When you have dental work done on one tooth, you will usually want the novocaine. The dentist gives you the shot to numb the area around the tooth. But its never the one tooth, is it? That tooth and the area surrounding it is often numbed with the one pinpointed shot. That is the way novocaine works. You try to dull the pain of one tooth, and in so doing, dull the feeling of the entire surrounding area. How interesting that pain is pain and numb is numb! When something happens to cause us emotional pain, we do what we can to get rid of the pain. We don't want to hurt; to feel pain. So we numb it out with whatever we can. For some, its with drugs and alcohol; for others its with relationships or sex. For me its often with denial or indifference; I can escape the pain by simply not feeling it or ignoring it. I numb the feeling of the pain that situation brings.
But like novocaine, its never just the pain that gets numbed. A lot of times, its not just "pain" in general that gets numbed. Like novocaine, I pinpoint my pain, numb it, and find out that it inadvertently numbs the surrounding areas as well. I find in my attempt to numb the PAIN of a situation, I can end up numbing other emotions. I become incapable of FEELING much of anything. 
When you numb one thing in your life so you don't have to feel, that emotional novocaine is going to affect more than the problem. Numb is numb! Even though I purposefully numb the pain, I also end up numbing, simply, the ability to FEEL. Numb is numb! Now you cannot feel joy, affection, love, anger, sadness, and other emotions in the surrounding area.
We have to feel!!!! Even the pain!! Pain motivates us to change something, and if we only numb the pain, we do not change; and we numb other emotions in the process.
