By Linda C J Turner | Trauma Therapy & Neuroscience-Informed Healing
There comes a moment in the healing journey when everything feels… strange.
You look at old photos and feel nothing.
Not love. Not hate.
Just… blank.
The face in the image is familiar, but distant. The memories are there in theory, but not in sensation. It’s as if someone else lived that life—and your heart wasn’t fully there for any of it.
This is what happens when the brain has been in survival mode for too long.
When you’ve endured emotional neglect, gaslighting, chronic disappointment, or psychological abuse, the mind begins to shut down its emotional receptors as a form of self-protection.
This is not weakness. This is neurobiology.
🧠 Emotional Shutdown Is a Survival Strategy
In neuroscience, this is often referred to as emotional numbing, a protective response orchestrated by the brain—particularly the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. When the nervous system has endured too much, too often, for too long, it begins to suppress emotional responses in order to prevent overwhelm.
Your brain literally downregulates certain emotional circuits to help you function in environments where feeling was dangerous.
Where kindness came with strings.
Where affection was inconsistent.
Where being vulnerable made you a target.
The cost?
You stop feeling much of anything at all.
Joy, grief, hope, excitement—they all become muffled echoes. And you forget what it’s like to be fully alive.
❤️ Then One Day, Something Changes…
Someone new enters your world.
They speak softly, kindly.
They look into your eyes without trying to manipulate you.
They see you—not as someone to fix or use—but as someone to connect with.
And suddenly, your body starts waking up.
You feel warmth in your chest. Butterflies in your stomach.
Tears that come without warning—not from pain, but from a gentle kind of remembering.
And it scares you.
Because these sensations are foreign.
Because part of you doesn’t trust them.
Because you’ve lived for so long in the freeze response, that the experience of being felt, seen, and safe feels almost dangerous.
But here’s the truth:
This isn’t danger.
This is healing.
🧬 What’s Happening in Your Brain
You are moving from trauma brain into connection brain.
- Your limbic system, which governs emotion, is no longer on constant high alert.
- Your vagus nerve—the superhighway between body and brain—is beginning to regulate, allowing for calm, rest, and openness.
- Your mirror neurons are firing again, helping you resonate with another person’s joy, affection, and presence.
- Your prefrontal cortex is learning to tell a new story—one where love doesn’t equal loss, and connection doesn’t mean danger.
Your brain is literally rewiring in the presence of safety.
And that’s what a new, kind, attuned connection can do—not save you, but awaken you. It reflects back to your nervous system what’s always been possible: a life with feeling, meaning, and mutuality.
🌱 Feeling Again Is the Bravest Thing You’ll Ever Do
No, you’re not broken because you went numb.
You were surviving.
And no, you’re not weak for trembling now that love is in front of you.
You are re-learning safety.
This person—this moment—may not be forever. Or it might be.
But what matters most is this part of you that’s coming back to life.
The part that wants to feel.
The part that remembers what trust could be.
The part that sees beauty in a smile, warmth in a hand, truth in a gaze.
That is your birthright.
That is your healing.
That is your body remembering the way home.
✨ You are not going backwards. You are waking up.
To joy. To connection. To real life, in real time.
Don’t be ashamed of your fear.
But don’t let it silence your aliveness.
The trauma might have numbed your emotions, but it never stole your capacity to love—or be loved in return.
And now?
You’re ready to feel again.
#TraumaHealing #NeuroscienceOfLove #EmotionalNumbing #WakingUpFromAbuse #LindaCJTurnerTherapy #NeurobiologyOfHealing #ReclaimYourMind #SafeLoveFeelsDifferent
