Welcome to the Happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a knob

connected to our body and this knob controlled our feelings? When we turned it down, it would suppress

any sadness, anxiety, grief, or emotional pain that we were experiencing at that moment.

But unfortunately, that knob is connected to all our emotions, so not only would we turn down

the sadness in our heart, we would also turn down the joy in our heart.

The truth is, our emotional system has a master volume fader. If we lower our volume on

pain, we also lower our volume on love. Perhaps an extreme case will help illustrate this point.

A friend of mine told me about years ago how she had dated a man who really had no emotions, either good or bad.

And he remembers when he was a kid, he used to watch really scary movies just so he could

feel something.

And in truth, because he had no real emotions either good or bad, he wasn't a very good

boyfriend for her.

In fact, he ended up being a terrible boyfriend,

abusive, and cruel. So it sounds great. We're going through a rough time. We don't want to feel

them. Let's turn them off. This is called desensitization. It's a survival strategy that some

people use to get through really difficult times. Very few of us are born with it. Most of us have to turn towards something to desensitize our hearts. We've all seen it and no stories about it. Someone's girlfriend breaks up with him and he goes on a three-week drinking binge not to deal with the emotions of the loss.

It sounds like a good strategy. I don't want to feel this pain, Dr. Puff.

I want to desensitize myself to what I'm going through right now, so we numb ourselves.

And in our world, there's a lot of ways to desensitize or numb our hearts.

But here's the part that a lot of people don't think about when they choose this path.

The same walls that we're putting up not to feel the pain also keep all of life out.

When we turn on our master volume fader, it doesn't just fade the pain.

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