t keep feeling this pain over and over.

“Angel counted herself lucky she lacked the ability to love. Falling in love meant you lost control of your emotions and your will and your life. And Angel couldn’t risk that, even with this man.” (Page 215 of Redeeming Love)

I don’t blame Angel for becoming numb after all she had been through; her mind and body simply responded to the trauma it was presented. What saddens me though, is the lies that pain makes her believe.

Angel counts herself lucky that she doesn’t have love? She believes that love means losing your life? True love is quite the opposite: we are lucky when we have it and it gives us life!

Pain will so drastically distort what was originally meant to be beautiful and fulfilling, causing us to push it away and fear its presence. Angel couldn’t accept love because of what her pain told her about it. The tragedy is: the longer that she numbed herself and kept her walls up, the more she pushed away the love that could bring renewed life and joy.

You and I are just like Angel. Sure, our circumstances might be different, but we still face things that have us wanting to become numb just the same. And the lies that pain feeds us makes us believe we need to keep ourselves numb forever.

The pain of a broken heart says to never trust another person with our love. The pain of a lost dream tells us we can never find anything else that brings happiness.

So we medicate, and we suppress, and we numb.

And when good things do come along we either miss them entirely or push them away; because we can’t possibly allow ourselves to feel again and risk the chance of getting hurt.

I want to leave you with this thought:

Is numbing your pain worth the cost of missing out on life?

To feel is to live—the good and the bad feelings, the beautiful and the ugly ones. I know that pain can be overwhelming and hopeless and it feels like it has the final say in our life, but it doesn’t.

Despite the pain we feel in this world there is also so much good we can feel. Don’t give up this one life you get because pain tells you that your only option is to become numb.

Here’s how I see it: Numbing my heart to pain is not worth the cost of numbing my heart to love, joy, excitement, or peace. Pushing people away to guard myself is not worth losing lifelong, healthy relationships. And, suppressing my emotions is not worth going through the rest of my life feeling nothing.

-Stephanie Lauren Jordan