When You Can't Feel Love for Your Kids (But You'd Die for Them)

I’m at the kitchen counter making dinner. My daughter asks about homework — place values or long addition or something. I’m answering, but it’s like there’s thick glass between me and her. Between me and everything.

I look at this person I’d die for without hesitation, and I feel… nothing.

Not emptiness. Static. White noise. I know, intellectually, that I love her. But I can’t feel it. And that knowing without feeling is one of the loneliest experiences in the world.

Then she drops her pencil. It rolls across the floor. And something in my body detonates. My jaw clenches. My shoulders shoot up. I want to scream or run out of the house. Over a pencil. A fucking pencil.

Emotional numbness doesn’t come alone. It comes with hair-trigger reactivity that makes you feel insane. You can’t feel the love, but you can feel everything else at maximum volume. The guilt of that — the shame of being so disconnected while being so overwhelmed by their mere existence — it’s crushing.

You shame yourself for not feeling enough. You shame yourself for snapping over spilled water, replay it obsessively, promise you’ll do better, then do it again two hours later. You start building this story: I’m a bad mom. I’m damaging my kids.

This is the very definition of shame, physiologically activating. It floods your system with stress hormones. It puts you into a state of threat. So when you’re already running on a depleted nervous system, and you add layers of shame on top of it, you’re actually making yourself more reactive, more disconnected. The shame you’re using to try to punish yourself into being a better parent is the very thing making it harder to show up the way you want to.

Your emotional system has gone offline to protect you, not to punish you. You’ve been running on empty for so long — maybe from your own childhood stuff, maybe from the relentless demands of parenting itself, maybe from a relationship that never felt safe — that your nervous system just… shut down the feelings part. Because feelings take energy. And you need that energy just to survive the day.

But your threat detection system? That never shuts down.

Your nervous system has a limited budget. When you’re chronically overwhelmed and depleted, your body makes choices about where to allocate resources.

Connection, warmth, and presence are expensive. They require bandwidth you don’t have. So your system does the math. We’re shutting down emotional connections to conserve energy. It’s not conscious. It’s your body trying to keep you alive.

But threat detection? That’s non-negotiable. That stays on 24/7 because your survival depends on it. So you end up with this brutal combination.

Emotionally flatlined but hypervigilant to every potential threat.

And the noise — oh my god, the noise. My kids are laughing, fighting, just existing at their normal kid volume, and it all feels like it’s scraping against my nervous system.

It’s bedtime, and my daughter wants one more story, one more hug, one more glass of water. She’s reaching for connection, and I know that. I know this is the moment I’m supposed to feel tender and present. But instead, I feel trapped. My body is screaming at me to get out of that room. So I go through the motions — I read the story, I give the hug — but I’m not really there. And she can feel it. I can see it in her eyes that she knows I’m not really with her.

These aren’t just annoyances. Our bodies are reading them as threats. Parenting is fundamentally unpredictable and relentless. The sensory input never stops — sudden noises, constant physical contact, interrupted thoughts. For a nervous system already in survival mode, every small interruption registers as a five-alarm fire because your body can’t distinguish between a spilled cup and a genuine crisis.

So what does “creating safety” actually look like? Spoiler: it’s not bubble baths or meditation apps. I mean the things that keep you from losing your mind over a pencil.

First: catch your body before it blows. What’s your tell? Jaw locked, heat crawling up your neck, hands turning into fists. Everyone’s got an early warning system. Find yours.

Just noticing you’re overloaded is the first move. The ashes you’re standing in? Name them. Sometimes all it takes is one thought — “my nervous system is fried,” or “I’m in survival mode.” That’s enough to wedge a little space into the spiral. Not to fix it. Just to interrupt it.

Sometimes that interruption works fast. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes you need the whole day to crawl back to baseline. That’s not failure. That’s your nervous system doing its job. The goal isn’t to bounce back. It’s to stop the free fall.

Then use an actual exit strategy. “I need two minutes,” and you go sit in your car. Or say to your kid, “I love you, but my body needs a break,” and step away. Not as punishment. As information.

This time, maybe instead of going from zero to screaming in three seconds, you get a five-second window. Maybe you still feel numb during bedtime, but then your kid says something funny, and for just a flash, you feel it. That warmth. That “oh, there you are” feeling you thought was broken forever. An ember that there is more.

When you let your kids see this, you’re normalizing the process of identifying, naming, and managing your own spiral. You’re teaching them that bodies have limits. That recognizing those limits isn’t weakness — it’s wisdom. That sometimes the most loving thing you can do is step away before you become someone you don’t want to be. They’re learning that emotions are real, that regulation is a skill, and that asking for what you need is possible. That’s not damage. That’s modeling what it looks like to be human.

Understanding this doesn’t magically fix it — your nervous system doesn’t just flip back online because you finally get what’s happening. But it changes everything anyway. When you stop seeing yourself as broken and start seeing your nervous system as something that’s been working overtime to protect you, the shame begins to lift. And shame is expensive. When that eases, even a little, you have more resources available.

Slowly. In small moments. You stop adding self-hatred to an already overwhelmed system. You recognize the signs earlier and intervene before you’re screaming about a pencil.

You can look at your kids and think, “I can’t feel it right now, but I know I love you,” without that thought destroying you.