Trauma Causes You To Be Unable to Register, Recognize, and Experience New Pain. How to Befriend This Symptom.

The first few months after I let my abusive boyfriend, I jumped at everything. Sounds. Lights. Unexpected touch. A loud person on a bus. Someone running down the hallway of my graduate school building, late to class. A cough from the person sitting next to me. My eyes stayed open and my body tense. My sympathetic nervous system, the part of our nervous system that deals with stress and activates fight or flight, was stuck in overdrive. 

Over time this dissipated. Over a year or so, even the insomnia I was experiencing, wondering if he would find me, find my new address, seek me out, and hurt me, passed. I started to relax a bit. I met my husband, we started a life. Then he died, and I was thrown into trauma again.

This time it felt like swimming under water. Like there was light above me, and I could see life happening, but I’d developed gills and started a million year evolutionary process toward growing legs and rejoining the world. It was slow. Very slow. The clock that ran through my life, in tune with society, had all but stopped.

And then I decided to try dating. I missed having a partner. I made new friends.

And this is when the new, unexpected thing occurred. I realized I could no longer tell if someone was being mean. If someone was causing me pain. And most importantly, if I was feeling any emotional pain.

I’d leave an encounter with someone, and find myself questioning if I was feeling pain. If something bad was happening. If I was supposed to hurt. I couldn’t feel it. At all. I felt like I was going crazy. There was a part of me that knew that the past me would have balked at the experience I was having; would have raised hell, or walked away, or felt, well, something akin to a painful twinge in the heart. I could feel none of that. 

I wasn’t anhedonic (state of numbness, nothingness, associated with depression): I could feel other emotions just fine. Love, happiness, joy (well, that took awhile, honestly), sadness, (very good at feeling that), etc. But pain? I could still feel the kind of pain that comes with your life breaking apart and you sinking under water, I was familiar with that kind of pain. But that was old pain. Any new pain? Nothing.

Around this time, I came across a sentence while reading a trauma book that set off a light bulb, cartoon style, over my head:

Trauma causes you to be unable to register, recognize, and experience new pain. I don’t remember where I read this. I did write it down though, so now I can share it with you.

I realized this was exactly what was happening with me. Maybe the root is somewhere in dissociation. I’d gotten so incredibly good at dissociating. I think also it has to do with the heightened state of anxiety, of alertness, of the sympathetic nervous system in overdrive. 

I’d had such intense states of both, of both overdrive, and being under water, that I’d created the perfect cocktail of some state of anhedonia specific to pain. I could no longer distinguish subtle pain from baseline (the space where we exist at rest with our anxiety, emotions, pain).  And beyond distinguishing it, I could no longer feel it in my body. I just felt curious, mostly, when it would happen. Of course, if someone was shouting in my face, calling me names, that’s a different story. I knew that was supposed to be pain. But more subtle examples of pain possibly happening (think small disagreements between two people, where you may be treated badly, but have to distinguish it happening by the stabbing feeling in your chest), became impossible for me to discern.

 I could distinguish none of that because I could no longer feel any new pain.

This was not a super power. I needed to be able to distinguish pain from non-pain, no-pain. This was making me crazy. Keeping me awake at night, because I could actually un-think any feelings my body was telling me I was supposed to have. It was maddening. This went on for years. It still happens to me, fairly often, more than not. I had to figure it out.

So, how do I manage now? 

These are some of the ways I’ve learned to befriend this symptom: 

I’ve gotten much better at boundaries. I’ve learned, instead of thinking in circles, to apply my thinking to how I want to be treated and what I want for my life. Then I think about if my relationships are fulfilling that path, and are feeding me, in positive ways. I think my way through it. I make slow decisions. I turn to my intuition. I let it be ok that it takes me time, and that I’m not the same. 

I check in with others. I ask for opinions on whether this relational experience I’m having is something they would be upset about. If they would want to be treated better. If they would feel pain. Then I consider their answer, and decide if I should tighten or expand my boundaries based on that, plus my own experience.

I’ve also learned to move back into my body, through yoga for trauma practices (which I teach), through exercise, and through just spending time breathing, existing, bathing, dressing, grooming, stretching. Anything that brings me back to my body, and lets me ground into something. This is a direct counterpoint to dissociation, and also allows my parasympathetic system to activate, which increases relaxation, bringing my baseline down millimeter by millimeter over time. 

But mostly, I embrace my sea legs, thank the breath that breathes the water, and keep moving toward the light.