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Summary
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After several family deaths and another relative’s terminal illness, a reader feels emotionally numb despite continuing to help. The absence of tears or sadness feels confusing and potentially hurtful to others.
The response presents numbness as one possible grief reaction and suggests, without certainty, that emotional distancing may be protective after repeated losses.
It emphasizes that grief does not follow one pattern and recommends grief counseling if the lack of felt emotion remains concerning.
Question
Reader · Identity withheldLast February I lost my grandmother who had Alzheimers. I had lived with her and taken care of her during the last two years of her life, Less than a week after she passed, I was told that an uncle I am not very close to was in the hospital and likely to die. Thankfully, he did not.
\nAbout a month later my cousin died. A month after that, an uncle I was close to also passed away. Now my aunt, his wife and someone I am very close to, is dying. She has stage 4 cancer, and this week we were told she probably has only three to six months left.
\nI feel nothing. No sadness. No tears. I do not understand why. I think her daughter might be upset with me. She cries all the time, and I support her, but I do not feel any sadness or emotion myself. I go over about three times a week and help however I can.
\nStill, I feel like I should be feeling something.
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Answer
Mark Vigil Dombeck, Ph.D.You are likely experiencing a variety of grief reaction. Not a standard one, but not one that is weird or rare either. You’d think you should be feeling something, I understand, but that is not how grief works all the time. You have had an extraordinary amount of death and suffering in your life lately. Not extraordinary by wartime standards, perhaps, but certainly for everyday life, you’ve been positively clobbered with death and significant loss of loved ones.
\nAs a protective reaction to the shock of this grief bombardment, you may have quite unconsciously dampened down your ability to feel the pain that is associated with these intense losses.
\nThe process through which this sort of dampening down of emotion occurs is called dissociation, a mental phenomena that is closely related to hypnotism.
\nWhat happens during dissociation is that you check out mentally and start thinking about something other than what you are dealing with.
\nThere are many varieties of dissociation. The very mildest forms of dissociation are very common; we call them \"spacing out\" or \"day dreaming\" and they happen all the time to most everyone.
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On the severe side, some people use dissociation to \"check out\" during abuse, or during traumatic events. The abuse or trauma is still experienced, but the emotional and cognitive memories of those events are detached from consciousness in some fashion. People describe their memories during dissociative events as having the quality of watching a movie rather than having been a participant. Some people who dissociate during trauma do not remember the events at all.
\nMy guess is that you’ve engaged a mild dissociation process to help you cope, and this is why you’re having difficulty feeling the feelings you think you should be feeling.
\nThis isn’t necessarily anything to worry about. There are all sorts of grief patterns and this is one of them. You may reach a point in time when it starts feeling safe again to feel again, and at that time you will find feelings bubbling up to the surface, perhaps in the form of sudden bouts of crying that seem to come from nowhere.
\nIf you focus on the feelings of grief you might be able to make contact with them, but then again, consider that the fact that you’re insulated from them now is protective in some manner; it is helping you to stay functional, and that it’s okay to allow this to happen.
\nIf it really concerns you that you aren’t feeling grief at any point in time (now or in the future), my recommendation would be for you to seek out some grief counseling. The safety of the therapy room might offer you the sort of container you need to feel safe enough to let some of this out.
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