Numbing Yourself to Cope: Addiction, Dopamine, and Learning to Feel Pain Again

This is a reflection on addiction, Anna Lembke’s research on dopamine, and Viktor Frankl’s tragic optimism — on why numbing pain doesn’t work and what it costs to feel again.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

The Man Who Couldn’t Feel His Hand: What a stranger’s injury taught me about the cost of not feeling anything at all.

I met a man this weekend at a birthday party a close friend of mine was hosting. He seemed like a pretty nice guy – reserved – but I noticed layers of bandages around his left hand and couldn’t help but ask what had happened.

He noticed my confusion and explained the bandage was there to stop him from hurting himself. He’d had a terrible injury to his hand, one that had left him unable to move it or feel it at all.

So, it turns out that after the surgery, movement is coming back. But he still couldn’t feel anything in his left hand. Because he works a lot with his hands, rather than behind a PC, he has deep cuts, bruises, and gashes that he couldn’t account for.

He showed me one of them. I asked him what happened. And he responded, “I don’t know… but at this rate I will lose my hand.”

That interaction has been stuck in my mind.

Reaching Oblivion

The bulk of my use in my active addiction days was for one thing: reach oblivion. Something so uncontrollable and incomprehensible that I wouldn’t be able to register any feelings even if I wanted to. I figured that if joy and happiness were so far out of reach, feeling numb was the next best thing.

“…if my house were a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it.”

— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I say these words begrudgingly, and with gritted teeth, but for whatever amount of pain I’ve had to endure, hindsight shows me that my life was very much built on a house of cards. I was entirely dependent and reliant, to the core of my being, on factors I had absolutely no influence over: romantic partners, distant parental figures, circles I never quite fitted in, people’s opinions of me, and the death of loved ones. And putting all my stock in such fleeting things was bound to send it all crashing down.

The insane pain of processing those losses felt almost cruel. It felt worse than death, and I was very keen to test it. However, that pain also serves as a very strong reminder of where to place my stock and my will to live this time around. Because, you know… I really don’t want to endure that again.

The Brain Wasn’t Built for Bliss

Dr Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist, pointed out that, contrary to what I’d like to believe, the human brain isn’t set up for a permanent state of bliss. It’s wired for stability and regulation. This is why when someone artificially spikes their dopamine, the brain stops producing its own. There’s always a balance to be struck. It can be argued that perpetual happiness, excitement, and elation, taken to an extreme, can be just as damaging as suicidal depression – there's actually a clinical name for that: mania.

“Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it.”

— David R. Hawkins

I don’t think Hawkins was only speaking about the so-called “negative” feelings. I tend to receive positive news with just as much worry and angst as I would the bad news. Instead of letting this good thing happen and truly living in it, I find myself frantically trying to find a way to make it last as long as possible or keep it. And the frenzy I work myself into turns the entire thing into a terrible ordeal.

And I know it’s a trauma response. Hypervigilance once served a vital purpose in getting me to navigate through very unstable environments, but now it’s stopping me from actually living. Life becomes a tightrope I walk. I am so afraid of pain that I will do almost anything to avoid it, but that usually makes the situation worse.

Learning to Carry the Boulder

But then we return to a quote that has appeared so many times in my writing…

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Sisyphus is happy not because of a promise of a brighter future. He knows rolling that stone up the hill only for it to fall again is his fate. But as he walks back down to get the boulder, he’s fully lucid. He embraces this fate — the weight of the boulder, the curves, the edges, the incline — and he prepares himself to go at it again.

And that’s what I want to try to do. I want to know that there will be great moments, but also painful ones, and that I can take every single bit of it in and make the best of it anyway.

Maybe that’s what Viktor Frankl meant when he said the following:

“Yes to life, in spite of everything.”

— Viktor Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (1946 lectures)

Khothatso Moshodi explores the intersections of philosophy, psychology, and the human condition. If these quiet thoughts awakened something within you, join my private letter where I continue to dig where minds seldom choose to, or support my independent work on Ko-fi.