Episode 320
E 320: Tammys takes #23: Emotional Numbness, Childhood Trauma & Nervous System Healing
Are you functioning but not really feeling?
If you grew up in dysfunction, emotional neglect, addiction, chaos, criticism, or unpredictability, emotional numbness may have become a survival response.
In this episode of Tammy’s Takes, Tammy Vincent follows up on her conversation with Megan Margherio to explore why adult children of dysfunction often feel disconnected from themselves, struggle with nervous system dysregulation, and stay stuck in survival mode long after childhood ends.
Tammy breaks down:
✔ Emotional numbness and childhood trauma
✔ Nervous system healing and regulation
✔ Why peace and safety can feel uncomfortable
✔ Survival mode, hypervigilance, and emotional shutdown
✔ Why adult children struggle to feel joy
✔ Body awareness and emotional healing practices
✔ How to stop spiraling and reconnect with yourself
✔ Practical nervous system tools you can use today
If you’ve ever wondered, “Why do I feel numb even though my life looks okay?” this episode is for you.
Because you are not broken. You adapted.
Listen to Tammy’s full episode with Megan Margherio for deeper healing around emotional numbness and trauma recovery.
Book your complimentary Clarity & Calm Call here:
https://calendly.com/tammyvincent/clarity-and-
Transcript
Well, hello, everybody.
Speaker A:Welcome back to Tammy's Takes, where we take powerful conversations with our guests and turn them into practical strategies you can use right here, right now.
Speaker A:So today I am going back to yesterday's episode with Megan Mergario, and I want to talk about something that I think many of you are going to really find hit home, especially if you grew up in the kind of chaos that we talk about on this program.
Speaker A:The emotional neglect, the addiction.
Speaker A:We talked yesterday about emotional numbness, and I want to say something right off the gate, and I think people need to hear it.
Speaker A:Just because you're functioning doesn't mean you're feeling.
Speaker A:Just because you're functioning doesn't mean you are feeling.
Speaker A:You can be successful, you can be helper, you can be a fixer, you can be the strong one.
Speaker A:You can even be the person everybody comes to, and you can still feel completely disconnected from yourself.
Speaker A:That numbness doesn't mean you're broken.
Speaker A:It usually means that your nervous system just learned how to survive.
Speaker A:And it was an overwhelm for so long, and.
Speaker A:And now it needs to kind of slow down.
Speaker A:And in order to do that, to protect itself, it literally shuts down and you become emotionally numb.
Speaker A:One thing that Megan really stood out for me was the idea when she talked about that numbness being protective.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:It hit hard, because it makes sense.
Speaker A:If you grew up in dysfunction, you probably learned very early that emotions weren't safe.
Speaker A:Crying wasn't safe.
Speaker A:Anger wasn't safe.
Speaker A:Speaking up sometimes was not safe.
Speaker A:And most certainly having your needs met was not safe.
Speaker A:So your nervous system did exactly what it was designed to do.
Speaker A:It adapted.
Speaker A:It protected you.
Speaker A:And for so many people, that protection looks like shutting down, not feeling, but rather disconnecting.
Speaker A:And when you disconnect for so long, you become numb.
Speaker A:Can't feel anything.
Speaker A:No happy, no sad, nothing.
Speaker A:You feel nothing.
Speaker A:Because let's face it, the hard truth is you don't just numb the pain.
Speaker A:You numb everything.
Speaker A:So when you numb, when you become so emotionally disconnected that your body feels the need to numb, you don't only just numb the pain.
Speaker A:You also numb the excitement and the joy and the peace and the ability to feel safe and the ability to trust and feel goodness and love and all those things.
Speaker A:So that is why so many adult children of dysfunction, they tell me, tammy, I should be happy.
Speaker A:Nothing is technically wrong with me.
Speaker A:I have a good life.
Speaker A:So why do I still feel like this?
Speaker A:Because survival mode does not know how to relax.
Speaker A:It just doesn't.
Speaker A:It only knows scanning what's wrong?
Speaker A:What's going to happen next?
Speaker A:Who's going to fall apart?
Speaker A:Who's upset?
Speaker A:Who do I need to fix?
Speaker A:How do I stay safe?
Speaker A:And after years of doing that, you forget, honestly, what it feels like to just simply be.
Speaker A:To just be you.
Speaker A:Now here's the part people don't expect.
Speaker A:The thing that feels the most uncomfortable in healing is often the joy, the safety, the peace, the love, the calm.
Speaker A:The things you weren't used to getting.
Speaker A:And that's the question I get the most often, because they say that sounds crazy.
Speaker A:But think about it.
Speaker A:If chaos was familiar, peace maybe might have felt a little suspicious.
Speaker A:Like you were used to chaos, you weren't used to peace.
Speaker A:So peace came along and you had a moment where it was peaceful.
Speaker A:You were curious, you questioned it, you didn't embrace it, really.
Speaker A:If you had to learn to earn love when you were younger, a healthy love feels very uncomfortable.
Speaker A:And if your nervous system was wired for danger, calm feels very unfamiliar sometimes.
Speaker A:Because people sabotage good things, and not because they want bad things, but because their body trusts familiar things.
Speaker A:And that is huge.
Speaker A:That is a point I really, really want to dig home.
Speaker A:Your body trusts familiar before it trusts healthy.
Speaker A:So even though a pattern or an attitude or a feeling or a belief might be toxic and you might know in your mind that that is a bad choice, you still go there because it's familiarity.
Speaker A:It's what your brain knows.
Speaker A:Your brain likes the path of least resistance.
Speaker A:And that doesn't make you bad, it doesn't make you broken.
Speaker A:It doesn't mean that you're actually self sabotaging yourself on purpose, that your nervous system needs more time to just learn.
Speaker A:I'm safe now, so I have a little practice.
Speaker A:Because you know me, I always got to give you a little practice.
Speaker A:And I call it the goodness practice.
Speaker A:It's something practical that you can take that I kind of took from the conversation with Megan and you can apply it today.
Speaker A:And before you roll your eyes and think, oh, God, Tammy, here we go, a little bit more toxic positivity.
Speaker A:No, this is not about pretending life is perfect.
Speaker A:It's not about ignoring the hard things or the bad things.
Speaker A:This is not just think positive and you'll get over it.
Speaker A:This is nervous system retraining.
Speaker A:So here's what I want you to do.
Speaker A:Once a day, especially if you're anxious, overwhelmed, or emotionally numb, stop and ask yourself, what is okay right now?
Speaker A:Not forever, not tomorrow, not for your entire life, not for the rest of the things going on, but right now, right now, what feels okay.
Speaker A:So if I'm sitting here right now, looking around, my dog is laying next to me, that feels safe.
Speaker A:I know my kids are safe right now.
Speaker A:My coffee this morning was kick ass.
Speaker A:Like, I know things are okay right now.
Speaker A:I have a roof over my head, the sunset, the sky is beautiful.
Speaker A:It's a beautiful sunny day.
Speaker A:If it's the end of the day, maybe what is good right now is just that you got through today.
Speaker A:You're breathing.
Speaker A:I mean, let's start small.
Speaker A:And if it's a really hard season, sometimes the win is just I survived today because that counts too.
Speaker A:Because what you're doing is teaching your brain something incredibly important.
Speaker A:You're teaching your brain that danger is not the only thing present.
Speaker A:There is goodness here, too.
Speaker A:So if you are always constantly wired to look for the bad, start training your brain to look for the good.
Speaker A:And again, like I said, it doesn't need to be the good.
Speaker A:That's going to be good and there and forever.
Speaker A:It could be right now, this moment in time, in the present.
Speaker A:What is good in your life?
Speaker A:So another exercise.
Speaker A:Do the body check instead of mind spiral.
Speaker A:And here's the second thing I want you to do.
Speaker A:And this is in almost every single podcast that I do, especially in every single Tammy's takes, because it is the heart of what I do and it is the main basic focus of how I work with my people.
Speaker A:Because y' all know me, we're not going to stay in our minds all day.
Speaker A:So I want you to do a body check the next time you're spiraling, you're stressed out, you're anxious, you're shut down, just stop and ask yourself, what am I feeling in my body right now?
Speaker A:Not the story, not the why, not an explanation about who upset you, but just where do you feel it?
Speaker A:Where do you feel it in your body?
Speaker A:Is it the chest, the jaw, the stomach, the shoulders, the neck, the throat, whatever it is?
Speaker A:And then ask yourself, what does my body need right now?
Speaker A:Does it need movement, Maybe stretching, a cry, a walk, shouting it out, silence, resting?
Speaker A:You don't know.
Speaker A:You don't know what your body needs until you ask it.
Speaker A:And then if you learn to listen, it's going to tell you the right things.
Speaker A:Your body already knows how to heal you.
Speaker A:And I was talking about.
Speaker A:It's a really good podcast actually, too.
Speaker A:You should listen to it.
Speaker A:It's called Holy Shift Balls and it's From Shit to Shift or something like that.
Speaker A:But it's really, it's a good podcast.
Speaker A:I'll actually put the link to my episode down here when it drops, because we had such a great conversation, but we talked about how your body already knows everything.
Speaker A:I call it this universal knowledge.
Speaker A:Whether it's gut instinct or.
Speaker A:Some people call it instinct.
Speaker A:Some people call it all knowing.
Speaker A:Some people call it the universe.
Speaker A:Whatever it is, we've been trained not to listen to it.
Speaker A:And so my challenge to you is to start to listen to it.
Speaker A:If you literally take only one thing from today, it is this.
Speaker A:Survival is a small, small portion of the story.
Speaker A:You did not survive your dysfunction.
Speaker A:You did not survive all of that heartbreak, portrayal, abuse, abandonment, chaos, addiction, whatever it is, just to stay numb.
Speaker A:And I know that sounds like a crazy theory, but you survived everything.
Speaker A:You survived so that you could feel alive again, so you could live again.
Speaker A:Sometimes healing honestly feels scarier than survival.
Speaker A:Because healing asks us to trust goodness again.
Speaker A:It asks us to soften.
Speaker A:Healing sometimes even asks us to believe that maybe, just maybe, life starts to get better right now.
Speaker A:And if that feels uncomfortable, it's okay.
Speaker A:You're learning.
Speaker A:You're rewiring.
Speaker A:You're undoing stuff that has been taking decades and decades to become.
Speaker A:You're becoming safe in your own body.
Speaker A:And that takes time.
Speaker A:So if this episode hits home for you, go back and listen to my full conversation with Megan, because it was absolutely beautiful.
Speaker A:And if you're struggling with nervous system regulation, emotional numbness, or feeling stuck in survival mode, I want you to know that you do not have to figure this out all alone.
Speaker A:You can always book a complimentary clarity and calm call with me, and I can tell you more about the work we do around the nervous system, healing, and the subconscious patterns.
Speaker A:But until next time, just know this, my friends.
Speaker A:You are not broken.
Speaker A:You're adapted.
Speaker A:Now it's time to learn how to feel safe in your body again.
Speaker A:And that is what I'm here to help you with.
Speaker A:So you have a blessed day.
Speaker A:Come back soon.
Speaker A:I love you guys.
Speaker A:Bye.
