I protected myself from feeling. You can’t numb pain and still feel joy. You dimmed everything to avoid one thing.
The first week of residency, one of the senior residents gave me advice I heard as practical and later understood was a survival instruction. He said: “Don’t let it get to you.” He was talking about the deaths. The unsuccessful resuscitations. The patients who came in with lives they expected to continue and left through a different door than the one they entered. Don’t let it get to you. He said it the way you tell someone to wear a coat: matter-of-fact, slightly urgent, already moving on.
I took the advice. I became very good at it.
What I did not understand for years was that the human nervous system does not come equipped with a selective dimmer switch. You cannot turn down the volume on pain and leave the volume on joy where it is. The neurobiological mechanism does not work that way. When you learn to suppress the signal on one frequency of feeling, you reduce the bandwidth available for all feeling. The adjustment is not targeted. It is systemic.
Brené Brown at the University of Houston has studied vulnerability and emotional numbing in qualitative research across thousands of interviews, and the observation she returns to consistently is this: you cannot selectively numb emotion (Brown 2010, The Gifts of Imperfection, Hazelden). Honesty Scale: Promising (4/5). Brown’s work is qualitative and grounded theory, not a randomized trial, and it should be understood as such. The selective numbing claim is consistent with affective neuroscience literature and with the clinical observations of clinicians working in distress tolerance, but Brown herself does not present it as a controlled experimental finding. The statement is plain and the clinical evidence around it, while not coming from a single clean trial, is consistent enough across multiple research streams to take seriously as a working hypothesis.
Marsha Linehan, who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy out of her own experience with intense emotional suffering and decades of clinical work, built an entire therapeutic approach on the premise that distress tolerance is teachable, and that the attempt to eliminate emotional experience, rather than tolerate it, is itself a major source of suffering (Linehan 1993, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, Guilford). Honesty Scale: Solid (5/5). DBT has extensive randomized controlled trial evidence across multiple populations. The distress tolerance module specifically has been validated in clinical samples.
What I want to say here is simpler than the literature. I want to say it the way a physician says something to a patient when the clinical language has done its job and the human work is what remains.
I had learned to protect myself from feeling by the time I was quite young. Not by deciding to. By adapting to an environment where certain feelings were too costly to express and therefore too costly to have. The Sengera village of my early life was not a place where a boy called ekerentane had the luxury of sustained grief, or sustained fear, or the kind of longing that, if voiced, would have been used against him. So the feelings did not disappear. They went underground, into the place in the body where the voice cannot reach them easily.
Years later, in an American hospital where I had a different kind of authority and a different kind of safety, the habit was still running. The patient who died at three in the morning, the family standing in the hallway with a silence that was larger than any clinical language: I was moved. I knew I was moved. The moving was real. And I was also, at some specific level below the moving, doing something that kept the moved feeling at a manageable distance. A professional at the edge of the room rather than a person in the middle of it.
This is not a failure of empathy. I want to be clear about this. The people who learn to dim their feelings in order to function are not people with empathy deficits. They are people who learned, in environments that required it, that feeling fully was too expensive. The dimming was a form of survival. The survival was real.
What the dimming costs is harder to see because it is gradual and quiet. You notice it not in a single moment of absence but in a pattern of near-presences. The dinner where you are there but not quite all the way there. The conversation where you are saying the right things but the right things are arriving from a slight distance, like words spoken through glass. The good news about your child or your friend or your own life that produces something that resembles joy but is, when you hold it up to the light, the shadow of joy rather than the thing itself.
And the particular cruelty of it is this: the feeling you were trying to avoid still finds you. Pain is not permanently dimmable. It leaks. It appears in the 3 a.m. waking, in the irrational response to something small, in the grief that arrives for no clear reason on an ordinary Thursday. The dimming postpones the feeling, not always. It does not prevent it. What it prevents, reliably, is the joy that was supposed to come through the same channel.
In September 2024, I walked away from the Carle Foundation Hospital position and the $800,000 a year that came with it. I have described that decision in terms of agency and direction and the R.E.T.U.R.N. work. What I have not said, until now, is that part of what made that decision possible was a single afternoon in the spring of that year when I was sitting in a room with someone who had known me for a long time and I allowed myself to feel, without immediately managing it, the full cost of what I had been doing for eight years. The full weight of what Sengera had deposited and what American medicine had then added, layer by layer. The whole of it.
It was not a pleasant afternoon. My hands were not steady. Whatever is usually dry on my body, like my forehead and my palms, became moist. Whatever is usually moist, like my mouth and my throat, went dry. The feeling arrived at a volume that the dimmer had been holding back for years.
I did not die.
The feeling was survivable. And when it passed, which it did, what replaced it was not euphoria and not peace exactly, but a quality of presence that I had not had access to in a long time. The kind of presence where the food at dinner tastes like food, where a conversation has actual texture, where someone’s face across a table is specific and real rather than a general impression of a face.
That quality of presence is what the dimming had been holding at bay.
You cannot dim one feeling. You dim them all. The volume goes down on the whole life.
The recovery of feeling is not dramatic. It is incremental, and the increments are often uncomfortable at first, because the system that learned to dim has calibrated for a narrower range, and the recalibration requires sitting with discomfort that the dimmer would have handled before. But the discomfort is not permanent and it is not pathological. It is the feeling of a person learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, that they can be present in their own life without being destroyed by it.
You dimmed everything to avoid one thing. Everything includes the things worth showing up for.
I want to say one more thing before the mirror at the end of this chapter, and it is this: the recovery of feeling is not the absence of pain. That is a misunderstanding worth correcting directly. The goal of this chapter is not a life in which the feeling you have been avoiding never arrives. The goal is a life in which, when that feeling arrives, you have enough access to yourself to meet it, hold it, and continue. That is different from a pain-free life, which is not available and would not serve you if it were.
The people I have known who were most genuinely alive were not the people who felt the least. They were the people who had the widest range, who could move from grief to gladness within a single conversation, who did not have to quarantine one in order to access the other. That range is what the dimming has been costing you. The range is what becomes available when the dimming stops being the only option.
You are allowed to feel. This movement has been building toward that one sentence for nine chapters. The sentence is simple. The work it names is not.
The volume knob turns both ways.
A Mirror
Name the specific feeling you learned to manage most carefully. The one that, when it arrives, you have the most practiced response to containing. Where did you learn to contain it? (Listening for: the primary suppressed affect and its origin. Most people can name it when asked directly. The naming is often the first time they have said it aloud.)
What would you describe as the emotional range of your average week? Name the upper and lower end of what you actually feel, not what you believe you should feel. (Listening for: the compression of the emotional register. A very narrow reported range in either direction, particularly the absence of the lower registers, is the signature of systemic dimming.)
Is there a joy that you know should be available to you, that other people seem to access, that you find yourself unable to quite reach? Name it specifically. (Listening for: the shadow joy. The approximate but not-quite, the near-miss that the dimming produces when it cuts the channel to pain and cuts the channel to joy simultaneously.)
What feeling, if you allowed it fully, do you believe would be intolerable? Name that feeling. Then sit with the question of whether the belief about its intolerability has ever actually been tested. (Listening for: the untested hypothesis at the core of the dimming. Very often the feared feeling, when finally encountered, is survivable in ways the person had not imagined.) ---
Letter from Dr. Job
Subject: The feeling you dimmed
I want to tell you something I know from the inside.
The feeling you have been protecting yourself from is survivable. I know that because I finally felt it, the whole of it, in a room where I did not look away, and I did not disappear.
The surviving of it opened something. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But the presence I have in a room now, the actual quality of being there, is different from what I had access to before. Not because I mastered the feeling. Because I stopped managing it away.
The volume on your life has been lower than it should be. The good things, the real ones, the ones worth living for, they are coming through the same channel as the hard things. When you turn the hard things down, you turn those down too.
I am not asking you to stop protecting yourself. I am asking you to ask: what is the protection still costing you?
And whether the cost, added up, is one you chose, or one you inherited so long ago that you forgot to question it.
You are allowed to feel. That is the work this movement has been building toward. Not the performance of feeling. The actual thing. In the body. Without managing it away.
In Ekegusii, imoka means to arise. Not the dramatic arising of performance. The quiet arising of a person who has been down long enough to understand what standing costs, and who stands anyway, not because the ground is safe but because being down has become more expensive than rising.
That is where Movement III begins.
Imoka.
Welcome to the beginning.
Movement III — The Stories That Stopped Being True
— Job