Why Do I Feel Emotionally Numb During Antidepressant Withdrawal?

One of the common and unnerving experiences during antidepressant withdrawal can be not feeling too much, but feeling too little.

You may have expected anxiety, low mood, disturbed sleep or some of the physical symptoms associated with withdrawal. You may not have expected to wake up one day and discover that the feelings which once connected you to your life seem to have disappeared.

You may look at someone you know you love and feel very little. You may spend time with your children and know that they matter enormously to you, yet be unable to feel the warmth or tenderness you expect to be there. Things that once brought pleasure may leave you untouched. Music may sound like noise. A beautiful view may register as something you know is beautiful without producing any corresponding feeling. You may stop looking forward to things. You may no longer miss people when they are away.

Sometimes even distress itself can feel strangely distant.

And then, quite understandably, the questions begin.

What has happened to me?

Why don't I feel anything?

Do I still love my partner?

Why don't I miss them?

Why don't I want affection?

Why do I feel nothing when my children hug me?

Have I become cold?

Was I pretending before?

Is this how I really feel?

What if the feelings never come back?

Emotional numbness, blunting or anhedonia as it is called, can be particularly frightening because feelings are one of the ways we recognise ourselves. We use them as information. Love feels like love. Pleasure tells us that something matters. Missing somebody tells us that we are attached to them. Warmth, affection, excitement, sadness, desire, curiosity and hope all help to create our sense of being a particular person living a particular life.

When access to those feelings changes, it can therefore seem as though the truth about our life has changed with them.

But feeling and truth are not necessarily the same thing.

When You Know Something but Cannot Feel It

There can be a peculiar split during withdrawal between what you know and what you can feel.

You may know that you have loved your partner for twenty years and yet be unable to locate that love inside yourself. You may know that your children are the most important people in your life and be horrified by how little you seem to feel when you are with them. You may remember loving your work, your garden, your dog, your friends, travelling, cooking, sex, music or simply sitting in the sunshine, while feeling almost entirely disconnected from the person who enjoyed those things.

This can be deeply disorientating.

We tend to assume that if a feeling is absent, its absence must mean something. If I don't feel love, perhaps I don't love them. If I don't enjoy seeing my friends, perhaps I don't want those friendships anymore. If I don't feel excited about the future, perhaps I don't want the life I have created.

The mind tries to explain the experience.

That is what minds do.

The difficulty is that during antidepressant withdrawal you may be trying to make sense of your whole life through an internal landscape that is itself changing.

Emotional numbness is recognised as something that can occur during antidepressant withdrawal. That does not mean every change in feeling should automatically be attributed to withdrawal, or that every relationship difficulty or loss of feeling has the same explanation. Human beings are more complicated than that.

It does mean that a profound change in emotional experience during withdrawal deserves to be held with some uncertainty.

You do not have to immediately decide what it means.

When You Start Questioning Everything

Withdrawal can become consuming.

When something feels profoundly wrong and you do not understand it, attention naturally turns towards it. Feelings are examined. Thoughts are examined. Relationships are examined. Memories are revisited. You may begin looking backwards for evidence that explains what you are experiencing now.

Perhaps I was never really happy.

Perhaps this relationship has always been wrong.

Perhaps I have wasted years of my life.

Perhaps I need to leave.

Perhaps I need to change everything.

Perhaps this is the real me.

The questions themselves are not wrong. Some may eventually prove important. Withdrawal does not make every thought meaningless, nor does it mean that every difficulty in a person's life existed only because of withdrawal.

But a thought does not have to become a verdict simply because it has appeared.

There is a difference between noticing I cannot feel my love for this person at the moment and concluding therefore I do not love this person and our relationship must end.

There is a difference between nothing in my life feels right and my entire life is wrong.

And there is a difference between allowing a question to exist and believing that you must answer it today.

Be Careful With Decisions That Cannot Easily Be Undone

If you are experiencing a profound and unfamiliar change in your emotional world during antidepressant withdrawal, this may not be the best time to make irreversible decisions about the rest of your life.

That does not mean remaining in a situation in which you or somebody else is at risk. Safety matters. Withdrawal should never be used as a reason to tolerate abuse, danger or circumstances in which someone is unsafe.

Nor does it mean that every relationship must be preserved, every job retained or every previous version of your life restored.

It simply means recognising that major decisions made in the middle of an altered and potentially changing state may deserve time.

If it is safe to do so, there can be wisdom in allowing some decisions to remain open.

You can notice what you are thinking without acting immediately upon it. You can acknowledge that something feels wrong without deciding that you already understand why. You can create space where space is needed without necessarily turning that space into a permanent ending.

There may be things you need to reconsider when you are further through withdrawal. There may also be things that look very different from another point on the journey.

You do not have to know which is which today.

Emotional Blunting Does Not Only Affect the Person Experiencing It

There is another side to this experience, and it matters.

If you cannot access love, affection, warmth or connection, the people who love you may experience their absence.

A partner may feel you pull away when they touch you. They may notice that you no longer initiate affection or that you seem indifferent to things that once mattered to both of you. They may tell you that they love you and receive little in return. They may look into the face of someone they have known intimately and feel as though that person has disappeared behind glass.

A parent may wonder why their son or daughter no longer calls. A friend may stop asking after repeated invitations are declined. A child may notice that a parent seems distant without having any way of understanding why.

For a partner in particular, emotional numbness can be extraordinarily painful.

From inside withdrawal, you may be thinking, I cannot feel anything.

From outside, the person who loves you may be thinking, They cannot feel anything for me.

Those are not the same statement.

But when nobody understands what is happening, they can very easily become confused.

The person in withdrawal may feel pressured to produce emotions they cannot access. The loved one may seek reassurance because they are frightened. That need for reassurance can feel like another demand to someone who is already overwhelmed, causing them to withdraw further. The withdrawal then increases the loved one's fear.

Two people can become caught in a painful cycle without either of them intending to hurt the other.

Understanding this does not magically make it easy. It does, however, give us another possibility besides blame.

There Is No Shame in What You Cannot Currently Feel

People can feel enormous shame about emotional numbness.

It can be difficult enough to say, I don't feel like myself.

It can be almost unbearable to say, I look at someone I know I love and I cannot feel it.

You may be afraid of what another person will think if you tell them. You may be afraid of what you think it says about you.

So you may pretend.

You may force affection because you believe you should feel it. You may avoid people because being around them reminds you of what is missing. You may become irritated when somebody asks how you feel because you simply do not know. You may push people away rather than repeatedly confront the frightening gap between what you remember feeling and what is available to you now.

None of this needs shame added to it.

Shame rarely creates the conditions in which human beings feel safer, clearer or more connected. Neither does blame.

The person experiencing withdrawal does not need to be blamed for an emotional state they did not consciously choose. The people around them do not need to be blamed for finding that state painful, frightening or difficult to understand.

Both experiences can be true.

You can be unable to give somebody the connection they need and they can be hurt by its absence.

You can need space and they can experience that space as loss.

You can be doing the best you currently can and somebody you love can still be struggling.

Compassion does not require us to decide that one person's experience is legitimate and the other's is not.

It allows us to hold both.

Allowing What Is Here

There can be a powerful urge during withdrawal to fix every feeling, answer every question and get back to yourself as quickly as possible.

Emotional numbness can make that urge even stronger because the absence of feeling seems so profoundly unnatural.

But sometimes the gentlest response is not to interrogate the numbness.

It is to notice it.

This is what is happening to me at the moment.

Not: This is who I am.

Not: This is how I will always feel.

Not: This proves that my relationship is over.

Not even: This is definitely withdrawal and therefore none of it means anything.

Simply: This is what I am experiencing now, and I do not yet know what it means.

That small amount of uncertainty can create space.

It allows feelings to be absent without forcing you to manufacture them. It allows difficult thoughts to exist without immediately reorganising your life around them. It allows the people around you to understand that your inability to access connection may not be a deliberate rejection of them.

And it allows kindness into an experience that can otherwise become a relentless attempt to work yourself out.

You Are More Than What You Can Feel Today

Withdrawal can become so consuming that, for a time, it seems to explain everything. Every feeling is examined. Every change is questioned. Every difficult thought or reaction can become another piece of evidence that something has gone terribly wrong.

But you are more than what is happening to you.

Before withdrawal there was already a human life, with all the complexity that being human brings. There was love and loss, fear and courage, disappointment and hope. There were relationships with histories. There were strengths and vulnerabilities. There were things you had learned to manage and perhaps things you had never quite learned how to hold.

Withdrawal does not erase that complexity.

Nor does understanding withdrawal require us to reduce every human experience to it.

What it can do is give us a reason not to rush.

If your emotional world has changed dramatically, you may not need to decide today whether those changes reveal a permanent truth about you, your relationships or your future.

You may simply need to recognise that something significant is happening.

To make things as safe as you can.

To allow what you cannot currently change.

To treat yourself with kindness rather than suspicion.

And, where possible, to extend some of that kindness towards the people standing beside you, who may be frightened and confused too.

There is no shame in not being able to feel what you think you should feel.

There is no shame in being hurt when somebody you love can no longer seem to reach you.

There does not always have to be somebody at fault.

Sometimes there are simply people trying to find their way through an experience none of them expected, with incomplete information and no certainty about what comes next.

For now, that may be enough.