(This video is recorded from a YouTube LIVE session)
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“Numbing vulnerability is especially debilitating
because it doesn’t just deaden the pain of our difficult experiences; numbing vulnerability also dulls our experiences of love, joy, belonging, creativity and empathy. We can’t selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light.”
This week has been a really intense week for me. One of my absolute best friends who is like a brother to me has been in critical care for a heart condition and had his 2nd open heart surgery…
And it’s been amazing to see how I cope with all of it. And I’ll be honest, I’ve gone back to some of my old numbing patterns.
This is just so common, I’ve had so many conversations this week with different people in the waiting room about how we numb, why we numb and I just feel like we really need to talk about it.
And the truth is there are different times we numb. We certainly tend to numb in crisis. But we also numb in our regular everyday lives.
And one of my desires for you is to live fully alive.
To really be able to embrace all of life and be present for it and I believe that it’s impossible to live a full life, a life where you are fully awake when you are stuck in patterns of numbing.
Numbing is what we do when we can’t face or process the emotions we are feeling, and we need to bury them. And then we consciously or unconsciously use a buffer to ignore and avoid processing those emotions and deaden the pain of the current uncomfortable emotion.
So let’s take a look at how we numb.
What’s your drug of choice?
Ways of Numbing:
Being crazy busy
Eating when we are not hungry
Sleeping when we are not tired
Social Media
TV/Netflix
Shopping
Drinking/Drugs
Sex/Porn/Fantasizing
We can actually numb with literally anything. Whatever dulls the sensation of being uncomfortable, that is numbing.
And just to be clear – none of these things are the enemy. A drink, a delicious meal, watching a show, none of these things are bad. You aren’t doing anything bad, it’s just when we use these things to numb out the emotion and stuff it down.
But does that glass of wine or 5 pieces of cake really make us feel better in long run? Does it really make us deeply happy?
Numbing robs us of the opportunity be fully alive.
Living a life where we must cope constantly is prison.
It’s not real. It’s not authentic. It’s not vulnerable.
It’s essentially one big fat lie of pretending that we are ok and can handle it all.
Fake pleasure, fake pleasure, fake pleasure.
Sure it feels good in the moment and it’s an illusion of happiness, but it’s not real happiness. Because the undercurrent is anxiety of all these emotions we are not willing to feel and that we are afraid of.
See, I believe that to combat numbing we have to be vulnerable and honest.
So in this episode, we’re going to talk about the 4 keys to combat numbing.
and I have a few questions for you to ask yourself:
How do I numb those difficult feelings? My first instinct is to ____________ ?
What feelings trigger me to begin numbing? Loneliness, shame, rejection, fear of success, fear of failure etc ..when I feel __________.
What does numbing cost me? When I numb I miss out on _____________?
What is a healthy way to cope when I feel triggered? When I feel the instinct to _________, I will now choose to ________ instead of _________ because it gives me what I am really craving.
