I didn’t cry when I saw the headline. I didn’t pause long enough to let it sink in, and I didn’t feel that sharp intake of breath that used to come with this kind of news. I registered what happened, clocked the location, skimmed the details, and kept scrolling like my brain had already decided this was something it could not afford to fully feel today.
That realization unsettled me more than the headline itself. Not because I don’t care, but because I do, deeply, and somehow that caring has been pressed flat over time. These stories used to live in my chest for days. Now they pass through like smoke, leaving only a faint residue behind. That isn’t resilience. That’s erosion.
This Is What My Nervous System Learned to Do
There’s language for this, which I learned the way most mothers learn hard truths: late at night, half-researching, half-trying to convince myself I’m not broken. Emotional numbing. Desensitization. A trauma response shaped by repetition and helplessness.
When the brain is exposed to the same horror again and again, especially when there is no meaningful protection or resolution afterward, it adapts. It lowers the volume. It dulls the edge. Not because the danger is gone, but because staying fully alert forever would destroy you.
This isn’t apathy. It’s survival. You still have children to wake up, meals to make, backpacks to pack, lives to keep moving. The nervous system learns to ration fear the way you ration candles during a power outage, burning just enough light to get through the night.
Understanding that has helped ease the shame. It hasn’t made me comfortable with the cost.
Breaking News That Never Breaks Anything
School shootings arrive now like a scene we’ve watched too many times. The framing is familiar. The language barely changes. Statements are issued, flags are lowered, vigils glow briefly in the dark, and then the camera cuts away.
The repetition has trained us. Not to accept violence, but to expect it. When something happens often enough, the brain stops treating it like an emergency and starts filing it under known risk. The horror doesn’t shrink, but the reaction does.
Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows how frequently school-related shootings occur in the United States. That frequency matters. Outrage requires fuel. Grief requires space. When both are demanded constantly, the body chooses numbness instead.
The story ends, the credits roll, and nothing actually changes.
Motherhood Changes the Math Entirely
Before I had children, school shootings were abstract in the most painful way. Tragic, unimaginable, but still distant. After becoming a mother, that distance disappeared. Every classroom now has a face. Every hallway could belong to one of my daughters.
Motherhood sharpened the fear and dulled the response at the same time. That contradiction feels wrong until you live inside it. The threat feels so constant that staying emotionally activated would mean existing in a permanent state of panic, and no parent can do that and still be present, warm, and steady.
So the body adapts. The mind builds walls. You whisper small, silent promises to yourself as you buckle car seats and walk kids into buildings, half-prayer, half-spell. Please let today be ordinary. Please let them come home.
Apparently, This Is a Trauma Response
I went looking for answers because I needed to understand what was happening inside me. Research shows that repeated exposure to violent news can cause trauma-like symptoms, even for people who are not directly involved. The brain reacts to perceived threat, not just lived experience, especially when that threat involves children and feels personally imaginable.
Over time, the nervous system stops responding with full intensity because it cannot sustain that level of alarm indefinitely. The imagination does too much of the work. Every headline becomes a rehearsal. Every detail asks the same unspoken question: what if this were mine?
Knowing this reaction is common doesn’t make it comforting. It makes it more frightening, because it means an entire population is quietly adapting to something that should never be normal.
Understanding It Doesn’t Make It Acceptable
I refuse to frame this as a personal failure. I am not heartless for feeling this way, and neither are you if you do. This response makes sense in a world that keeps asking us to absorb the unbearable and keep functioning anyway.
That doesn’t mean we should accept it.
In a society that works, violence against children would remain shocking no matter how often it tried to repeat itself. It would provoke sustained action, not ritualized grief followed by silence. It would not become another thing mothers learn to compartmentalize so they can get dinner on the table.
Desensitization may protect individuals in the short term, but collectively it allows the wound to stay open. When outrage fades, pressure fades. When pressure fades, the cycle continues.
Where I Land With This
I don’t want to be numb. I don’t want this to feel normal. I don’t want to live in a world where mothers have to dull their instincts just to survive the news cycle.
The fact that my nervous system has adapted makes sense. The fact that it had to is what I cannot accept. If something is horrifying enough to shatter a nation once, it should not be allowed to wear us down into quiet endurance through repetition.
This numbness is not peace. It is not healing. It is a warning sign, and I’m listening.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). What is posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?
Holman, E. A., Garfin, D. R., & Silver, R. C. (2014). Media’s role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(1), 93–98. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316265110
Gun Violence Archive. (n.d.). Gun violence statistics.
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