There’s a kind of difficulty that doesn’t look like difficulty from the outside, and is hard to name from the inside. You know what you should feel. You can describe it accurately. You understand why it would be there. And it isn’t there.
I’m thinking about something more specific than numbness. Numbness usually has a quality of suppression, something pushed down. What I’m describing is different: the feeling doesn’t arrive. The person isn’t withholding it. They reason about their emotional life with considerable clarity, and what they’re reasoning about never quite becomes experience.
In my work with clients, I’ve sat with people who can tell me, in detail and with genuine insight, what their grief about something is like, why it’s present, what it means. And then will tell me, equally genuinely, that they don’t feel grieved. The understanding is real. The affect is absent.
Psychoanalytic thinking would call this affect isolation: a defensive structure in which the cognitive content of an experience is split off from its emotional charge. The thought is permitted. The feeling that belongs to it is not. It developed, almost certainly, because in some earlier environment the feeling was too much, or was not responded to in ways that made it safe to have, or both. The defence is not weakness. It was a solution to a real problem.
But it costs something. Relationships feel at one remove. Moments that should register as significant don’t quite land. There’s a quality of watching your own life from a slight distance, understanding it well, not quite inhabiting it.
What does therapy offer here? Partly, I think, a different kind of attention: one that stays close to what is actually happening in the moment rather than what is being thought about it. What I’m noticing as you tell me this. What arrives in the room, however briefly. Not the understanding, which is already considerable. The thing underneath the understanding, which has been waiting a long time to be encountered differently.
Do you find it easier to analyse your feelings than to feel them? Most people who come to mind with this pattern recognise exactly what I mean by that question.
Knowing what you should feel and actually feeling it are different capacities. The gap between them is not a character flaw. It’s something that formed for a reason, and something that can change.