Untitled Story: I’m struggling to name things like articles and my feelings
Today I told my therapist I was feeling numb. I’ve just been really out of touch with my emotions during this pandemic and when someone asks me how I’m doing I don’t know how to answer them. I literally don’t what I’m feeling.
I’m not even really sure I’m feeling anything.
She mentioned I could be experiencing something called “emotional flooding”—when two or more coinciding, overwhelming emotions make an individual feel helpless and/or trapped. I looked it up (always the skeptic) and it’s actually a real thing. I guess it can trigger your body’s fight/flight/freeze response. And I guess in my case, I’m in freeze mode.
We talked about how it’s most likely my brain’s way of protecting me from painful emotions, or complex, hard-to-process emotions. It’s fairly typical in response to trauma, both individual and collective like this whole Covid nightmare.
Hello trauma, goodbye emotion
It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this. When I was 23, my boyfriend of 2 years was in a motocross accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. And I remember in the days, weeks and months I spent living in the hospital with him, multiple people complimented me on “how well I was handling it.”
