Intimacy is huge when it comes to human relationships. Emotional intimacy is arguably the most important type of intimacy for most people. Because humans are primarily an emotional species. Our feelings and emotions comprise a significant part of our psychic life.
Emotional intimacy is achieved via emotional connection, and the latter via the expression and sharing of emotions. Emotional connection and intimacy foster trust and transparency. They build and strengthen relationships. In contrast, emotional disconnection and detachment tend to break down relationships.
- The definition
- Emotional connection is an investment
- Signs
- 1. Emotional numbness
- 2. Reduced emotional range
- 3. Difficulty identifying emotions
- 4. Emotional suppression
- 5. Difficulty expressing emotions
- 6. Rarely admitting vulnerability
- 7. Using humor, logic, and detachment as a shield
- 8. Discomfort with emotional closeness
- 9. Avoidance of emotional conversations
- 10. Fear of commitment
- 11. Emotional unavailability
- 12. Poor empathy
- 13. Low relational investment
- 14. Social withdrawal
- 15. Conflict avoidance
The definition
Emotional detachment means not connecting with others on a deep, emotional level. You can connect with others in various ways and on various levels. With an acquaintance, you may only have a superficial connection. With your colleague, you may only have an intellectual connection. With your partner, family, and friends, you likely have an emotional connection.
Emotional connection is an investment
You may be somewhat detached emotionally from an acquaintance or a colleague. It makes sense because emotional connection requires emotional investment. Emotional investment uses up our limited emotional bandwidth. We simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth to emotionally connect with a large number of people. As a result, your highest levels of emotional investment are reserved for the people closest to you.
We continually monitor how much we’re emotionally investing in others so that we don’t waste or limited emotional reserves. If we manage to build a relationship with someone, great. We can keep emotionally investing in them. When the relationship is in trouble, emotional detachment is a likely response to conserve emotional energy and maybe divert to someone else.
Signs
Emotional detachment can be subtle or overt. When it happens to you, you’ll likely sense it. We’re good at this stuff because interpersonal relationships were key to our survival in ancient times. You’ll get a gut feeling that something is off. When you detach yourself emotionally from someone, you’ll sense it in yourself too. It’ll be as if a switch flips in your head. The switch of emotional connection that flips from ‘On’ to ‘Off’.
Still, you don’t want to rely only on your intuition. It’s always better to get more data, more signs, so that your intuition gets confirmed. Here are the core signs of emotional detachment:
Disclaimer: These signs are not meant to be a diagnosis. If emotional detachment is causing significant distress to you, it’s recommended that you seek professional help.
1. Emotional numbness
When you feel emotionally numb, your emotions get muted, or you don’t experience them at all. You don’t feel much of anything. Numbing is a protective mechanism the mind uses to protect itself from emotional pain or overwhelm. Therefore, stress can induce emotional numbing.1Glover, H. (1992). Emotional numbing: A possible endorphin‐mediated phenomenon associated with post‐traumatic stress disorders and other allied psychopathologic states. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 5(4), 643-675. So can anxiety, depression, and other negative emotions that are inherently painful states.
When you don’t feel much, you can’t express and share much. You struggle to emotionally connect. You become emotionally detached.
2. Reduced emotional range
Emotional flatness or reduced emotional range is a concept closely related to emotional numbness. It means you have difficulty feeling intense positive as well as negative emotions. You feel emotions, but not so intensely that they’d motivate you to express them. As a result, you find it hard to connect with others who feel emotions intensely. You feel out of sync with them emotionally. Their range of emotional experience is too much for you to handle.
3. Difficulty identifying emotions
This comes down to a lack of self-awareness. Self-awareness is required for emotional awareness. Some people have more self-awareness than others, but it can be trained like a muscle. What’s also true is that it can fluctuate. For instance, stress decreases self-awareness, and we find it hard to be aware of ourselves and our emotions. We might struggle to recognize or name what we’re feeling in the moment.
Often, people can tell how you feel by observing your non-verbals but we can be good at hiding our emotions. Communicating your emotional state verbally builds emotional connection. To do that, you have to be able to identify your emotions.
4. Emotional suppression
When you suppress emotions that you don’t want to face, you push them out of your awareness and into your subconscious. You bottle up these emotions and temporarily lose access to them. Because you lack access, you can’t share them, contributing to emotional disconnection.
Healing interpersonal trauma has a lot to do with bringing suppressed emotions to the surface of your mind so you can express and process them. Hence, when you heal, your capacity to emotionally connect improves.
5. Difficulty expressing emotions
Even if you’re not emotionally numb, haven’t suppressed your emotions, and can identify them, you may still struggle with emotional expression. The likely cause is that you have negative associations with emotional expression. Maybe your parents and family members discouraged it. Maybe you come from a culture that devalues it. Or it could be that every time you tried expressing your emotions, you were met with a negative outcome, such as:
- Being ignored
- Getting rejected
- Not taken seriously
- Mocked
These experiences teach you to be wary of emotional expression, even with those you otherwise trust, thereby leading to emotional detachment.
6. Rarely admitting vulnerability
Being vulnerable is not easy. You risk so much. Everyone only wants to show themselves in a positive light. When you show vulnerability, you’re showing your deepest, darkest emotional side to others. When people see that you trust them enough to be vulnerable with them, you permit them to be vulnerable with you. There’s increased sharing of emotions, leading to increased emotional intimacy.
Emotionally detached people hardly ever show their vulnerable side. They don’t want to appear weak, dependent, or admit to themselves and others that they have emotional needs.
7. Using humor, logic, and detachment as a shield
Humor and logic are wonderful capacities of the mind. However, they can be used to avoid emotional exposure. They can be used to intellectualize, minimize, or downplay the importance of emotions. Intellectualization is when you explain away emotions with intellect to avoid feeling them. In contrast, trying to understand emotions logically after you’ve acknowledged and felt them is a healthy, emotionally intelligent behavior.
8. Discomfort with emotional closeness
Those with the avoidant attachment style experience discomfort when they get emotionally close to others. It makes them feel intruded upon, suffocated, and unsafe. So, they keep their relationships from getting emotionally close by distancing or deactivating at the first hints of emotional closeness.
9. Avoidance of emotional conversations
Avoidants tend to keep most or all of their conversations in the intellectual realm. Growing up, they never got the chance to nurture their emotional side. Consequently, they tend to hide their emotional side and will avoid thoughts and conversations that have the potential to bring this side out and about.2Zimberoff, D., & Hartman, D. (2002). Attachment, detachment, nonattachment: Achieving synthesis. Journal of Heart Centered Therapies, 5, 3-94.
When you don’t show your emotional side to others, you’re hiding a big part of you from them. When you do that, they don’t get a chance to emotionally connect with you. People will only open up to you to the degree you open up to them.
10. Fear of commitment
When you invest heavily in something, you’re committing to it. The same goes for emotional investment. Some people fear investing in others and committing to them. They may have a good reason to do so, but a relationship can’t work without investment and commitment. They think it’ll be a waste of their emotional resources if they emotionally invest and so become emotionally detached.
Related: Emotional detachment test
11. Emotional unavailability
You may be physically close to someone, yet miles apart emotionally. Or you may be miles apart physically but close emotionally. Emotional closeness is not a function of physical proximity. It’s a function of emotional responsiveness. It’s co-regulation and being there for someone, emotionally.
12. Poor empathy
Lack of empathy is a natural consequence of human selfishness. It’s hard for humans, primarily concerned with self-preservation, to put themselves in the shoes of others and be considerate of other people’s emotions and needs. This is especially pronounced in narcissists and psychopaths, whose core, shared trait is a lack of empathy.3Eisenbarth, H. (2008). Assessment of emotional detachment in psychopathy via self-report and an emotion detection task.
13. Low relational investment
This usually stems from the belief that ‘relationships are unimportant’ and is typical of avoidants. Also, modern societies have increased human independence so much that many see no point in investing in relationships. Relationships require significant time and investment, but the return from a good relationship is good mental health.
14. Social withdrawal
Besides avoidant attachment style, social withdrawal may be related to introversion, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, PTSD, and neurological conditions such as autism.4Ringman, J. M., Qiao, Y., Garbin, A., Fisher, B. E., Fogel, B., Watari Knoell, K., … & Rexach, J. E. (2020). Emotional detachment, gait ataxia, and cerebellar dysconnectivity associated with compound heterozygous mutations in the SPG7 gene. Neurocase, 26(5), 299-304. Solitude is good, but loneliness is a warning signal that your social tank needs filling. When you don’t interact with others at all, there’s zero chance of any emotional connection occurring.
15. Conflict avoidance
Conflict, especially with the ones who’re closest to us, is emotionally painful. Emotional detachment is nothing but a strategy to avoid emotional pain. So it makes sense that conflict-avoidant people also have a tendency to be emotionally detached. Emotional sharing is the sharing of both positive and negative emotions, of pleasure and pain. When you avoid sharing pain, you remove half the equation of emotional intimacy.
