Numb

This blog is going to be pretty personal. But hey, I tell it like it is.

Growing up, I was always a pretty emotional person. Just ask my high school best friend, Scott. He'll vouch for me. So would Jane, my college roommate.

And somewhere in the last 6 years, that changed. It was a gradual process, so much so that I didn't notice it happening until people close to me started saying they wished I'd share my feelings more. It baffled me when they said that. Me? Not sharing my feelings? That's like saying I don't eat enough cookies. (Don't worry, I do.)

But when I took a closer look, I realized they were right. And I realized why. My marriage was painful for a long time. And I'm not putting all that blame on my ex, I'm just saying it was hard. And at some point I developed the ability to become numb to it. I'd never had the ability to numb my emotions before, but I guess when you hurt enough it turns into a callous. So it wasn't that I wasn't sharing my feelings...it was that I wasn't feeling them very often in the first place.

But you know how in the movie Click, when he starts fast forwarding through the negative things like fights with his wife and his kids annoying him, he finds that the remote is automatically skipping times with his wife and kids? Even the good times? That's kind of what happened. When I learned to become numb in the area of my marriage, I didn't just become numb to the pain. I became numb to the relationship. I think that's one reason the divorce process was so much easier for me than it is for most people. Someone in the video at my Divorce Care class said, "You only grieve for the things you care about." And that summed it up for me. I wasn't grieving because I didn't care anymore.

That's not to say I'd given up or stopped loving my husband during the marriage. I was doing what I could to fight for us. It's just that I was doing it numbly. Like drinking a glass of water when your mouth is still numb from the dentist. You can get the water into your stomach, but you haven't enjoyed the refreshment of the cool water.

Anyway, I came to this realization several months ago, it's not new to me now. What is new is that I started to see this habit of numbness creeping up again when something was starting to feel painful. Only it wasn't painful enough yet to become calloused, so I couldn't really numb it. But I found myself subconsciously transferring my emotion of pain and disappointment to anger. Because anger didn't feel quite as bad. So if I could make myself feel that instead, that would be an improvement.

Fortunately, I recognized this in myself within a couple of days. And I'm giving it to God and asking him to help me be emotionally healthy. Not oversensitive, but not numb, either. Because I don't want to become so emotionally numb that I can't feel joy anymore.