Emotional Numbness Quotes & Sayings

I used self-injury as a coping mechanism to help me overcome the emotional stress that I was incapable of dealing with in any other way. Self-injury was a means of escape, a way to relieve the numbness, and an expression of the pain within me. Something that the police wouldn't care about. — Stephen Richards

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows. — Frank Zappa

Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing effects. We may be so defended against feeling the full impact of our emotional pain - whether it be grief, sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that matter, even joy or satisfaction - that we unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at all or know what we are feeling. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Your instincts may tell you that you can't survive if you experience feelings. But they are leftover child instincts. They're the ones that first told you to freeze your feelings. They themselves are frozen and haven't grown with the rest of you. These instincts don't know that you're far more capable of learning to cope with overwhelming emotion now than when you were a [child]. — Maureen Brady

Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. — Henrik Tikkanen

Crossing the Ring of Fire is..moving from the emotional shutdown of numbness through the flames of fear and entering into the healing arms of change. — David W. Earle

Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life. — Martha Beck

He turned the cylinder of the Colt and listened to the small, clear clicks it made. The grip was wood, the barrel cool and blue; the holster had kept a faint smell of saddle soap. He slipped the gun back in its holster, put the gun belt around his waist and felt the gun's solid weight against his hip. When he walked out into the lots to catch his horse, he felt grown and complete for the first time in his life. — Larry McMurtry

The Selfish Gene - he set off decades of debate by declaring: We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. — James Gleick

When I work with countries struggling to pay for budgets or finance trade deficits, I reflect on how Americans do not spend a moment considering the unique advantages of being able to issue bonds and print money freely. — Robert Zoellick

Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death. — William Deresiewicz