What Happens When You Numb Emotions: Why Connection and Love Can Feel Muted
Avoiding the emotions of anticipatory grief that you don’t want to feel is often exactly what prevents you from feeling the ones you do want: love, joy, and connection with your animal.
When we’re walking alongside a beloved animal during illness, aging, or the end of life, it’s natural to want to protect ourselves from the hard emotions, as we often believe we are protecting our beloved animal from our pain. Grief, sadness, fear, and worry can feel overwhelming. Sometimes, without even realizing it, we try to push them down, avoid them, or distract ourselves from them. It’s a very human response. And our animals feel this struggle within us.
Here’s the tender truth: trying to selectively turn off emotional pain doesn’t work. When you numb or suppress difficult emotions, you’re not just turning off sadness, anger, or anxiety; you’re dampening your entire emotional range.
It’s like trying to adjust a faucet. You may think you can turn off only the “hot” water of grief and pain while leaving the “cold” water of joy and love running. But in reality, you end up with water that’s either scalding or freezing and neither feels quite right. When both taps flow together, something different happens: you find a more balanced, full, and alive experience.
This is one of the hidden “gifts” of anticipatory grief. (I know many don’t feel it is a gift in the beginning). But these emotions rise to the surface not to break you, but to be acknowledged, felt, and released. When you allow yourself to be with them, the tightness they create in your body begins to soften. Space opens inside you to feel love, joy, and connection more fully, allowing you to move more freely again.
Think of it like adjusting the volume on a sound system. You can’t turn down just the “sad frequencies.” When you focus on shutting down what’s uncomfortable, you end up lowering the volume on everything, including joy, love, and deep connection frequencies. Most of us don’t even realize how much of our emotional range we’ve closed off to protect ourselves, and over time, this can leave love feeling muted and connection feeling a little hollow. But once you know this, you can begin to approach your anticipatory grief differently.
The emotions you long for, true contentment, deep connection, genuine excitement, and profound love, all share the same neural pathways and emotional openness as fear and grief. When you accompany your animal with this knowing, you begin to move with more presence during your animal's end-of-life journey, and you have a little more ease and aliveness. You are open to understanding that it is okay not to have to manage or eliminate your difficult emotions, and are now expanding your capacity to feel them all and stay present with them.
You aren’t optimizing for emotional comfort through avoidance. You are opening your heart to the full spectrum of love and what this sacred time with your beloved pet has to offer. Your heart is capable of holding both pain and love, as well as everything in between, simultaneously. In this space, something extraordinary happens: the connection with your beloved animal deepens to a level beyond words.
The next time a difficult emotion arises, grief, anger, or anxiety, rather than turning away, try pausing.
Instead of saying “What’s wrong with me?” or “How can I make this stop?”, gently ask yourself:
Where do I feel this in my body?
What does this sensation need right now to feel supported or acknowledged?
What would love offer me in this moment?
Can I let the unconditional love from my animal in and love myself as they love me? Your animal holds you in their love for you as you find your way. Your relationship remains a mutual exchange of love throughout your journey.
You don’t know or have the answers to these questions; your willingness to get curious is where real change begins. This is how you stay open to yourself, to your emotions, and to the profound bond you have and share with your animal.
Avoiding the emotions you don’t want to feel may seem like protection, but in reality, it’s what keeps you from fully experiencing the love and connection that you do want to experience at this time. When you allow your heart to hold the full spectrum, you give yourself and your beloved companion the most incredible gift: your presence.
Explore more options
If this perspective resonates with you and you would like to deepen your understanding of your animal, anticipatory grief, nervous system awareness, and the human-animal bond, I invite you to explore my online course, Embracing Deeper Connections.
This course was created to support pet guardians in approaching aging, illness, behavioural changes, and end-of-life with greater presence, compassion, and understanding, for both themselves and their animals. Together, we explore how emotional overwhelm, grief, attachment, and nervous system responses can shape the journey we share with our beloved companions, while learning ways to stay more connected through it all.
I offer compassionate, grief-informed support to help you walk this path with more presence, understanding, and love. Whether you’re in the early stages of anticipatory grief or navigating life after loss, there are gentle, grounded ways to reconnect with yourself and your beloved pet.
For personalized support schedule a 1:1 session- Canadians, US & International
Download a free guide + meditation to support you in times of overwhelm.
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