When Numbness Starts to Crack: Ketamine Therapy and the Return of Feeling
Many people who ask about ketamine therapy do not describe themselves as “in crisis.” They say things like:
“I’m not that bad. I just feel… nothing.” “It’s like my life is happening behind glass.” “I know what I should feel, but it doesn’t land.”
They may still be going to work, showing up for family, even appearing “fine” from the outside. They often apologise for taking up space in the consultation:
“I’m not sure I’m ill enough for this. Other people have it worse.”
Underneath that apology there is usually a quieter truth: a long-standing sense of emotional shut-down that has never really shifted, no matter how many insights, self-help books, or therapy sessions they have tried.
The story is often less about intense pain, and more about an absence where feeling should be.
Numbness as a survival strategy
Emotional numbing rarely appears out of nowhere. For many people it began as a kind of intelligent adaptation.
If you grew up in an atmosphere where emotions were overwhelming, unsafe or simply unwelcome, your brain learned to protect you. Dial the volume down. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t feel too much, because feeling too much has consequences.
Sometimes there are clear traumatic experiences. At other times there is “quiet” trauma – years of loneliness, criticism, neglect, or pressure to perform. The details vary, but the pattern is similar: the emotional system concludes that fully registering your own experience is risky.
Over time, this protective style can become the default setting:
- Joy feels muted or short-lived.
- Sadness turns into blankness rather than tears.
- Anger is hard to access at all.
- Love is something you do rather than something you feel.
People with this history are often very competent, thoughtful and self-aware. They can explain their past with striking clarity. But their emotional life remains strangely two-dimensional. Insight has not translated into aliveness.
What ketamine changes – and what it does not
Ketamine is sometimes described as a “dissociative” medicine, which can sound unhelpful if you already feel disconnected. Why give a dissociative drug to someone who is emotionally distant?
The answer lies in distinguishing protective numbness from the kind of temporary loosening ketamine can induce.
In everyday life, numbness is like being stuck in one narrow corridor of experience. You can walk back and forth along the same strip, but all the doors remain closed. The system is rigid: it knows how to shut things down very well, and it does that almost automatically.
During a carefully supported ketamine session, that rigidity often relaxes. It is not that you are flooded with raw feeling all at once. Rather, different rooms become accessible. The corridor opens out. Doors that were stuck begin to crack.
For some people this shows up as:
- A brief, surprising warmth towards themselves.
- A sense of tenderness or grief that had not been reachable.
- Moments of awe, meaning or connection to something larger.
- A realisation: “I’ve never looked at my life from this angle before.”
At the brain level, ketamine appears to interrupt well-worn networks that keep us locked in familiar patterns of self-protection and self-talk. Those networks are not “bad” – they evolved to keep you safe – but when they are over-dominant, they leave very little room for spontaneity, curiosity or real contact.
Ketamine does not give you a new personality. It does not erase your history. What it can do, in some people, is create a short window in which the old protective style is less in charge, and other ways of relating to yourself can be tried on.
The anxiety about feeling more
It is very common for people who feel numb to be afraid of not feeling numb.
When we talk about the possibility of feeling more, worries often surface:
- “What if everything I’ve pushed down comes back all at once?”
- “What if I can’t cope if I let myself feel?”
- “What if I open up and then I’m just left like that, too raw?”
These are not irrational fears. Often they are based on earlier experiences where emotion did feel unmanageable, or where there was no one reliably there to help hold it.
This is why ketamine therapy is not simply about a medicine; it is about context.
In a good ketamine-assisted therapy process, you are not thrown into feeling more and then sent home to manage alone. There is preparation beforehand – getting to know your history, your resources, the parts of you that are scared. There is support during the dosing session and structured integration afterwards, where the focus is on digesting and grounding whatever arose.
The aim is not to rip away your coping mechanisms. The aim is to give the more flexible parts of your system a chance to emerge, while the protective parts remain respected and involved rather than sidelined.
Working with numbness in the ketamine space
For people whose main difficulty is emotional blunting or disconnection, the work around ketamine often looks slightly different than it does for those whose primary struggle is overwhelming anxiety.
Some of the themes we may explore include:
1. Learning the “micro-signals” of feeling When you are very used to numbness, feeling can arrive quietly at first. A tightness in the throat, a slight warmth in the chest, a subtle urge to cry that never quite becomes tears. A key part of the therapeutic work is learning to notice these early signals and stay with them, rather than brushing them away.
2. Making it safe to care Numbness often protects against the pain of caring deeply – about people, projects, or the future – when you have learned that what you care about can be taken away or disappointed. In the more open state that ketamine sometimes brings, it becomes possible to gently test what it is like to let yourself care again, in small, manageable doses.
3. Updating old predictions Emotionally shut-down systems are often driven by old predictions: “If I let myself get close, I will get hurt,” or “If I show how I really feel, I will be shamed.” In the weeks around ketamine treatment, there is an opportunity to gently test those predictions in real relationships: to express a little more, to ask for a bit more support, and see what actually happens now.
4. Bringing the body back into the conversation Numbness is not just a mental state; it is also a bodily one. Muscles that are permanently braced. Breath that never really deepens. In the altered state, some people find it easier to connect with their body as part of the story. Shifts in posture, breathing and sensation become another way to track change, not just thoughts.
The role of integration: turning moments into movement
The most meaningful changes after ketamine tend not to be the dramatic “peak” moments during the session itself, but the quieter shifts in the days and weeks afterwards:
- Reaching out to a friend rather than withdrawing.
- Allowing a wave of sadness to move through instead of shutting it down.
- Taking a small, concrete step towards something that matters.
Without integration, these possibilities can be noticed and then forgotten. The old corridor reasserts itself. “Interesting experience” becomes another story in the mind, rather than a change in how you live.
Therapeutic integration sessions are where we turn experience into practice:
- Naming what felt different.
- Exploring what it suggests about your capacity to feel and cope.
- Identifying small experiments in daily life that fit your nervous system, not someone else’s idea of recovery.
- Revisiting memories or beliefs that surfaced while your system was less defended, and seeing whether they look different now.
The goal is not to rely on ketamine indefinitely, but to use the period of increased flexibility to build habits, understandings and relationships that remain, even when the direct effects of the medicine have faded.
London, pace, and the problem of “functioning too well”
In a city like London, emotional numbness can be particularly invisible.
Our culture tends to value productivity and composure. If you are working, paying your rent, keeping up appearances, it is easy for both you and others to conclude that things are fine enough. Many people who come to ketamine therapy have been “functioning” at a high level for years, while feeling increasingly hollowed out inside.
One of the subtle gifts of this work can be permission to take your inner life seriously, even if you are outwardly coping.
You don’t have to wait until everything collapses. You don’t have to justify a desire to feel more alive by proving that you are desperate enough.
In a properly screened and supported setting, ketamine-assisted therapy is not about drama; it is about adjusting the conditions so that who you are is less narrowed by old defences, and more guided by what actually matters to you now.
Safety, screening and ongoing care
As with any medical treatment, ketamine is not suitable for everyone. A thorough assessment usually includes:
- Medical screening, including blood pressure and heart history.
- A review of current medication and past psychiatric diagnoses.
- A careful conversation about substances, dissociation, and any history of psychosis.
- Exploring your support network and day-to-day life: how you will look after yourself before, during and after treatment.
If ketamine is not appropriate, or if the risks outweigh the benefits, that is important information in itself. Sometimes the work is in finding other routes to emotion and meaning that do not involve this particular medicine.
Even when ketamine is suitable, it is not a quick fix. It is one part of a broader process that may include ongoing therapy, lifestyle adjustments, and, for some people, continued medication. For many, the most helpful framing is this:
Ketamine can help open the door. The work you do around it helps decide what you walk towards.
Allowing the first cracks of feeling
For people who have spent years carefully not feeling, the idea of seeking treatment that might change that can be both hopeful and frightening.
If you recognise yourself in this description of numbness or “living behind glass,” ketamine-assisted therapy is not about forcing you into an overwhelming emotional landscape. It is about exploring, at your own pace, what becomes possible when the old freeze begins to soften – and doing so in a setting where you are accompanied, not left to manage it alone.
The first sign of change is often not joy, or tears, but something quieter: A sense of contact with your own experience. A small increase in colour where everything was grey.
From there, the work becomes less about deserving help, and more about learning how to inhabit a life that feels a little less distant, and a little more your own.