EMDR and Emotional Numbness: How It Helps You Feel Again
- Dennis Guyvan
- Oct 7
- 10 min read
I. Introduction
Have you ever said, “I feel like I’m just going through the motions”?
Maybe you’ve found yourself smiling at the right times, showing up for others, and doing all the “right” things—but deep down, you feel distant, disconnected, or completely numb. You know what you're supposed to feel, but it's like something inside is muted—or missing.
This is emotional numbness. And if you’ve experienced it, you’re not alone—and you’re not broken.
In fact, emotional numbness is often your nervous system’s way of protecting you. When life becomes too overwhelming, too unsafe, or too painful, the body can shut down emotional processing to help you survive. It’s not a flaw—it’s biology. But what once helped you cope may now be keeping you from truly living.
Here’s the good news: you can reconnect. You can feel again—gently, safely, and at your own pace.
That’s where EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) comes in. In my work offering EMDR therapy in Denver, I help clients understand and gently unwind the protective freeze response that keeps emotions locked away. The goal isn’t to overwhelm you—it’s to help you gradually return to emotional aliveness.
Let’s explore what emotional numbness really is—and how EMDR helps.
II. What Is Emotional Numbness—And Why Does It Happen?
Emotional numbness is often misunderstood. People assume it means you’re cold, distant, or disconnected on purpose. But in reality, numbness is a nervous system shutdown—a form of protection your body has developed in response to stress or trauma.
Scientifically, this shutdown is linked to the dorsal vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system, part of what’s known in trauma work as the freeze response. When fight or flight aren’t options, the body goes still. Emotions, sensations, and energy get dialed down or shut off completely.
This can happen for many reasons:
Emotional neglect or invalidation during childhood
Chronic overwhelm or long-term stress
Traumatic experiences where it wasn’t safe to feel or express
Loss, grief, or unresolved attachment wounds
Feeling like your emotions were “too much” or “not allowed”
And over time, your system learns:
“If feeling isn’t safe… then it’s safer not to feel.”
This protective response makes sense—but it comes at a cost. When you shut down your pain, you often shut down your joy, connection, vulnerability, creativity, and passion too.
Common signs of emotional numbness include:
Feeling detached or “flat” even in emotional moments
Not knowing what you feel—or feeling like you feel nothing
Trouble crying, laughing, or connecting deeply with others
Feeling like you’re observing your life rather than living it
Knowing what’s expected emotionally but feeling unable to access it
These are not personality traits—they’re symptoms. And like all symptoms, they carry a message.
The message?
Your body is trying to protect you.
And it’s time to support it in feeling safe again.
This is why traditional talk therapy alone often falls short. You can’t logic your way back to feeling. You need to engage the nervous system directly.That’s where EMDR therapy comes in.
III. Why Talk Therapy Often Isn’t Enough
If you’ve already tried talk therapy to work through emotional numbness, you might have felt some relief—or you may have found yourself hitting a wall. You understand your past. You know your patterns. You’ve even said things like:
“I know what I should feel… but I just don’t.”“I can explain everything, but I still feel disconnected.”
That’s not a failure on your part. And it doesn’t mean therapy hasn’t helped—it just means you’re ready to go deeper.
Talk therapy works through the cognitive brain—the part of us that makes sense of things, finds meaning, and reflects. But emotional numbness doesn’t live in the thinking brain. It lives in the body, in the emotional and survival centers of the nervous system.
To truly reconnect with your emotions, you need a therapy that reaches those deeper layers.
That’s why EMDR therapy can be so transformative—because it bypasses overanalysis and works directly with the stored emotional and physiological imprints from past experiences.
In my work offering EMDR therapy in Denver, I help clients shift from insight to integration—supporting not just understanding, but real emotional reawakening.
IV. How EMDR Therapy Helps You Feel Again
So how does EMDR actually help you move from numbness to feeling?
Let’s break it down.
1. EMDR Helps Identify the Roots of Emotional Shutdown
Emotional numbness doesn’t just happen randomly. It’s usually connected to experiences—sometimes early in life, sometimes more recent—where feeling became overwhelming or unsafe.
This might include:
Repeated emotional invalidation (“You’re too sensitive.”)
Abuse or neglect that made emotion feel dangerous
Situations where expressing emotion led to punishment, rejection, or chaos
EMDR therapy helps us gently identify and target those experiences without forcing you to relive them. Even if you don’t have a clear memory, we can work with sensations, images, and emotional themes that live in the body.
2. Reprocessing the Freeze Response
Through bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements or tapping), EMDR helps your brain and nervous system reprocess unintegrated material. This isn’t about digging things up just to talk about them—it’s about helping your system finally complete the emotional and physiological responses that got stuck.
As the protective freeze response begins to loosen, clients often notice subtle changes like:
A lump in the throat that finally releases
The ability to cry for the first time in years
A wave of emotion that feels unfamiliar but safe
The goal is not to overwhelm you with feeling—it’s to gently restore your natural emotional rhythm.
3. Reconnecting You to Emotion and Embodied Self-Awareness
Once your system begins to thaw, your emotional range starts to return. You may begin to:
Feel moved by things again—music, memories, art, connection
Access a more authentic “yes” and “no” from your body
Express your needs and emotions with more clarity
Experience joy, grief, anger, and softness in healthy, regulated ways
It’s not about being emotional all the time—it’s about having full access to your internal world again.
In my practice offering EMDR therapy in Denver, this is one of the most rewarding parts of the work: watching clients slowly come back online—feeling, connecting, and trusting themselves more than they ever thought possible.
V. What Clients Often Say When They Start to Feel Again
One of the most powerful moments in EMDR therapy is when emotional numbness begins to thaw.
It doesn’t usually happen all at once. Sometimes, it starts with a single tear. Or the sudden realization that a song actually moved you. Or the surprise of feeling anger—real, clear, energizing—for the first time in years.
Clients often describe this experience with a mix of wonder, fear, and relief. They’ll say things like:
“I didn’t know I could still cry.”
“I was scared to feel, but once I did—it felt like a release.”
“It’s not overwhelming… it’s more like I’m waking up.”
Others worry that once the door to emotion opens, they won’t be able to handle it. But here’s what we’ve seen time and time again in EMDR therapy in Denver: When you re-enter your emotional life with safety, support, and pacing—your system can handle more than you think.
That’s because EMDR is not about dumping emotion into your lap. It’s about helping your nervous system feel safe enough to let those emotions come back online—one layer at a time.
In this space, even the first hints of feeling are worth celebrating:
The tear that wasn’t held back
The tension in your chest finally softening
The flicker of joy you hadn’t felt in months—or years
These are signs that your emotional body is reawakening. That what was once shut down is starting to come back alive—not as a flood, but as a flow.
And once that flow begins, you don’t just feel emotions.
You start to feel yourself again.
VI. You Don’t Have to Feel Everything All at Once
One of the biggest fears people carry—especially when they’ve been numb for a long time—is:
“What if all the feelings come back at once and I can’t handle it?”
That fear makes total sense.If your emotional system has been on lockdown for years, the idea of reopening it can feel terrifying. You might wonder:
“Will I be flooded?”
“Will I fall apart?”
“Will I get stuck in pain I can’t escape?”
These concerns are valid—and they’re also exactly why EMDR therapy is designed to be gentle, titrated, and resourced.
In my work offering EMDR therapy in Denver, I never push clients to dive into overwhelming material. Instead, we move at your nervous system’s natural pace. We build safety and capacity before we process anything deep. That way, you’re not just surviving the emotions—you’re integrating them.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
🌀 Titration
We process emotional content in small, manageable doses. This allows your body to stay regulated while still accessing deeper material. Think of it like dipping your toe in the water, rather than being thrown into the deep end.
🧘♀️ Resourcing
Before doing any trauma work, we develop internal tools to help you ground, soothe, and regulate. This might include visualization, breathwork, movement, or connecting with memories of strength and support. These tools stay with you—both during and between sessions.
🧠 Dual Awareness
EMDR supports what we call "dual awareness"—you can hold one foot in the past (to process), and one foot in the present (to stay safe). You’re never alone with the emotion. You’re guided through it, and you’re always in control.
So no—you don’t have to feel everything at once.
You don’t have to be overwhelmed to heal.
You don’t have to “rip off the Band-Aid.”
You get to move slowly.
You get to listen to your body.
You get to feel again—with safety, not chaos.
And in that space, what was once terrifying starts to feel… doable. And eventually, empowering.
VII. What Healing Emotional Numbness Feels Like
So what happens when you start to feel again—not all at once, but gradually, safely, and at your own pace?
At first, it may feel unfamiliar. Tender. Maybe even a little scary.But over time, as your emotional body reawakens, it begins to feel like coming home.
Healing emotional numbness isn’t about “becoming emotional” or crying all the time. It’s about restoring your capacity to feel fully and authentically. To be connected to your inner experience in real-time—not from the outside looking in.
Clients who’ve worked through numbness using EMDR therapy often describe it like this:
“I feel more like myself again.”
“I didn’t even realize how disconnected I was until I wasn’t.”
“It’s like I’m present in my own life again.”
Here are just a few things that can return as your emotional system heals:
💧 Tears That Actually Release Something
You’re no longer holding back because it feels unsafe—you’re allowing your body to let go.
❤️ Joy That Feels Real
Not performative or forced. Just a spontaneous sense of lightness, humor, or delight.
🎨 Creative Energy and Aliveness
When numbness lifts, so does the fog. You start to feel inspired, connected to beauty, and more like a participant in life—not a passive observer.
👥 Emotional Presence in Relationships
You’re able to connect more deeply—not by effort, but by simply being in your body and your truth.
🔄 Faster Recovery From Emotional Ups and Downs
You still feel hard things—but they don’t overwhelm you. You can process, soothe, and move through instead of getting stuck.
This is what EMDR therapy helps make possible. Not by “fixing” you, but by helping your system remember that it’s safe to be here. Safe to feel. Safe to be human again.
In my practice offering EMDR therapy in Denver, I’ve witnessed this shift again and again—and it never gets old. Watching clients rediscover their emotional world is one of the most sacred parts of this work.
VIII. You Deserve to Feel Again
If you’ve been emotionally numb for a long time, you may have started to believe it’s just who you are.
Maybe you’ve told yourself:
“I’m just not an emotional person.”
“I don’t feel things like other people do.”
“Maybe I’ve been through too much to ever come back from it.”
But numbness isn’t your identity.
It’s a survival state your body chose to keep you safe.
And if you’re reading this… something in you is ready to come back to life.
With the right support, you can feel again—not in a chaotic, overwhelming way, but in a grounded, embodied, deeply human way. You can access joy, sadness, connection, creativity, tenderness. You can reconnect to your truth, your body, and your full range of emotional experience.
EMDR therapy offers a trauma-informed, neuroscience-based path for that return.
In my practice offering EMDR therapy in Denver, I walk alongside clients who are waking up from emotional shutdown. Gently. With compassion. At a pace that feels safe. Whether your numbness started after trauma, loss, burnout, or years of emotional suppression—it’s not too late to come home to yourself.
💬 Curious if EMDR therapy is right for you?
I offer a free 30-minute Zoom consultation to help you explore whether this work feels like a fit for your healing journey.
You don’t have to stay numb.
You don’t have to live on autopilot.
You deserve to feel again—fully, safely, and on your own terms.
Book your free consultation today—and let’s take the next step together.
References
Badenoch, B. (2008). Being a Brain-Wise Therapist: A Practical Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology. W. W. Norton & Company.
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Rothschild, B. (2000). The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. W. W. Norton & Company.
Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
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Dennis Guyvan, a therapist in Denver, CO. He provides individual in-person/online therapy and life coaching in Denver, CO and online coaching worldwide . Schedule your free 30-minute therapy consultation with Dennis Guyvan.
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