You function. And you barely feel yourself.

You say you are fine. The day is organised, the work runs, nobody needs to worry. And the people who actually know you still feel a distance. Not always a fight. More like a pane of glass. You are there, and you are not there.

This is not a flaw in character. It is often an old solution. At some point feeling was too much, so the body turned the volume down. You learned to be useful. Useful holds a life together. It does not make you present.

What the body does instead of the explanation

Numbness is rarely empty. It is often a layer over fear, grief, or anger that nobody could hold back then. The jaw stays tight, the shoulders carry, the breath stays high, and you call it stress. Sometimes it is stress. Sometimes it is sadness without a name, or loneliness in a full room.

In somatic work we do not begin by asking why you became this way. We stay with what is here now. A place in the body. A breath that does not reach the bottom. An impulse to end the conversation before it gets tight. When that can be felt, without you repairing it at once, more life often returns than through the next plan.

The boy who is still driving

For many men the man functions, and the inner boy decides. He wants to get it right, not be a burden, not be left. The sentence “I am fine” protects him. The work is not to get rid of the boy. The work is that the man is back in the room when it gets tight.

If you recognise yourself, read next what happens in a session, or the letter on shame and the sentence that you are not enough. The way in is still a conversation.