We Cannot Numb Our Way Back to Joy
What we refuse to feel does not disappear. It changes form.
I wrote this piece because I keep noticing how much of our culture is built around not feeling.
Not healing. Not metabolizing. Not grieving. Not listening to the body. Just avoiding, managing, numbing, optimizing, diagnosing, distracting, and getting back to work.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that joy was the only acceptable emotional home. Everything else became suspect. Grief became something to get over. Fear became something to conquer. Anger became something to suppress or weaponize. Despair became something to hide. Sadness became something to explain away before it made anyone uncomfortable.
But the dark emotions do not disappear because we refuse to feel them. They change form.
They become anxiety, depression, addiction, rage, numbness, resentment, exhaustion, and a thousand other symptoms of a body and soul carrying what has not been given room to move.
This piece is about toxified emotional energy, about what happens when grief, fear, despair, and sorrow are exiled instead of befriended. It is also about the possibility that the way back to joy may not be around the dark, but through it.
Not because suffering is good.
Not because pain should be romanticized.
But because love is not afraid of the dark, and staying human may require us to feel what our culture keeps teaching us to numb.
Watch or Listen
The Whole Story
There is a strange kind of pressure in our culture to be fine.
Not honest. Not whole. Not deeply alive. Just fine.
Fine enough to keep working. Fine enough to keep producing. Fine enough to answer the text, make the payment, attend the meeting, manage the children, post the photo, send the invoice, get through the day, and not make anyone too uncomfortable with the ache underneath it all.
We have decided, without always saying it out loud, that joy is the emotional default and everything else is a malfunction. Grief means something has gone wrong. Fear means we are weak. Despair means we have failed spiritually. Anger means we are dangerous. Sadness means we need to get over it. So when the dark emotions come, and they always come, we do not welcome them as messengers. We treat them like intruders.
But what if the dark emotions are not the enemy of our humanity?
What if our fear of them is?
We are a culture afraid to feel dark emotions because we have decided they are bad, and that fear is making us less human.
That is the wound.
And the wisdom is this: what we refuse to feel does not disappear. It changes form.
Sometimes it becomes anxiety. Sometimes depression. Sometimes addiction. Sometimes rage. Sometimes numbness. Sometimes despair. Sometimes a body that is exhausted from carrying what the soul was never allowed to name.
The emotional energy does not vanish simply because we suppress it. Like all energy, it moves, mutates, disguises itself, finds another channel. The grief we will not grieve becomes irritability. The fear we will not listen to becomes control. The despair we will not touch becomes cynicism. The anger we will not honor becomes cruelty, collapse, or chronic resentment. The loneliness we will not admit becomes consumption, scrolling, overworking, drinking, performing, disappearing.
And then, because the symptom has become louder than the wound, we start treating the symptom as the whole story.
This is where we need nuance, because medication can be necessary, merciful, and lifesaving. Therapy can be holy work. Clinical care can help a person survive when their nervous system is drowning. No one should be shamed for needing support, chemistry, diagnosis, or treatment.
But there is also a way a culture can use treatment language to avoid transformation. There is a way a system can help us manage symptoms while refusing to ask why so many of us are sick with loneliness, disconnection, overwork, grief, fear, and meaninglessness in the first place. There is a way medication can become one more tool of avoidance when it is offered as a substitute for feeling, grieving, telling the truth, changing our lives, repairing our relationships, or confronting the cultural machinery that keeps making us unwell.
We cannot medicate our way out of a culture that keeps teaching us not to feel. And the truth is, a lot of us are not feeling.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than one in five U.S. adults lived with a mental illness in 2022, an estimated 59.3 million people, or 23.1% of adults. The 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that 40.3 million adults had some form of mental illness and another 46.3 million adults had a substance use disorder. These numbers are not just private tragedies. They are cultural signals.
They tell us something about the water we are swimming in.
They tell us that millions of bodies are carrying what our dominant way of life has not taught us how to metabolize.
They tell us that we are not merely dealing with individual weakness. We are dealing with an emotional ecology that has been poisoned by speed, performance, isolation, extraction, domination, shame, and the endless demand to keep functioning.
We are not machines, but we are trained to live like machines. We are not brands, but we are trained to curate ourselves. We are not productivity systems, but we are trained to justify our existence through output. We are not consumers at the core of who we are, but nearly every platform, advertisement, algorithm, and economic incentive around us depends on our remaining restless, wanting, anxious, distracted, and easy to manipulate.
A society built on avoidance will always need industries of escape.
So we numb.
We numb with alcohol, weed, pills, porn, work, achievement, food, shopping, outrage, entertainment, sex, relationships, religion, self-improvement, busyness, certainty, and even healing language itself. Anything can become addictive when it is used to help us leave the body we are afraid to inhabit.
And at first, numbing can feel like mercy. Sometimes it is how we survive.
Psychic numbing is not a moral failure. It is often a trauma response, a way the body protects us when feeling everything would overwhelm the system. There are seasons when the nervous system closes the gates because too much pain is trying to rush through at once. That deserves compassion, not contempt.
But what protects us for a season can imprison us for a lifetime.
If we keep numbing the dark, the habit begins to generalize. We do not get to selectively numb grief forever while keeping joy untouched. We do not get to shut down despair without also narrowing wonder. We do not get to silence fear without also muting courage. We do not get to exile sorrow without also losing tenderness.
Eventually the capacity for feeling itself begins to shrink.
The heart does not become peaceful. It becomes less available.
This is one of the great lies of emotional avoidance: we think we are escaping pain, but often we are escaping aliveness.
Bill Plotkin, in Wild Mind, offers a helpful map for understanding the fractured inner ecology of the human person. He names the parts of us that flee toward escape and addiction, the wounded children who still carry old pain, the loyal soldiers who learned to protect us through control, performance, and vigilance, and the deeper resources of soul that invite us into descent, imagination, grief, and mature belonging.
In his language, when we are trapped in escapist patterns, we often need the medicine of the West, the dark muse beloved, the one who leads us down into the depths, not to destroy us, but to help us recover the life hidden beneath what we have refused to feel.
That feels deeply true to me.
Because the way back to joy is not always up.
Sometimes the way back to joy is down.
Down into the grief we have postponed. Down into the fear we have mocked. Down into the despair we have spiritualized away. Down into the body that has been trying to tell the truth while our conscious mind kept saying, “I’m fine.”
This is not the glorification of suffering. Pain is not holy because it hurts. Darkness is not automatically wisdom. Despair does not become sacred simply because it is intense.
But pain can become holy when love meets it.
Grief can become a doorway when it is held in compassion.
Fear can become a teacher when we stop treating it like an enemy.
Despair can become a signal when we listen for the loss, longing, or impossibility beneath it.
Anger can become courage when it is metabolized through love and aimed toward repair.
The dark emotions do not automatically make us wise. But unbefriended, they can make us sick. They can turn toxic. They can pool in the body. They can harden into identities. They can leak into our relationships. They can become the very patterns we then judge ourselves for having.
This is why shame cannot heal us.
Shame only adds another layer of exile. Shame tells the anxious person they are broken. Shame tells the depressed person they are failing. Shame tells the addicted person they are disgusting. Shame tells the numb person they are dead inside. Shame tells the grieving person they are taking too long.
Grace tells a different story.
Grace says: something in you is trying to survive.
Grace says: this feeling is here for a reason.
Grace says: you do not have to obey every emotion, but you can listen.
Grace says: you can be overwhelmed and beloved at the same time.
Grace says: the goal is not to appear healed. The goal is to become more human.
In the Christian story (the one found in the Bible but missing in most churches), God is not only found in brightness, triumph, certainty, and praise music with a major chord resolution. God is found in wilderness, lament, blood, sweat, betrayal, groaning, silence, and tombs. God is found in a crucified body that refuses to pretend empire is not violent. God is found in women weeping at a grave before anyone knows resurrection is coming.
The tradition has always known what our positivity culture forgets: love is not afraid of the dark.
Jesus does not save by avoiding suffering. Jesus reveals a love that descends into the places we abandon, a love that tells the truth, absorbs violence without becoming violent, grieves without shame, and rises with wounds still visible.
Resurrection is not the denial of death. It is what happens when love goes all the way through.
This is the path to staying human.
Not pretending the dark emotions are good in themselves. Not drowning in them. Not building an identity around them. Not using them to excuse harm. Not refusing medication or therapy when those supports are needed. Not romanticizing collapse.
But learning to feel what is here with enough compassion that it can move.
That is emotional alchemy.
Not a forced transformation. Not turning grief into gratitude too quickly. Not bypassing sorrow with a lesson. Not rushing pain toward usefulness.
Alchemy begins with attention.
What is here?
Where does it live in the body?
What is it asking me to know?
What is it protecting?
What has not been grieved?
What needs care?
What needs truth?
What needs repair?
What needs to change?
When dark emotions are met with mindful attention, they can begin to move instead of stagnate. Grief can become tenderness. Fear can become discernment. Anger can become boundary. Despair can become honesty. Sadness can become depth. Loneliness can become longing for communion. Pain can become a portal, not because pain is good, but because love is willing to meet us there.
And this matters beyond our private lives.
A culture that cannot grieve will become violent. A culture that cannot feel fear honestly will become obsessed with control. A culture that cannot metabolize despair will sell distraction as salvation. A culture that cannot honor anger will either suppress it in the powerless or weaponize it for the powerful. A culture that cannot sit with sorrow will keep demanding entertainment while the world burns.
Our unprocessed emotions do not stay private. They become politics. They become parenting. They become theology. They become policing. They become consumption. They become climate denial. They become religious certainty. They become contempt for the vulnerable. They become systems that punish in others what we cannot bear to feel in ourselves.
This is why staying human is not only an inner project.
It is an act of resistance.
To feel grief in a death-denying culture is resistance.
To listen to fear without letting it drive is resistance.
To metabolize anger into repair instead of domination is resistance.
To refuse numbness in a machine that profits from dissociation is resistance.
To reclaim joy, not as denial, but as the fruit of a heart that has been allowed to feel, is resistance.
We cannot numb our way back to joy.
We can only feel our way back to aliveness.
And feeling is not passive. It is one of the bravest things a human being can do.
Because the moment we stop running from the dark emotions, we may discover that they were not trying to destroy us. They were trying to return us to ourselves. They were trying to show us where love had been blocked, where grief had been waiting, where truth had been buried, where the body had been carrying the cost of our refusal.
If grief is part of what you are carrying, and if you are tired of being told that time heals all wounds, I created Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds as a more honest path through loss. One for those ready for support that honors grief instead of rushing you past it.
The invitation is not to become someone who never feels anxiety, despair, anger, sorrow, or fear.
The invitation is to become someone who can stay present when they arrive.
Someone who can say, “This too belongs.”
Someone who can place a hand on the body and listen.
Someone who can let the wound speak without handing it the wheel.
Someone who can seek care without shame.
Someone who can descend without disappearing.
Someone who can grieve and still love.
Someone who can feel the darkness without becoming loyal to it.
Someone who can stay human.
Because joy is not the opposite of grief.
Joy is what becomes possible when grief is no longer exiled.
Practices for Staying Human With Dark Emotions
Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.