Numbness or Peace?
It took me decades to tell the difference.
When you’ve lived for years in survival mode, the idea of “feeling calm” can get tangled up with something else entirely.
Sometimes what looks like calm on the outside is actually numbness — a kind of quiet that’s more about absence than ease.
And for survivors, that makes sense. Your nervous system learned early on that the safest way to keep going was to not feel too much. So when your body finally slows down, it can be hard to tell: is this healing, or is this shutdown?
They can look the same at first. The heart rate evens out. Thoughts get quieter. You stop crying or panicking.
But under the surface, they’re very different states.
When you’re regulated, there’s aliveness under the stillness. You can feel your body — maybe not everything, but something. You might notice warmth in your hands, a flutter of curiosity, a small impulse to connect or move. It’s quiet, but it’s responsive.
When you’re numb, there’s a kind of static. The body might feel distant or heavy, like it’s made of stone or fog. Time gets weird. The world flattens out — food doesn’t taste like much, laughter feels forced, joy doesn’t register. It’s not peace; it’s absence.
Numbness is a brilliant, painful form of protection.
It’s the body saying: “You’ve felt enough for now.”
There’s no shame in that.
But if you want to build a life that’s bigger than survival, it helps to know when you’re in that space — and how to find your way out gently.
A few cues I use myself:
Can I feel my breath moving in my chest, even a little?
Can I tell whether I’m tired, hungry, or lonely?
Can I tolerate the tiniest bit of feeling — not all of it, just one spark — without wanting to disappear?
If the answer is sometimes, that’s progress.
Regulation isn’t a switch you flip; it’s something you practice by noticing and returning, over and over.
The goal isn’t to feel “good.”
It’s to feel safe enough to feel.
That’s what my journal by that name was designed to help people practice — small, steady experiments in noticing, softening, and returning to the body in a way that feels possible. It’s for the parts of us who want to live, but don’t yet know how to do it safely.
If that’s where you are, you’re not alone.
Your system isn’t broken; it’s brilliant.
It’s just waiting to learn that safety doesn’t have to mean silence anymore.
Hi Jade, I just listened to the interview you did on "Back from the Abyss" and want to thank you SO much for doing it, as well as your post "Hypersexuality in DID systems." So helpful to hear someone addressing the issue of alters being abused sexually, with the host and others having amnesia for it. As I try to understand my system so late in life, I am more bewildered and disturbed by this issue than any other, and I find it difficult to find much written or spoken about it. Do you know of any resources for me to learn more on this topic? Regardless, thank you again for that great interview. It is also important how it shows the ignorance of the host who, like almost every other clinical psychologist, is skeptical about DID and is thus not seeing it and thus failing his clients. At least he sees it now. Thank you for that, too! Maybe he will actually change and have more systems on his podcast.