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Theresa's avatar

That numbness is characteristic of a form of PTSD that is a result of constant exposure to a lot of very bad information.

I worked as a court clerk for most of my working life. You hear details of rapes, murders, child abuse, marital breakdown, etc., and although it is second hand, yes, it is traumatic to listen. And you must NEVER betray emotion, especially in jury cases. And eventually you stop feeling, or maybe it's that you can't access your own emotions.

I recall one particularly awful case, where a young man murdered his neighbors. He killed the parents, and then stabbed their 5 year old daughter, who survived only because she curled up on the ground, preventing her intestines from spilling out. She testified at the trial. As a clerk, I listened without batting an eyelash, and without much emotional reaction. I thought. When I got home, to my shock, I sat down and cried and cried.

That was about 10 years into clerking, and the last time the emotions made it to the surface.

About 30 years in, they required us (clerks, bailiffs, court reporters, judges, prosecuting attorneys, public defenders) to go to a PTSD seminar. Which we thought was silly, until we were there. Couple of hours in, and we're all looking at each other in a "so that's why we're all like this" way. Emotional flattening, numbness, was something many of us long-timers had noticed about ourselves and been disturbed by ; now we could see where it was coming from.

I think that many more people are inundated by negative information from Internet and TV 24-hour news and school indoctrination, and this may be a partial explanation of the numbness of young people.

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John Kelleher's avatar

I had an acquaintance who described himself as a seeker. Like most self proclaimed seekers he was nothing of the kind. He was a close minded dogmatic Richard Dawkins type who thought he was a very open minded type. There is a sense in which being open minded and a seeker can be good. But it has to have some end point because you wind up less open minded than empty headed and if you seek and never find you’re just acting out Sisyphus. You’re something of a shadow person. Also it’s worth pointing out , the pose of seeker is fashionable and validated in our society. I “ love” these books or movies where someone “ seeks”. It’s probably going to be Julia Roberts eating entire pizzas and finding love in Bali. ( She could never have stayed so thin with all that pizza). As a shallow fashionable pose , it’s tedious and trivializing.

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