Numb Quotes

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“I just let the pain take over, allowing it to numb the pain of being left behind.”
― Jessica Sorensen, The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden

“I’ve perfected the art of the fake smile. It’s not so difficult when you are completely numb.”
― Bethany Griffin, Masque of the Red Death

“Some scars don't hurt. Some scars are numb. Some scars rid you of the capacity to feel anything ever again.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself from going downstairs to get it.”
― Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“There was no other way to say it. After being heartbroken for so long, I had made myself completely numb inside. Maybe not from physical pain, but anything emotional, yes. Sexual pleasure? Numb to that, too. I’d have been a great actress. After all, I had the perfect, mind-blowing orgasm down to an art. Suppose I deserve an Oscar for that.”
― Jennifer Salaiz

“And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I learned how to stop crying.
I learned how to hide inside of myself.
I learned how to be somebody else.
I learned how to be cold and numb.”
― Sherman Alexie, Flight

“And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea...”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Nothing else you want to do after all your dreams come true.
You've become numb. You shouldn't have ever stopped dreaming.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you ‘go away.’ You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.”
― Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse

“There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“Being heartbroken doesn’t mean you stop feeling. Just the opposite — it means you feel it all more.
With your heart in fragments, every sensation is sharper, every emotion more acute. Your feelings are enhanced, like a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell, or a deaf woman whose eyes can perceive things a normal person would never recognize.
The brokenhearted are the best empaths of all.”
― Julie Johnson, Erasing Faith

“Be careful with too much joy,
it can make you numb in life.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.”
― Dean Koontz, The Bad Place

“Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about it. In some cases, this deadpan presentation can also be the result of cult training and brainwashing. Unfortunately, when a patient describes a traumatic experience without showing any apparent emotion, it can make the listener doubt whether the patient is telling the truth.
(page 119, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)”
― Graeme Galton, Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“I thought I would prefer apathy over this," I confided to her. "Why?" she asked. "Are you saying you would rather be cold than comforted? He's looking at you and offering his hand in friendship and you're rudely looking away pretending not to notice. At least with him you wouldn't be so alone." I felt my eyes turn into colorless pools as I glared at her for stating the obvious. "Being numb to someone is better than feeling something," I explained. "Safer you mean," she interrupted. I sighed and continued, "When someone who was once significant in your life comes back after an extended absence, emotions you had finally freed yourself from are reawakened, and if that's not enough to contend with, dormant memories are summoned whether you want them to be or not." "And what is it that you want?" she posed triumphantly. I swallowed my anger and thought with defeat, "Nothing anyone can give me.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged.”
― Christine Stockton, Sluts

“Maybe I needed that somebody else could cry over my pain, to become able to cry over it myself. Nobody ever cried or was moved when I suffered as a child. (Lisa)”
― Giovanni Liotti

“And... well, she had done it. Just as she said she would. She felt nothing - which was good - no, which was great. You could get anything you wanted in this world if you didn't feel. It was just a shame that she couldn't feel happy about it. She would've settled for feeling satisfaction at what she'd done, but feeling nothing at all was better than feeling bad. If that was all there was, then that was all she wanted or needed”
― Malorie Blackman, Tell Me No Lies

“I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Maybe I feel angry. No. I don't feel anything.”
― Alice Oseman, Solitaire

“You ever get so disappointed in somebody that it doesn't even hurt? You don't feel anything at all.
It's just like 'That's how it is, huh?”
― Kalen Dion

“She didn't want to be in her head, didn't want to be in her body. Wanted the beating of drums and the riotous song of a fiddle to fill her with sound, to silence any thoughts. Wanted to find a bottle of wine and drink deep, let the wine pull her out of herself, set her mind drifting and numb.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“At the core, every person has legitimate important needs that must be met and there is nothing wrong in having them. We can feel our needs deep down, but we don’t always know the best way to meet them. The more we try to meet these needs in illegitimate or negative ways, the more difficult it becomes to meet our needs in positive or constructive ways. So, we choose the wrong things, and the wrong things feel
right, for a minute. Yet they leave us even more empty, sometimes even numb and hopeless. Illegitimate methods usually create more needs than they address. The longer we use them, the more hopeless things seem.”
― Michael J. Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“Sometimes the relationships would help me keep sober, but whenever a relationship failed, it always caused me to relapse harder and fall further than before. Sometimes a failed relationship would send me scrounging for drugs in an attempt to numb the pain. Other times, it would send me to clubs or raves, looking for rebound girls to put a band-aid over the blow to my ego and self-esteem.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“Cuando conseguimos no sentir nada, perdemos el único medio que tenemos de averiguar qué nos hiere y por qué”. Ése es el remate brutal en el episodio de la leprosería.”
― Alma Delia Murillo

“Some hearts are like haunted houses; someone dwells within, yet remains unseen. Someone weeps, but all you hear are your own echoes. A cold, as chilling as sorrow, lingers in every corner, seeping from every pore, making you numb. An eerie silence pervades, broken only by the sound of your own heartbeat.”
― Shahid Hussain Raja

“I should have been angry, but I was struggling to feel much of anything.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir