Chosen numbness is the deliberate, if often unconscious, suppression of emotional experience — not because nothing is happening but because what's happening is too much. It's the shutdown that follows overwhelming feeling. The flat affect that is not depression but protection. The decision, somewhere below the level of decision, that the exposure of feeling is more than can be borne.

Anonymous thoughts about chosen numbness posted here are from people who are not feeling what they could — the honest account of what it's like to manage distance from your own interior life.