Why do some people seem to have no feelings?
When I was a little child, I would dread going to the doctor’s office. For as soon as the doctor stepped into the room, I would immediately be pinned down to the table. The icy cold cup of the stethoscope would be pressed hard onto my chest and goose bumps would ripple all across my skin. My jaw was then forced open, and a stale wooden stick would wrestle my tongue down into submission.
And oh no! Here comes the warm sour taste of puke as it begins to rise up my constricting throat, because the doctor has just touched IT! He just swapped by tonsils and he is now going get a steady stream of liquid payback; courtesy of my somersaulting stomach!
But the worst is yet to come. For as soon as my mother would immobilize me with a Muay Thai choke-hold, I knew that my single outstretched arm would inevitably be pierced with long metal needle. The only thing I could do was to helplessly release a blood-curling screech at the top of my lungs, in hope that it would scare the doctor away. But no, the needle still came.
But this time, the doctor started doing something strange. He started to tickle me gently on the arm. His latex-gloved fingers danced and tapped furiously away. As I slowly opened my eyes to see what he was doing, he was already capping off the tip of the needle and throwing it away. All he said to me with a wink was… “All done!” He just injected me and I didn’t feel an ounce of pain.
The power behind his “trick” was that the sensation of his dancing fingers around the injection site distracted me from feeling the prick of the needle. Since my brain was far too preoccupied with trying to figure out what the doctor was doing, I was spared from feeling any of the pain.
In the same way, a lot of people in this world employ this same trick to try and distract themselves from engaging with their feelings; especially the feeling of pain. But instead of tickling the arm, they resort to tickling their minds by constantly overthinking. For those who are endlessly distracting themselves with the task of overthinking, are often those who are too afraid of confronting and feeling their emotions.
