Why We Shut Down in Witnessing Atrocity

Are we stuck in psychological shutdown mode?

We keep repeating …

“It’s just horrible, I can’t believe it!”

Beyond this being a form of sympathetic venting, is it helping us? And perhaps more importantly, is it helping those about whom we’re concerned?

Does it help move us to deeper understanding and our role in making change happen? In this piece, I propose that, while it’s a form of empathy, it may be counter-productive in many ways and that it’s a psychological reflex we need to understand and actively re-design. And the way we do that is catching ourselves in the act of shutting down.

Here’s how psychological shutdown works, why it occurs, and what we need to do to break out of helplessness and despair.

This video post is a prelude to a podcast/article I’m publishing shortly on our reflexive psychological shutdown response in the face of disbelief and horror.

I know nearly all of us who are daily witnessing the horrifying and viciously evil assault by Russia against Ukraine are left aghast.

I keep coming back to the words disbelief and horror, saying repeatedly “this is insane, it can’t be.” And yet, it is, and I feel powerless. And with that sense of helplessness comes a feeling of having to distract myself from what I’m witnessing, in part because all whom I watch or listen to on media channels are feeling the same.

And in the face of witnessing such atrocities committed intentionally against a peaceful people, there’s both a desire to scream “stop this insanity” and to blunt or shut off my awareness so that I’m not continuously anguished and feeling immobilized.

I spent a considerable amount of time over the preceding week deeply troubled, reflecting on this reflexive “shut down” response, as I’ve seen in it myself and many others as we encounter catastrophe. And I wondered why we go into shutdown mode. While it seems obvious as to why – there’s nothing you can do about it (forlorn sigh, slow shrug) – I discovered that that very response is itself a severely dysfunctional psychological mechanism. While it likely has its origins in the trauma “shutdown” and avoidance responses, we seem to resort to it by default in dealing with all horrible things.

And that response set itself allows us to become immobilized and less responsive than we should be. And progressively, we become inured, more numb, to the stream of war-related and other man-made atrocities occurring with increasing frequency. But that is exactly the opposite of how we need to respond.

As my draft of the article/podcast was becoming somewhat lengthy, I thought it best to do a shorter video overview to get this out there while it’s fresh.

I truly believe it offers a new insight into a phenomenon we in the mental health field seldom explore and one that few outside of it have any knowledge of.

I hope you find it sufficiently compelling as food for thought, enough so that you listen to the podcast and accompanying narrative (to be uploaded in the next day).

And I congratulate you in advance as the very act of watching this piece, listening to the podcast or reading the article is itself a form of breaking out of that cycle of overwhelmance and reflexive shutdown.

I’d love to have your feedback on whether these reflections concur with your experience.