Depression and emotional numbness overlap but are not the same experience. Depression typically involves painful emotions: sadness, hopelessness, guilt, irritability. Emotional numbness involves the absence of emotion. A depressed person suffers. A numb person does not feel enough to suffer, which creates its own kind of distress: the disorienting awareness that something that should be there is missing. Some people experience numbness as a phase within a depressive episode, while others experience it as a standalone condition that exists without the typical markers of depression.
For adults near Deerfield Beach who are uncertain whether they are dealing with depression, numbness, or both, Dr. David Steinbok's psychodynamic approach does not rely on diagnostic labels to determine the direction of therapy. What matters is the patient's subjective experience and the history that produced it. A therapist for emotional numbness near Deerfield Beach works with the specific contours of each patient's shutdown rather than applying a standardized protocol.
