Episode 20 | Emotional Sensitivity & Emotional Numbness: What Both Are Really Telling You

Welcome To The Womanhood Podcast.

In this weeks’ episode, we’re discussing both sides of the pendulum ⚖️ from a Somatic Embodiment perspective: What happens under the surface of emotional sensitivity, and what happens underneath emotional disconnect. 

I end with X1 Mini Practice to invite the exploration of the Emotional Body inside you, I also finish with X2 Hot Tips on how to embody this Womanhood Wisdom and integrate it into your life for lasting effect. 

RESOURCES:

📚 Treasure Chest Of Compassion & Emotions V.s. Thoughts Mini Guidebooks (access here): https://www.somaticbody.com.au/shop

❣️ Heart Womb Somatic Practice (access here): https://youtu.be/iQ3bhcGbeZg

🌸 Feminine Harmony Starter Course (Info Link): https://www.somaticbody.com.au/feminine-harmony

🌸 Feminine Harmony Starter Course (Buy Link): https://buy.stripe.com/8x23cu9pDaeReo24Ns5EY0o 

🌹 Book A Somatic Womb Session With Me (Info Link):  https://www.somaticbody.com.au/one-on-one-consults

🌹 Book A Somatic Womb Session With Me (Buy Link): https://buy.stripe.com/cNibJ08lzcmZ2FkcfU5EY0m 

Book an Embodiment Session 🔮📞 A free chat with me: https://www.somaticbody.com.au/book

Connect With Me:

IG 📲 https://www.instagram.com/somatic.body/

Website 🌐 https://www.somaticbody.com.au

With Love, Shannon

🔻 Somatic & Energetic Integration Specialist for Women,

🔻 Creatress of the Feminine Harmony™ Program and the SomaCycle™ Method.

🔻 Feminine Systems Educator | Reclamation Guide | Ritual Facilitator

🔻 Foundress of Somatic Body™ - a space devoted to helping women reconnect to their feminine bodies.

00:50 Introduction: What This Episode Is Covering

02:23 Protective Mechanisms Associated With The Emotional Body

03:01 Yin & Yang Overdrive: The 2 Extremes Of The Emotional Body

04:16 Yin Overdrive Presentations & Core Wounds

06:38 Yang Overdrive Presentations & Core Wounds

10:13 Core Wounds & The Dysregulated Heart Chakra

13:08 Suppression & When We Do Not Express Emotions

14:50 Coming Back To Balance With Emotional Expression

17:16 A Mental Re-frame To Assist In Emotional Expression

18:16 A Practical Solution: Emotions In Motion

22:22 Mini Somatic Practice To Explore The Emotional Body

26:29 A Somatic Cue: Reframing How We Express Emotions

27:06 Finalising The Episode & Whats Next On The Womanhood Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to the Womanhood Podcast. I'm your host, Shannon, Somatic and Energetic Integration Specialist for Women, founder of Somatic Body and creatrice of the Soma Cycle Method and the Feminine Harmony Program. And I'm here to inspire you to reclaim your rhythms, remember your wisdom, and root into your womanhood. Each week I'll be discussing topics centered around our womanhood from a multifaceted, somatic and energetic viewpoint, weaving together both science with spirituality and masculinity with femininity. We'll be talking cyclical natures and rhythms, intuition, instincts, ancient womb wisdom, and grounded embodiment strategies. Find yourself a cozy space and let's get started. Being emotionally numb doesn't mean you're a cold-hearted bitch and that you don't feel. And being emotionally sensitive doesn't mean that you're weak either. Some women survive by shutting their emotions down, while others survive by feeling absolutely everything. And both, I believe, are responses of the emotional body. And so this is what we're going to be exploring today. So first things first, if you're new to my channel, I will explain to you what the emotional body is in terms of what I believe the emotional body to be. We have the four bodies, I call it the four body healing system, physical, mental, emotional, and energetic. And when we're talking about the emotional body, we are talking about feelings, reactions, emotional expressions, emotional processing, and emotional memory. So memories linked to and eliciting emotions. So that experience of the emotions through our memories. All of this is what encompasses our semi-conscious and unconscious aspects of us that are feeling-based and emotion-based. That's the emotional body out of the four bodies. It's this little guy here, you know, physical, mental, emotional, and energetic. It's this little guy here that we're going to be focusing on today. And we're going to be discussing kind of both extremes of feeling, whether it be complete numbness and shutdown of emotions or really feeling them and expressing them and diving deep into them and almost living into that experience of the emotions rather than what's actually happening in your reality. So we're going to be looking and dissecting both extremes and coming back to that happy medium, which I always like to do. And so when we look at numbness, we often think, oh, they're emotionally numb, they're cold. Or when we look at sensitivity, we look at them and go, oh, they're broken, like something's wrong with them. But both are actually just signs of emotional stagnation and protection. It's our emotional body coming in to protect us and also to speak to us that there's something we need to work on, that there's some emotions stagnant here, or there's some emotions that we're really buying into and living into if you feel like you're emotionally sensitive. The other example, the other extreme. And so when it comes to these two sides, these two extremes that we're going to be dissecting today, we can look at these two sides of emotional protection as yin and yang. So we have the yin overdrive, which is where we're in that extreme of being sensitive, emotionally sensitive. This is the yin overdrive. We can look at that as one of the two sides of emotional protection. And this is where we are, we have this emotional flooding and hyper expression and overfeeling. It's like this emotional overwhelm. And then we have the other side, the other extreme, the yang overdrive. And with the yang overdrive, we have this emotional shutdown, this suppression and disconnection and numbness to our emotions, to our feelings. And so when we look at them as yin and yang, but like the overdrive of them, that overexpression of either of the two, so the extremes, we can start to dissect the core reasons behind why they occur. Because neither are wrong. They're just adaptations and they are protective mechanisms to previous traumas and experiences we've had in our lives. And so let's start to dissect the core wounds, the core reasons. Why we may be in yin overdrive or yang overdrive. When it comes to yin overdrive, that emotional sensitivity, this can happen when you're absorbing someone else's emotions. You find yourself crying easily, emotionally reactive, emotionally overwhelmed, and have this anxious attachment to people around you. You might have difficulty self-regulating, like self-regulating your emotions, and over-identifying with your emotions. Hence why that regulation isn't there. And the core wounds behind the yin overdrive is abandonment, which is a type of rejection, inconsistency, emotional invalidation, so striving for that acceptance, that fawning response, and a lack of safety. And it can also just be from hypervigilance, so not feeling safe in an environment and our emotions switch on to tell us that it's not safe. You know, it's like your body screaming at you going, We're not safe. But it's like, is that really what's happening? Or have we learnt that from a past experience? And so, in essence, when the yin is in overdrive, that emotional sensitivity, when we look at those core wounds of it, the abandonment, the inconsistency, the emotional invalidation, not having yourself validated by other people, and that lack of safety, where we feel like we need to be hyper-vigilant. In essence, this yin overdrive is coming from codependency and emotional merging, otherwise known as enmeshment, which is something I came to learn recently at the start of the year. And really it's saying, if you're not okay, I'm not okay. And so that's really what that yin overdrive is, that emotional sensitivity. We can look at empathy and being sensitive beings as yin, but when it's yin overdrive, it's that codependency, that need to feel others all the time so that we don't feel ourselves because that feels unsafe potentially, which is something I came to experience in my mid to late 20s with certain relationships as well. That whole, if you're not okay, I'm not okay. And I had to work through that core wound myself as well. So I know this personally, being in yin overdrive with emotional sensitivity. And I think as women, we are more prone to that. But then we also have certain aspects of our life where there might be yang overdrive. So let's have a look at that as well. When we have yang overdrive, that emotional numbness, we could have difficulty crying, we could have that feeling of disconnection and we don't know quite what it is, but we just feel dissociated. We could have emotional flatness, so like a depression of emotions, and having trouble intellectualizing our feelings. We can feel shut down, avoidant, and that there's this like inability to access strong emotions like joy and grief, like fully, to be able to fully access them because they are strong emotions and they they come on strong. And the core wounds that are often associated with Yang underneath it are shame around our emotions. So we've been shamed for being emotional or vulnerable. And I kind of touched on this in the previous episode where I talked about why it feels unsafe to be truly resting and to truly be vulnerable and soft. And we can have punishment for vulnerability, so being punished for showing your emotions, you know. There are certain environments I can think of. Like when I was at work growing up in adolescence as a teen, my first job, you can't try you can't cry on the job. You have to like go out the back and just cry on your own. And it's like, I understand, like logistically and logically, why we need to be professional on the job when we're an employee, but it also developed that core wound that you get punished if you're crying in a certain environment, right? Then we have the betrayal, that can be another thing, which is similar to the abandonment type of rejection I talked about in the yin overdrive, being emotionally sensitive. We have that abandonment type. The betrayal type comes out with yang. That's more like that strong, I need to protect myself here because I've been betrayed. Whereas abandonment's more softer and it's like I've been hurt, right? But both are types of rejection. And then the yang overdrive can also occur when we're in chronic survival mode. And when we're in chronic survival mode, we reach that emotional exhaustion so much faster because we don't have the capacity for it, because we're just in go, go, go. And so they're the core reasons why. But in essence, when we're summarizing all of those core reasons, at the end of the day, we have this hyperindependence and this real detachment, this lack of connecting with others. And that's really what Yang looks like when it's in overdrive. And that's the core reasoning behind it is we have this hyper-independence and this detachment, this connection with others, where it kind of tells us if that person that I'm interacting with is too much for me, I'm out. I'm out of here. I'm fleeing. If they're too much for me, I'm out. Like I'm defending myself. I'm fighting. You're too much for me. And then we have the freeze mode, which is where we shut down from our emotions and switch off and become numb. Also a part of the yang. And you can apply this to yin as well. You could have flight mode where we become emotionally sensitive and we run away because we buy into our emotions. You could have fight mode where we really start to buy into our emotions and express with anger. And you could have freeze mode where we emotionally withdraw from someone and go cry in a room because we just feel so emotional that we feel like we have to freeze and shut down and be with our emotions and be stuck in them. But we do need to eventually come out of them. We can't just be stuck in one state forever. That's not what life is about and what we were designed to do. We weren't designed to be stagnant. And so that's an example of how those, you know, three nervous system states, the fight, flight, and freeze mode, can come into it for both extremes as well. And I guess when we're looking at those two extremes and everything that comes with them in terms of their characteristics and the core wounds that are behind them and their core reasonings for why they exist when we go into those extremes, it's really just about being hurt, whether we've been hurt by something that's made us emotionally sensitive or hurt by something that's made us emotionally withdrawn. It's from being hurt. It's it's a trauma response. And it's a trauma response of the heart. And this is where I'm going here is I feel like we should bring in a bit of that heart chakra where our heart chakra is either on overdrive, the yin overdrive, or our heart chakra is in shutdown mode and it's it's slowing down that wheel, that heart chakra is just slowing down and shutting down, which is that yang overdrive. With the heart chakra, this is our core center of emotional connection to others. So it's really relevant based on everything I've just talked about. The heart chakra represents our sense of love and connection with others. And so when the heart chakra becomes dysregulated, whether it's overstimulated and oversensitive or shut down and emotionally unavailable with our connection with other people, we either are overopen or we are completely closed off. And an overly open heart has generally porous boundaries. So that enmeshment with other people, not being able to discern what our emotions are and what others are because we're feeling into theirs. We could have a sense of like overgiving, always overgiving, always rescuing and nurturing others and not receiving ourselves. And we could have that self-abandonment. So we're we're so enmeshed in a puddle of emotions, whether it's a puddle of emotions of our own or a puddle of emotions of others that we're we're kind of abandoning ourselves here because we're not coming back to a regulated state with our emotions. And then with the yang, we can have these emotional walls built up when the heart chakra is dysregulated in that way and numb. We have this fear of vulnerability, this hyperindependence, and the avoidance of intimacy is a big one here. We avoid connecting with others because it involves intimacy, and that's not safe when we are in yang overdrive or emotionally numb. But regardless, when we're looking at both extremes of the heart chakra, it's overstimulated and there's a lot of emotions going on, or it's like slowing down and shutting off. They're both dysregulation in a sense, and both mean that energy is getting trapped. When we have this slow, smooth movement in the middle, we have this free-flowing energy with all the other chakras. We have this ability to be able to come to a regulated state with our emotions, to be able to feel them, to honor them, to get curious about them and learn from them, but without buying into them too much and distorting our reality, and without shutting down so much so that it becomes this barrier that we never get past. And either way, we'll never get past them when we look at both, because they're both quite imbalanced and distorting our reality. And so this is where we can actually come back to what I was discussing in the previous episode as well, where suppression of our expression causes a storage in the body. Emotion needs movement, just like all other things. And suppression often happens when we feel like our emotions weren't safe, where we feel like our expressions were judged and sensitivity was shamed. Shame is such a big thing. And then we can also have this rejection, you know. Sometimes when we're being vulnerable and expressing, we get rejected in some way, or betrayed, or abandoned. You know, everything I was talking about with the yin and the yang overdrive. But what happens when we have this stagnant energy and emotions stay trapped in the body, we have this build-up of the heart chakra, and suddenly we have anxiety, tension, shutdown, emotional outbursts, numbness, chronic dysregulation, you know, of the body as well. It starts to show up within the other aspects of the four bodies. You know, if our emotional body's blocked and stagnant, it's eventually going to back up and start to trickle through the other three bodies and affect the other three bodies. And so that's where muscle tension can present in the physical body. Anxiety can present in the mind with loops, looping thoughts. We can have a shutdown of the body, adrenal fatigue, chronic fatigue, again, affecting the physical body. We can have emotional outbursts, numbness, just chronic dysregulation, knowing that on that subtle body, the energy body level, something's wrong and we can sense that, but we don't quite know what it is. This can start to affect all four bodies, that four-body healing system. There's a reason I say that because they're all connected. And when one's affected enough, the rest will become affected as well. It's a domino effect. And so the way that we can come back to healing and come back to this happy medium now that we've dissected the extremes, why it happens, what it looks like, how it can present, we can start to look at ways that we can come back to that happy medium. And I usually like to start with a bit of a mental reframe. And so the reframe I'm gonna offer today is that expression is not weakness, it is emotional movement. It's the way we express our emotions. You know, you think about all the artists in the world who express through voice, through instruments, through dance, through painting, through poetry. This is an expression of emotions. It's emotional movement, it's energetic movement, and it involves the physical body as well as the mental body, where we're linking all four bodies. It's that four-body healing system. I really do have a strong appreciation for the arts and for what it does in that way, especially when it's messy and unplanned and unchoreographed and not colored in between the lines, you know. I have a real appreciation for that. As well as an appreciation for the devotion and discipline of stronger arts like ballet and, you know, learning instruments like violin, you know, that takes discipline and structure to learn that. I have a really strong appreciation for it because of the fact that it allows us, it's a somatic practice in its own, to really flow through that emotional energy and process it in in ways that are body-led. So our mind doesn't become, you know, the front driver, the main driver. It takes a backseat. And when it takes a backseat, the mind, and I talked about this in the previous episode and other episodes, when the mind takes a backseat, we can start to discern for ourselves and witness what our body wants to express, what our emotions want to express, what our subtle energy, our energetics and our soul wants to express. And we don't get stuck in those extremes when we're doing that. How can we? We're being body-led, sensory led. We're not getting stuck in our mind. The mind is the thing that often gets us stuck. You know, we start to buy into our emotions. Well, that's getting stuck into the emotions. We're starting to relate to them like they're our reality. When we're overly sensitive and there's that yin overdrive, or when it's yang, we're getting stuck by not being able to feel them, and we're starting to shut down emotionally and mentally. We don't want to feel that. Our mind chooses not to, whether it's conscious or semi-conscious, we choose not to. And so we come back to that reframe. That expression is actually not weakness, it's it's emotional movement and we need to move. It's an amazing thing. It's a healthy thing. Just that one reframe alone can be a game changer for us. If we can listen to that, that emotional expression is healthy, emotional movement is healthy. If we can start to really feel that for ourselves and embody that somatically, not just know it logically and hear it, but start to believe that and feel that for ourselves and explore that, then we can really heal and come back to that happy medium in those moments where we find ourselves in yin and yang overdrive, whichever one you tend to lean towards. For me, I got a bit of a mix and it doesn't happen often, but because it doesn't happen often when I notice it, I really notice it. And I know how to come back to this happy medium through art expression, through somatics and energetics, this messiness of expression of emotions in a safe container, in a safe environment. The body wants to feel safe when it's doing these things anyway. And so this is where I'm going. The solution to all of this to come back to that happy medium is through somatic and energetic work. Healing the emotional body requires safety, slowness, sensation, presence. And through that we can express. We can express and move our emotions. If we want to look at some examples of some somatic practices, again, I'll break it up into yin and yang overdrive. So when we have the yang overdrive, that emotional numbness, things like a grounding touch, a body scan, heart beating, like listening to our heart, the awareness of our heart beating or our breath, uh humming through the body, like vocalizing and sounding things. We can journal to get our thoughts out. Music that invokes feelings. That that one's one that I go to when I feel emotionally numb. I I listen to music and that helps me invoke emotions and gain clarity. And even just safe crying places. Like I used to have my safe space at one point in my 20s, for example, was which I didn't know that this is what it was at the time, but it was essentially fire gazing. And whenever I felt like I needed to express my emotions, I felt stuck, like I was numb to feeling a certain emotion and wanting to let go of it and purge. I was mourning over a previous partner. And so what I would do is I would go home into a safe crying space when no one else was there. I was living with one of my beautiful friends at the time. And I would light a candle. It was always nighttime before bed. I would light a candle and I would just stare at that candle and cry and release until I felt relieved. I would just let go and purge and feel the feelings. And sometimes visuals would come in, sometimes memories would come in, sometimes messages from collective, from universe, from God, angels would come in. And that was a healing process in itself. So simple. Light a candle, stare at it, and feel what you feel. But that's that's that safe crying space, right? You can use warmth and co-regulation as well. So like a heat blanket or those weighted blankets. You can create warmth by hugging someone and create that connection. You can invite that in. So they're all examples of practices that you can do when you're feeling emotionally numb, when you're in yang overdrive with your emotions. When you're feeling emotionally sensitive, the yin overdrive, we can look at practicing boundaries. So discerning for ourselves, is this emotion mine or is it someone else's that I'm feeling and tuning into right now, even if they're not in the room with me? We can practice nervous system regulation because when we're in our emotions a lot and we're buying into our emotions, dropping into the nervous system and body-based sensations will really help us to come back to a happy medium and to not feel our emotions so much that it becomes our reality in that moment. We can practice grounding rituals, so things that ground us into the earth, they're really good, grounding us back down to reality. We can practice separating what is mine versus what is theirs practices. So you can like write that down, similar to journaling and you know, mind dumping all your thoughts. You can write down like literally a two-column line, what's mine, what's not mine. And the whole point of that is to not overthink it. You just write, this is mine, this feeling. You write down your feelings. And then with any feelings that you feel like they're not yours or you're not sure if you have a connection to them, put them on the other side. And you can use that as a reflective practice. You can do breath work, you can do embodiment practices. So when we do breath work, it's a way to release emotions, but we're doing it in a way that's body led rather than our emotions coming out in expressions of anger, so much so that we buy into. That and make that our reality. So those are examples of your yin practices that you can do. And if you're not sure which way you lean, or you feel like you have a combination of the two, you know, this emotional numbness and this emotional sensitivity. Because, like I said, I have both, like a combination of both that show up and have shown up throughout my life, we can do a more generalized practice. I'm actually going to take you through that now, just like a mini practice that's a little more generalized and helps you to tune into heart chakra and the emotions in a more neutral way. So whether you feel like you're in yin or yang overdrive, this will help to kind of re-regulate and rebalance. So if you're ready, just take a moment to get settled, find a comfortable space, feel into the space you're in if this feels like a safe space. And if not, pause this recording, this video or this audio. Find a safe space if you really want to join me. And once you're ready, invite your hands onto your chest space. You can invite the eyes to close down.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Take a few slow breaths, dropping into the body, noticing the placement of your hands. Deep breaths here.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Dropping into the heart space and the chest space, into the heart chakra. And just bring your awareness to the beat of your heart.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

You don't have to physically feel it, but just bring your awareness to the beating of your heart here.

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And then from there, shift your awareness to the subtle pulsing throughout your body. The pulsing of blood through your veins from your heart.

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How it expands out to the rest of your body.

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So just take that moment to connect with your hands there on the chest.

SPEAKER_02 24:22

Notice any sensations that arise through the body. And as you notice these sensations that arise, you might like to ask yourself Is this sensation linked to a feeling that's asking to be felt?

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Or a story asking to be witnessed or questioned? You can even ask yourself what emotion inside me right now, if I'm feeling any, is asking for gentleness right now. So just tuning into those sensations.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

Getting curious as to whether there's an emotion there asking to be witnessed, to be felt, to be questioned and dissected.

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Or perhaps it just needs a gentleness and a nurturing.

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And then just slowly as we come out of this practice, bringing your awareness back to the breath, back to the heartbeat. Inviting your eyes to open and hands to drop back down, to come back to the space when you're ready.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

And so that was just a mini-practice to neutralize and tune into the heart chakra as well as the physical heart and the circulatory system to rebalance from both yin and yang overdrive, from that numbness or sensitivity, and come back to a happy medium. I hope you really enjoyed that. And just to really drive this home, I just wanted to remind you that you are not broken for feeling too much. And you are not broken for struggling to feel at all. Both numbness and sensitivity are intelligent responses from the body trying to protect itself. And so your emotions are not inconveniences, they are sacred messages from your emotional body. Sacred messages that we can really utilize and learn more about ourselves from and come back to a state of peace and regulation. And so thank you for sharing this space with me today inside the Womanhood Podcasts. I hope that this episode reminds you that healing's not about becoming more or less emotional, but it's it's really about becoming safe enough to honor your emotions with compassion and discernment and with love. Which, come to think of it, is why I often sign off with my audios that I create, my audio journeys with love, Shannon, and Somatic Body. And I sign off on social media and things like that too. Funny how it all works. Anyway, I'm gonna pop some resources in the caption below, like I usually do. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Feel free to follow, subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. And I will see you then. As we finish this week's episode, remember that you are your own rhythm keeper. So just keep listening for that rhythm and keep coming home to you. Until next time with love. Shannon at Somatic Body.