Pins and Needles: The Prickling of Paresthesia

Paresthesia is the tingling, prickling sensation that accompanies the return of feeling to a limb after it’s gone numb. Most of us have experienced it – your foot falls asleep, you stand up too fast, and suddenly you’re swarmed by a thousand tiny needles. The medical term is dry and clinical, but the experience is anything but: it’s irritating, painful, and sometimes overwhelming. And more than anything, it’s a sign that something inside you is waking up.

So what do you call it when this happens to your emotional life?

After months — or years — of feeling nothing, the return of feeling doesn’t arrive as a warm reunion. It comes jagged. It comes raw. It scrapes you open in the middle of nowhere. “People think healing is soft,” said Dr. Thema Bryant, a psychologist and professor at Pepperdine University, “but healing often hurts. It involves naming, grieving, releasing. It’s hard work” (Bryant, Homecoming, 2022).

For those of us who’ve been frozen—by trauma, depression, burnout, grief—emotions can feel like old debts. They come due all at once, with interest.

In psychological terms, emotional numbness is not unusual during times of intense stress. It’s the nervous system’s version of triage: when everything hurts too much, we stop feeling anything at all. “It’s a natural, adaptive response,” writes trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. “But if it persists, it becomes maladaptive” (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014).

This disconnection can look like detachment, dissociation, or apathy. But to the person experiencing it, it often feels like failure. You watch your own life from behind glass, unable to react to anything. You miss your own birthday. You forget to cry at funerals. You know you should care, but you don’t. And that emptiness starts to feel permanent.

When numbness becomes chronic, it seeps into everything. You stop reaching out. You stop remembering joy. “I didn’t feel alive,” one woman told me. “Not sad, not angry, just — absent. Like I was watching someone else go through the motions.” It becomes easy to mistake this kind of stasis for healing, or at least for stability. But healing isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the presence of feeling.

The cruelest part of emotional paresthesia is that when the numbness wears off, you don’t feel better. You feel worse. The same way your leg screams when blood rushes back in, your heart can ache when emotions return after a long silence.

This return is often slow and scattered. You find yourself crying at toothpaste commercials. Shaking during casual conversations. Suddenly grieving things that happened ten years ago. You can’t tell if you’re regressing or moving forward. You just know you’re uncomfortable.

“There is nothing neat about recovery,” says therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab. “We must be willing to be uncomfortable, to cry, to mourn, to feel things we thought we’d buried” (Set Boundaries, Find Peace, 2021). And yet in our culture of instant gratification and Instagram affirmations, the idea of healing as a non-linear, painful process is rarely acknowledged.

To feel again is to remember what you’ve been avoiding. It means finally confronting the breakup you never processed, the death you never mourned, the trauma you tried to outrun. It’s overwhelming by design.

We live in a world that encourages avoidance. Whether through substances, scrolling, shopping, or self-optimization, we are sold constant ways to distract ourselves. Coming out of emotional numbness often requires rejecting those numbing tools, or at least noticing them.

Johann Hari, in his exploration of addiction and disconnection, puts it plainly: “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection” (Chasing the Scream, 2015). And yet reconnection — with ourselves, with our past, with other people — can be terrifying.

Emotional sobriety means choosing to stay present with discomfort. To sit with the itch instead of scratching it. To resist the urge to flee. “When you numb the pain, you also numb the joy,” Brené Brown famously said. “You can’t selectively numb emotion” (The Gifts of Imperfection, 2010).

So when you start to feel again, you don’t just feel pain. You feel hope. You feel anger. You feel hunger — for touch, for truth, for beauty. All of it comes rushing back. You’re no longer a spectator in your own life.

But being alive hurts. Especially at first.

One of the most surprising parts of coming out of numbness is the grief. You grieve not just the things you feel now, but the time you spent not feeling. You mourn the days you missed, the connections you let drift, and the person you became just to survive.

“Trauma creates a new version of you,” said author Stephanie Foo. “You wake up one day and realize you don’t recognize your own reactions. You don’t trust your feelings. You have to reintroduce yourself to yourself” (What My Bones Know, 2022).

There is no celebration when you cry for the first time after months of dissociation. It doesn’t feel victorious. It feels humiliating. But it’s progress.

Like a limb learning to move again, your emotional body has to relearn motion. Relearn language. Relearn rhythm. The first steps back into feeling are uneven. You will overreact. You will underreact. You will feel raw, exposed, too much.

But you will also feel real.

Eventually, the tingling subsides. The emotional pins and needles give way to something quieter. You begin to trust your feelings again – not all of them, but enough. You begin to orient yourself around what you value, not just what you fear.

It’s not dramatic. There is no montage, no final breakthrough, no soundtrack. There’s just the slow, ordinary unfolding of days. Coffee with a friend. A favorite song. A memory that hurts less than it used to.

This is the real miracle of recovery. Not that we feel again, but that we keep feeling even when it hurts. That we stay open even when we know what it costs. That we choose life over safety, knowing full well the risk.

“Sometimes you have to break down to break open,” says poet Yung Pueblo. And it’s true. Emotional reawakening isn’t clean. It’s full of false starts, of backslides, of doubt. But it is, at its core, the work of becoming human again.

And being human – aching, fragile, feeling – is the bravest thing we ever do.