If you asked me before the election how I might feel if Donald Trump were to win, I imagine I might’ve said any number of negative things: horrified, angry, disturbed. And I don’t doubt plenty of people are feeling these ways right now. But when I attempted to answer the question Wednesday morning, I came up…empty. It’s not a common occurrence for me as a person who translates feelings and concepts into words for a living. And yet, there it was: A mental paralysis, a deep and utter sense of numbness that, in the hours since, I’ve had mirrored back to me by friends and colleagues: “I don’t even know how to feel right now.”
This kind of shutdown might seem like a lack of emotion, but it turns out, it’s more likely a response to a rush of different feelings happening at once. Numbness is a defense mechanism to emotional overwhelm, Gail Saltz, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, tells SELF. Rather than spring into fight or flight, you enter the third and lesser-discussed stress response of freezing, wherein your body and mind suspend typical functions amid full survival mode. Any number of negative sensations might be the cause, from anxiety and fear to grief, loss, or horror, but the common denominator is just that there is simply too much of everything. Rather than feel it all, your brain opts to feel none of it, at least as best as it can.
It’s an especially common experience in response to shock, Dr. Saltz notes. If you’ve been anticipating a bad result for some time, your mind and body can gear up for it—something she likens to navigating a slow-motion car wreck. But if it comes out of the blue, it’s more likely to hit so hard, you wind up dissociating to protect yourself. That’s not to say that everyone feeling numb was surprised by the election’s outcome; deep down, you may have known that, logically, this was a possibility (a likely one, even), as I did. But if you hadn’t really wrestled with it, you could still feel stunned by it, to some extent, and shut down.
A few things might be beneath your feelings of numbness after the election.
Disbelief and denial
There’s a reason denial is the first stage of grief: Much like feeling numb, mentally pushing back on bad news can be a mode of protection and is perfectly normal, Helen McKibben, PsyD, a board-certified psychologist and author of Drop: Making Great Decisions , tells SELF. And plenty of factors might make it easy for your brain to glom onto disbelief right now—namely, things like bomb threats at polling locations or just how quickly the race was called. As a result, you could be missing closure, Gina Moffa, LCSW, a trauma-informed psychotherapist in New York, tells SELF: “You might feel like you don’t even know what to grieve yet because you’re in this state of emotional suspended animation.”
The tricky thing is, if you try to turn off that sense of denial for any length of time, you might feel swamped by the feelings that surface, and then go numb again as a result, Dr. Saltz says. The process of slowly letting in the upsetting emotions bit by bit until it doesn’t feel like too much is, to some degree, the process of grieving a big loss, she explains.
Helplessness
Beyond functioning as an immediate defense mechanism, feeling nothing at all could be a symptom of a deeper sense of despair—that you’ve done all you could do and it wasn’t enough, or that things will only get worse from here. And for plenty of people, that may very well be a reality, Dr. Saltz concedes. There’s a kind of anticipatory grief that sets in when you start thinking about all you might stand to lose in the future, Moffa explains, particularly when the stakes are as high as they are now, with things like basic human rights and the continued functioning of our democracy on the table.
The toll of repetitive trauma
A disconcerting thing happens in your brain when you experience a loss: “Every time you’ve felt a similar loss before can jump on board,” Dr. McKibben says, “which can leave you flooded with feelings from the past as well as the here and now.”
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