Emotional Numbness: What It Means and How to Treat It

You discovered your husband was unfaithful. Now you just feel numb. You’re disconnected from your feelings, don’t want to be with or confide in others, and are unsure how to heal or what to do next. Emotional numbness is a common response to betrayal trauma. It’s how your mind protects itself from overwhelming pain. You can overcome this survival response as you heal from betrayal.

What Is Emotional Numbness?

Emotional numbness is when you feel disconnected from your emotions or unable to experience typical emotional responses. It manifests as a sense of emptiness, detachment, or indifference, even in situations that would normally evoke strong emotions, like sadness, anger, joy, or love.

Common causes of emotional numbness include:

• Trauma, including betrayal trauma
• Grief or loss
• Chronic stress
• Mental illness
• Being emotionally overwhelmed

While people respond to emotional stressors differently, there are some common signs or symptoms you may look for to know if you are experiencing emotional numbness.

Signs of emotional numbness include:

• Feeling “flat” or incapable of experiencing any type of emotion
• Indifference toward or loss of interest in things that used to matter to you
• Feeling detached from yourself and others
• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Disconnection from your thoughts or experiences, or feeling distant, even when you’re present
• Avoiding emotional conversations or situations
• Withdrawing from relationships or social situations

Why Emotional Numbness Happens After Infidelity

Emotional numbness is a common response to infidelity. That’s because when someone you trust most breaks that bond, your brain goes into survival mode, shutting down emotional responses to protect you from the pain. You know logically that this painful thing happened, but you feel disconnected from it, as if it’s happening to someone else.

This numbness is part of your body’s natural trauma response. Just like the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions, emotional shutdown is a way to cope with overwhelming stress. After infidelity, your brain struggles to process the betrayal, the loss of safety, and the flood of emotions that follows. Rather than deal with intense grief, anger, confusion, or fear all at once, it dulls them or turns them off entirely.

Emotional numbness might offer temporary relief, but it can also leave you feeling stuck and unable to move forward or reconnect with yourself and others. That’s why it’s important to recognize it for what it is and work to get unstuck. 

The Cost of Emotional Numbness

You may wonder why you can’t just embrace this emotional numbness. After all, your body is protecting you from what happened. And it’s easier to avoid dealing with the emotions than it is to face reality. But there are some costs to emotional numbness that you want to avoid.

Costs of emotional numbness include:

• Disconnection. Emotional numbness means you’re disconnected from everyone and everything, including yourself. You may feel like a stranger to yourself, uncertain of what you think, want, feel, or even need. It’s difficult to make decisions and have agency when you’re emotionally disconnected.
• Relationship Strain. Numbness is confusing to others and makes it difficult for them to connect with you and vice versa during a time when you really need connection and the support of others.
• Delayed Healing. Avoiding the pain won’t make it go away. You’re just burying it. If you don’t process it at some point, it will resurface later in your physical and mental health.
• Joylessness. You can’t just numb the emotions you want to. When you numb the negative emotions, you also oppress the positive ones. Things that used to make you happy now seem meaningless. A life without joy is no way to live long term.

Healing From Emotional Numbness

Healing from emotional numbness after infidelity is a gradual process of reconnecting with your feelings, rebuilding your sense of self, and learning to trust again. Here’s what that healing journey often looks like.

Acknowledging the Issue

The first step is noticing the numbness. It may feel like emptiness, emotional distance, or a lack of reaction to things that used to matter. Recognizing and naming it is the first step toward healing.

Working With a Professional

People who experience betrayal trauma often need help from a mental health professional to process the trauma and learn to heal. Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help you understand your emotions, process your experience, and move forward in your new reality. You may also consider a betrayal trauma group where you can share with and learn from others with similar experiences.

Reconnecting With Your Body

Disconnection from the body is often a component of emotional numbness. Gentle practices like yoga, breathwork, or walking in nature can help you start to feel again. This type of grounding helps the nervous system move out of shutdown mode and into a place where healing can happen.

Creating Safety

Feeling again requires safety. That requires setting boundaries with people, places, or things that may trigger you, and building an internal sense of safety through self-compassion, calming rituals, and supportive routines. Emotional numbness often lifts when your body and mind feel secure enough to handle what’s underneath.

Allowing Emotions to Surface

Healing means making space for feelings when they happen. It might not be comfortable to cry when something reminds you of your partner, but it’s healthy to have emotions. Your tears and sadness are signs that your emotions are resurfacing.

Rebuilding Trust in Yourself

Betrayal makes you doubt your judgment or question what you think you know. Part of healing from numbness is rebuilding a relationship with yourself and learning to trust yourself again. You have to learn to trust yourself again before you can trust others. 

Practicing Patience

You didn’t expect any of this to happen, which means it shocked your body and mind. It’s going to take time to recover from that shock. Healing after infidelity takes time and patience, but you deserve to heal.

Dealing With Emotional Numbness

Emotional numbness helped you survive the pain of betrayal, but healing helps you live again. With the right support, you can begin to feel, trust, and thrive on the other side of infidelity. You deserve more than just surviving. You deserve to feel fully alive. Contact Begin Again Institute for help. Our 6-Day Partner Intensive can help you overcome the pain of betrayal trauma.