Emotionally Disconnected: Can Developmental Trauma Cause Someone To Be Emotionally Shut Down?

What someone may see, if they were able to step back and reflect on their life, is that they don’t have a good connection with their needs and are rarely in touch with how they feel. This is likely to mean that they will spend a fair amount of time living in their head.

What they could also find is that they have been this way for as long as they can remember. As a result of this, this could just be seen as who they are and they may believe that their life will always be this way.

Their Experience

By living life in this way, they could find that they typically feel disconnected from others and life itself. This is because the connection that they have with others and life are going to mirror the connection that they have with themselves.

By being on the outside, so to speak, they could often feel very low and depressed and even wonder if life has any meaning. Still, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have any friends and spend most of their time by themselves.

Surface Level Connections

If they do have a number of friends, there is a strong chance that most of their friendships will lack depth. When they are around one of their friends, they could typically talk about what they have done and current affairs, for instance.

This will mean that they won’t talk about how they feel and most if not all of their needs will be hidden. Due to this, they could largely come across as some who is needless or doesn’t need a great deal.

A Natural outcome

But, if they are rarely in touch with their needs and feelings, it is not much of a surprise that they will generally act this way. It won’t be that they are consciously choosing to hide their needs and feelings; this will be something that just happens.

This is then going to be no different to what happens when they are by themselves, with this also being a time when they are typically not going to have a good understanding of what is going on for them. For their life to change and to live a fulfilling life, they will need to create a better connection with themselves.

An Empty Existence

As they are alive, it will show that they are, at the very least, meeting their basic needs but for them to live a life that is worth living, they will need to meet the rest of their needs and wants. Until this takes place, they are likely to often feel empty and deprived and life will continue to be experienced as cold, meaningless and bleak.

Also, their need to experience deeper connections with others won’t take place and this will mean that they won’t be able to experience intimacy. Right now, this can seem like something that is completely out of their reach.

The Next Step

However, even though this will need to take place for their life to be transformed, it doesn’t mean that they will just be able to reconnect to themselves. If it was just a case of them reconnecting to their body, it wouldn’t take long for their life to change.

When it comes to why their life is this way, it could be due to what took place during their developmental years. This may have been a stage of their life when they were routinely neglected and when they were given attention, it may have largely been misattuned care.

Out of mind

Yet, thanks to how painful this would have been, their brain would have ended up blocking out what took place to protect them. This would have caused them to be unaware of the cause but their life will be defined by the impact of what took place.

So, when they were left, it would have been too much for their undeveloped brain and nervous system to handle. To handle what was going on, their brain would have automatically repressed how they felt and they would have gone into a shut-down, collapsed and frozen state.

No Choice

As for when they were given attention, the same thing would have also taken place. This was a stage of their life when they were powerless and totally dependent, so they were unable to do anything about what was going on.
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Ultimately, disconnecting from themselves would have allowed them to survive a brutal stage of their life but now that this stage is over, it will no longer be serving them. In other words, they no longer need to live in this way to survive.

A Process

Many, many years will have passed since this stage of their life but their brain and body will be loaded up with pain. If all this pain was to enter their conscious awareness, it would be too much for them to handle; this is why it will need to be worked through in stages.

For them to be able to get to the point where they can feel their pain they may need to work through a number of defences and as well as armouring that they have in place to protect them. Once they have worked through a number of these barriers, it will be easier for them to surrender to how they feel and to work through their pain.

Awareness

If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.

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Oliver JR Cooper
http://www.oliverjrcooper.co.uk