What’s the scientific explanation to why peoples emotions go numb when they go through intense mental trauma?
In: 1
In short:
Our mind is a powerful tool, and we can use being emotionally numb as a way of diverting the feelings. The chemicals associated with such actions in your mind are not present; or the effects of such chemicals have lost their potency.
In long, I’ll firstly start with the psychological angle of framing:
Everyone has different ways of handling trauma, both physically and mentally. Your body is a killing machine, and debatably the greatest natural killing machine on earth due to our intellect.
Now us being naturally bred to survive, it would be useless if we were predators that couldn’t handle harsh mental conditions – imagine if every time you got lost in a shopping mall you curled up and committed suicide.
Now applying this to actual severe and intense trauma your body has a few options:
– Denial
– Acceptance
– Enjoyment and Psychosis
– Diversion
These are essentially just the very simplified defence modes your brain can go into, their is obviously more complex social behaviours that occur but again for the most part your brain will be in one of these special categories.
In regards to your answer, see diversion.
People who go into denial, are unwilling to admit what they have done – their brain has taken on the mental load and realised it can’t handle it. Most people in denial will then proceed to go into other stages such as bargaining and anger, before eventually trying to accept the causality.
Acceptance, is what the most mentally strong individuals do and it’s also the route which allows for the most rationale behaviour – they accept the trauma for what it is and try and move past it. In regards to torture for example, if someone cuts off your arm then frankly losing a few sheds of skin is not going to be as bothersome. This is why the military train their special forces to be highly resilient so they can think rationally.
Enjoyment and Psychosis, is mostly reserved for psychotic individuals. They have lost their humanity in a sense, they were so mentally broken by the incident they can’t keep a track on themselves. Usually these people need severe medical help.
Now Diversion is a very complex one as it’s a mix of the above, your mind is capable of playing tricks even on itself – sometimes your mind is unwilling to admit the full truth of what has happened, or you have diverted to a coping tactic such as being emotionally numb to inherently ignore any emotions that may come out of the incident. People who have diverted their emotions or thoughts haven’t exactly dealt with the solution, they just found a way to pretend it isn’t what it actually is. The difference between this and acceptance, is that people who have accepted the issue understand the mental trauma they went through – they don’t try and downplay it and they are the same person they were previously, just with an added experience. Someone who’s diverted their trauma, such as by being numb to it, is still quite capable of feeling the full blunt force of the trauma – they are just trying to pretend it means nothing as if it meant something they’d break down.
Biologically speaking:
Your mind associates certain actions with chemicals, its why you cry when your parents pass and how you feel happy when you kiss someone. Through training or exposure to certain events, these chemicals can stop being produced for certain thoughts – and instead may encourage other chemicals to be released. Being emotional is a full body experience whether you like it or not.
Additionally, overdosing on certain chemicals – even ones produced in your body – can result in the chemical losing its potency. If you are always sad, the effect that sadness has on your mind is minimal and in most circumstances will be reflected in your physique permanently. As such when you go through immense trauma, the potency of such chemicals is highly present and as such comparatively less traumatic experiences no longer seem as bad. Typically then you can use this to justify more meaningless emotional experiences, which then disassociates them from sadness permanently.
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