Who Took Away My Ability To Feel?
June 17, 2024
Growing up, I had little to no regulation regarding internet and device use. My parents who grew up on the countryside of a rural city in China simply had no idea of the harms early internet use posed. I was given an iPad to freely explore on at the alarming age of six, a child merely entering their first year of official schooling. Although I have minimal recollection of the information I had consumed throughout the years, there were most definitely things that an elementary school child should not have come across (That one My Little Pony video).
Fortunately enough, I was quite the sensitive kid. Media like Creepypastas, Detective Conan and games like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Yandere Simulator, even Doki Doki Literature Club were all too scary for me. I thankfully never got into any of the fandoms that would have most definitely taken a toll on my psyche at that age. Stepping into middle school, I was finally introduced to my first “official” glance into the world of horror, true crime.
True crime is a genre that spiked in popularity during the COVID-19 years, consisting of people on social media talking about true, happened cases of murder, school shootings, kidnapping, and more. Most aim to inform a wider audience of these cases as an act to spread awareness, although there are still many exploiters within the community. Popular mediums within this genre include YouTube, Spotify podcasts, and Netflix documentaries.
The first Youtuber I came across was Eleanor Neale, throwing open the gates of horror and mystery for eleven year old me. Ever since that day, I’m afraid I have to say that I’ve never been able to escape.
I spiraled into the never-ending tunnel of true crime, watching all 200 or so of Eleanor’s videos in mere months. It played as constant background noise in my daily life, no matter what I was doing. I was fixated and talked about cases every chance that I could find. During this process, I did concerning amounts of research on case specifics. Needless to say, I came across countless details and photographs that depicted gore in that process. All these were things that a developing minor should not have been consuming without regulation in middle school.
As the years passed, I began noticing little changes to my personality and character, so miniscule at first that I disregarded its existence. During my initial deep dive, I had seen many exclaim on social media that overconsumption of true crime will only lead to violent behavior, even the most influential adult in my life expressing concern regarding this new interest. But as someone who believed they had an abundance of self control and responsibility accompanied by strong morals, I did not for a moment think I was vulnerable to this. Yet, as time passed, I found myself down another rabbit hole. This one, was the trap of desensitization.
Desensitization can be explained and experienced in countless ways. As someone interested in psychology (and unfortunately just took the AP test), I would like to explain its impact through habituation and the stages of development.
In psychology, desensitization is defined as diminishing a stimulus through exposure. In simpler terms, it is something that that human mind eventually gets used to after seeing or experiencing a certain event repeatedly. An everyday example of this is how children often jump at the sound of firetrucks while most adults are immune to the noise. It is also commonly seen as a form of behavioral treatment for certain phobias to decrease the impact of stimuli. Discussing this through the lens of developmental psychology, one can consider rough ages of self development posed by Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. From adolescence onwards, individuals begin to find a sense of self, shaping identity with abstract reasoning. During these crucial years, the negative impact of desensitization affects their idea of righteousness, leading to a higher possibility of societally deemed incorrect morals.
In my case, the most remarkable side effect of desensitization was a lack of empathy. Hearing about loss of life in brutal ways was becoming the norm in my life, I found myself feeling indifferent to tragedy. I was unable to understand those around me when they were not in a good place, feeling powerless in situations where those I love depended on me for emotional support. However, I was on the luckier side as my morals had been set in place through guidance before my discovery of true crime. Having that security, I did not perform actions that would pose harm for those around me. Through further self-discovery, I resorted to the field of psychology to help me recover from the side effects of overconsumption.
There are also extreme cases of desensitization leading to the romanticization and often mimicking of violent behavior for those who were not as fortunate as I am. A infamous instance of this is the case of Shaye Groves, a woman with an unfortunate childhood who fantasized over serial killers as a coping mechanism and eventually murdered her boyfriend during an argument. She was desensitized, therefore resorted to violence as it was something she had grown comfortable with through her personal experiences and consumption of true crime. She even took inspiration from the cases she had watched and attempted to cover her crimes up using things she had learned.
After realizing the negatives in the past year, I had started limiting my consumption and started on the journey of recovery. Today, I rarely indulge myself in this genre and instead have put my efforts towards better understanding those around me. True crime left me with plenty to work on in regards to my lack of empathy, but I was lucky enough to notice this before any escalation.
For future generations, I heavily recommend actions that set limits on the age of proper consumption and etiquette moral lessons regarding these topics in the education system. I wish to prevent other children from going through the same things as I had to, and do not want to see any more youth fall into desensitization or violence due to the lack of regulation.
Editing Notes:
repetition of desensitization & behavior
look over entire blog again for canadian spelling & other typos
