Meditation. Yoga. Silence. Breathwork. These are the practices we’re told will help us heal. Tools that promise transformation, peace, emotional regulation, even awakening. But what if that peace you’re chasing – that quiet, detached stillness through meditation and emotional numbness – isn’t healing at all?

What if it’s actually another way you’re suppressing your life force?

At Beyond Psychology, we see it all the time. People come into this work because something inside of them feels stuck. Anxious. Restless. Depressed. They’ve already started exploring their inner world. They’ve already read the books, taken the courses, burned out their nervous systems trying to “calm down” and be “spiritually evolved.” And then they discover meditation, and it feels like an answer.

But it often isn’t. Because instead of bringing you home to yourself, it can become another coping mechanism. Another way to disconnect from the very parts of you that need to be reclaimed. 

This blog is co-created with AI and based on the video of Myrthe Glasbergen, MSc. (founder Beyond Psychology & Psychologist) about this topic. You can watch the video below. Prefer to read on? Just scroll past the video. 

You’re Not Looking for Peace. You’re Looking for Relief

Let’s be honest about something: most people aren’t looking for inner peace. Although this is what they truly belief, what they are actually seeking is: relief. 

Relief from the inner war that’s going on between parts that they have allowed to exist, and parts that they’ve spend a lifetime disowning. Because here’s the truth: you don’t just arrive on a meditation pillow one day because you’re joyful and whole. You come there because something inside of you hurts.

You experience anxiety, numbness, rage, confusion, sadness, and from this suffering you start seeking for salvation, a solution, peace, and a way out of this internal turmoil. But this pain, it’s not random. It’s not because something is wrong with you. It’s the results of decades of fragmentation. 

From the moment you learned certain emotions, desires, or needs weren’t welcome, you began to split off from yourself. Not because you wanted to – but because it felt safer that way. And what happens when you meditate from that place? You don’t meet those suppressed parts. You suppress them further.

Meditation and Emotional Numbness: A Dangerous Pairing

Meditation, in and of itself, is not the problem. But what happens when meditation becomes the tool you use to silence the inner voice that wants to scream? What happens when you use breath work to bypass grief, stillness to bypass rage, or detachment to escape your own needs?

You end up calm on the outside and chaotic on the inside. You look regulated, but you feel numb. You’re not alive, you’re dissociated. This is where meditation and emotional numbness find each other. 

And the tragic part? You don’t even realize it. Because in the wellness world, this dissociation gets celebrated. It gets spiritualized. You’re told you’re “enlightened” because nothing ‘triggers you anymore’.

But what’s really happening is that you’ve become excellent at suppressing your humanity.

The Shame-Based Identity Hiding Beneath the Calm

Most of us didn’t grow up being taught how to safely feel. We were taught how to behave. How to be quiet. How to be small. How to be good. And somewhere along the way, you learned which parts of yourself to shut down in order to be accepted: your anger, your sensuality, your neediness, your opinions, your desire, your voice.

So you created a version of yourself that could survive. You built a shame-based identity, one that is loved for being nice, calm, humble, spiritual.

And now, every time one of those suppressed parts begins to rise, you feel unsafe. Dysregulated. Not because those parts are dangerous, but because you’ve spent your entire life avoiding them.

Meditation becomes your escape. You go inward, you go silent. You try to “breathe it away.” But in doing so, you suppress the very parts that are trying to come back online. You call it peace. But it’s actually emotional numbness.

The Cost of Meditation & Emotional Numbness Is Your Aliveness

The body doesn’t lie. You can meditate every day and still feel stuck, anxious, burnt out, or disconnected from joy. Because you’re not integrating. You’re dissociating. You’re living in your not-self. Low energy. High effort. Constant inner monitoring. Performing peace while secretly longing for more.

What many people don’t realize is they believe they’re finding peace – but what they’re actually doing is silencing themselves to survive. Eventually, you start needing to meditate more just to feel okay. You chase the feeling your first meditation gave you, hoping to get back to that sense of relief. But the more you use meditation to suppress, the louder your system starts screaming. 

Because your soul didn’t come here to be regulated. It came here to be expressed.

What You’re Really Craving Isn’t Stillness. It’s Wholeness

You’re not broken. You’re just buried. And no amount of detachment – or meditation and emotional numbness – will reconnect you to the parts of you that you’ve learned to fear. The way out isn’t more silence, more detachment, or more not feeling. It’s unshaming what you once buried, reclaiming it, owning it as part of who you are, and integrating it in your day to day reality, without letting it dictate you. It’s unshaming your desires, your voice, your vision, your anger, your needs, and your grief. It’s unshaming the fire in your belly that wants to say: No more, it ends here with me. 

When you finally stop trying to heal your emotions away, and instead allow them to live and breathe through you, something radical happens. You come back online. You feel your aliveness. You start to say what you mean. Ask for what you need. Trust your own energy. And act from a place of rooted self-worth, not performance.

That’s when you no longer need meditation and emotional numbness. Because you’re no longer trying to suppress yourself into stillness. You’re letting yourself be whole.

Healing is Where We Start. Liberation Is Where We Go.

At Beyond Psychology, this is what we do. We guide people out of the shame-based identity they were taught to live in, and into radical, embodied authenticity. If this piece spoke to something inside you, we created a free e-book for exactly this moment:

Unshame Yourself — your guide to recognizing the ways you’ve fragmented, the ways you keep trying to fix yourself through suppression, and the path back to integration, emotional freedom, and self-trust.

We offer more than insights. We offer the tools to help you live this. And if you want guidance? We’re here. No shame. No bypassing. Just the real work of coming home.

👉 Download the free e-book here
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