Recently, someone close to me had an experience that created anger and disgust in everyone I know, and in me – I discovered I was just…meh, regarding the situation. After the third and fourth person expressed their angst to me, I finally had to ask the question. Am I under-reacting to this situation?

Turns out, I was desensitized to the scenario this person had gone through. Having experienced multiple similar scenarios, which for the privacy of the close friend, and myself, I will not go into great detail on, I had begun to think this is just ‘how it is.’

We become desensitized after repeated exposure to certain things. The best examples I can give are watching violence on television. The shock factor fades, expectations set in, and we begin to think of those things as less emotionally charged than they were the first time we were exposed to them. At least, I think I am explaining that correctly.

Now, I am not an expert on the subject. I am just musing about my own experiences with desensitization. I was shocked to realize I was accustomed to certain bad behaviours, so much so that this person’s scenario barely hit my emotional range, at least compared to those around me.

So another set of questions came to me: how do I undo all this desensitization?

How do I remind myself that a few bad situations don’t immediately amount to the feeling that all people are bad? Which also equates to me having a little more anger/shock that someone would behave so badly to someone else.

These are two separate questions, and I’ve been thinking about them both a lot, and I don’t have the answers.

I know I can’t change what I have gone through in the past. I can’t exactly ‘undo’ what I have become desensitized to, but I can open my mind up to the idea that not all of my thoughts are 100% truth. Some of the thoughts might be lying to me. At least, that is what it feels like. Some of these emotions I am feeling, or lack thereof, are straight-up fibbing about the depth of the bad behaviour.

Ultimately, it’s like my radar is off, and I don’t know how to fix it.

It’s an interesting set of questions I will likely explore further with a licensed counselor, but it was definitely an awakening for me to reach this conclusion about myself.

Writing it all out helps me to sort through my emotions on the subject and to see things more clearly.

Have you ever felt desensitized to certain things? I read that reading true crime novels can desensitize you to different scenarios as well.