Failed attempt at desensitization

[Ex-User (12972)]

Fun fact: my fear of death was so terrible at the age of 13 that on several occasions I attempted to desensitize myself.
Did not work. At all. I thought that by exposing myself to it, I would eventually become numb. There was this forum on Reddit called "Watch People Die". It's exactly as it sounds. I'd watched a handful of videos before I couldn't take it anymore.I just sat there shaking feeling quite ready to faint or vomit. Positively terrified. My father said it'd worked for him, and that I could try it if I wanted to. So, I did.

I'd watched a few videos in which people were hit by a car. Those weren't terribly explicit. The others, however.. There was one video in which a middle eastern woman attempted suicide by laying on the railroad track. But she put her legs where her head should have been, and the train ran over them instead. She still had her thighs, but from that point on, anything below it was destroyed and torn. She was immobile and a group of people gathered around her. She was bleeding to death, and couldn't do anything but cry out and weakly lift whatever was left of her legs. The people started chanting something and made no move to help her. Shortly thereafter, spasms began to rack her body and she stopped moving. In another video, a terrorist group had taken some guy hostage and bent his neck at an odd angle, using a scalpel to slit his throat. Of course everything came spilling out. I couldn't sleep properly for days after watching those videos. I was traumatized. It still fucks with my head to this day.

I would /not/ suggest watching any videos, but this was the site:
www.reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie/

I deeply regret having ever watched any of it.

 

[Reluctantly]

I've seen a video of an Islamist getting his brain splattered by a sniper. Or a guy/girl with a hood on get their head chopped off with a chainsaw. Or People jumping off buildings. For some reason, none of those bothered me.

But then I saw a video of someone tied up with a creepy smiley mask get stabbed by another person with a mask on. He/She just kept stabbing the person and they were freaking out of course. That one bothered me because of the mask. Not sure why, maybe because it mocked suffering. That one just seemed wrong; the others seemed ...more natural, even if still fucked up.

 

[Reluctantly]

wtf, lol, I clicked on your link and watched a bear eat someone's face off. wow. Holy shit, that would ...suck. I wonder what the bear was trying to accomplish. He didn't even kill or eat him, just let him alone after that.


edit: you know what, fuck bears.

 

[Ex-User (12972)]

I've seen a video of an Islamist getting his brain splattered by a sniper. Or a guy/girl with a hood on get their head chopped off with a chainsaw. Or People jumping off buildings. For some reason, none of those bothered me.

But then I saw a video of someone tied up with a creepy smiley mask get stabbed by another person with a mask on. He/She just kept stabbing the person and they were freaking out of course. That one bothered me because of the mask. Not sure why, maybe because it mocked suffering. That one just seemed wrong; the others seemed ...more natural, even if still fucked up.

Goodness.. I'm not sure as to whether or not I want to commend you for being able to handle such things. Where did you come across these videos?

I can see where the latter of the two would be more bothersome.
The first two instances seem more instantaneous and to a certain degree more consensual than the last. Practically inevitable and so quick, that there was nothing an outsider could have done to stop it. Either those people didn't see what was coming for them or they quite frankly just didn't care.

The last one you described sounds drawn-out and horrifying.. There was enough time for someone to interfere, the person on the receiving end certainly wasn't okay with being stabbed, and they seemed to care quite a bit about their own survival. Yet there were completely different circumstances and they simply weren't given the time to retaliate. Truly disturbing.

 

[Ex-User (12972)]

wtf, lol, I clicked on your link and watched a bear eat someone's face off. wow.

... Mm, I saw that one. O.o
Reminds me of that incident in Miami, Florida, a while back, in which some guys on acid ate the faces off of an unfortunate lot of people. I wonder, a bear on acid. Hmm..

 

[Reluctantly]

oh, I remember that. At the time they said it was bath salts and he ate the face off a homeless guy. Like shit. Already homeless, now someone tries to eat your face off. Not sure how I'd deal with something like that. I think I'd find a new more pronounced hatred for humanity, bordering on the possibly psychopathic.

 

[Cognisant]

Fear is a natural response to death and mutilation, I'm not surprised it traumatized you, watching lots of those videos at once would have given your subconscious an unrealistic expectation that such events are far more common than they actually are.

It's the concept of death that really gets to me, in of itself death is nothing to be afraid of but the coming of death is the end of possibilities and ultimately the end of hope, I fear the moment before death when all hope is lost.

 

[Happy]

I don't think desensitisation works that way.

My first year of my adult life was spent on the slaughter floor of an abattoir in an attempt to raise the money to put myself through university. The experience only made me acutely aware of my own mortality. Didn't help that a handful of my colleagues committed suicide in that year. Or that I witnessed a couple of people lose limbs on machinery and I even saw one person crushed by a falling cow (outrageous and true).

During my time there, I even had a couple of close calls myself (in the most noteworthy incident, I found myself in an enclosed space with an escaped steer which was trying to maul me and my gun was inches out of reach). I waved such encounters off as nothing, which was what was expected of you - an unwritten law of sorts.

I came out of the experience thinking I'd be tougher, and in many ways I was. But ultimately, long term exposure to death only increased my awareness of death.

Granted, I'm possibly less afraid of it, but more than anything, I'm able to appreciate all the times I escaped death's clutch (I've spent a lot of time, particularly in my childhood, quarantined in hospitals with deadly diseases for some reason; and it took that year of experience and a number of years of mulling it over to appreciate how fortunate I am to be alive).

Back to my point, I don't think desensitisation is the answer. Rather, I think the answer to overcoming a fear of death is to understand the value of your own life (cheesy AF, I know) and spend your days realising your own life's potential.

 

[Rixus]

Some fears can be helped by flooding. But only those where the point is to realise that there is nothing to be afraid of. For example, I was afraid of spiders - so I held a tarantula and realised it was kind of fluffy and cute, not spindly, thorny and evil as I had imagined it to be. But dying horribly - this is something it's perfectly natural to be afraid of. Nobody wants to die in a horrible manner. I can't see how it would make your fear of death easier even if you achieved a level of desensitisation - you would become desensitised only to the deaths of other people and not yourself. And then only those you didn't care about - and that is not a desirable state to achieve.

What is it you fear? Do you fear walking out into a road and being hit by a bus? Or being mugged and killed at night? Perhaps unwittingly causing a house fire? Those would be signs of anxiety and worry - but from the sounds of it that is not what you fear. If the method of death is not problem, then it will only increase your anxiety. Is it the idea of death itself? Is it an acceptance of your own mortality that is the problem?

The only way to overcome a fear of death is to accept your own mortality and accept that you are now alive and likely to be for quite some time. Instead focusing on death,. try to focus on life. Figure out what can be achieved and what the purpose of it is. If you are still in High School, you are very young and have a full life to look forward to. Consider that you have not even experienced two decades and cannot remember half of the first one with clarity. Based on statistical probability, you have have perhaps another six. That's a lot of life left and it isn't in fact all that short. It's quite long, really.

So I believe you should go and enjoy life and try to make the most of it in order to become more comfortable with mortality.

 

[nanook]

To desensitize is to destroy the natural abilities of the brain. I wouldn't expect it to be less painfull than the destruction of muscle tissues in bodybuilding. Not comparable in quality of course. Only in principle: What doesn't kill you can only make you stronger, if recovery time outlasts the time of destructive impact and if recovery is even possible. Many sport injuries will last a lifetime. Too much stress has made people dull, numb, violent, ignorant. Just the right amount of stress has allowed some to grow transcending intelligence, that made them capable of approaching the stressful issue more constructively than before. I dare say that my narcissistic father has desensitized me to his insanity. I can deal with it constructively, on most days. Untrained people have inappropriate reactions to such behavior. They insist on relationship when none is possible. They must speak up. They crave to be heard and understood. I assume this detachment vs insolvent dichotomy is directly related to a certain kind of neurological sensitivity towards which ever part of the brain is in relationship with other people, because my neurological sensitivity will vary depending on physical states, such as fasting, ketosis, etc and my detachment varies along with it. More neurological sensitivity, less detachment from the function of relationship/involvement. My father is a workhorse, raised in the mines of the orks, baptized by the bombs of world war II. He is excessively proud about being desensitized to the human condition. He has no empathy for his own needs, nor for those of anyone else. It's almost comical until he assumes responsibility "for your own good". Then you are in for some desensitisation training. He literally whistles a melody while he imposes his management on you. Make no mistake, this singing is not a proof of human nature. The only purpose of this upbeat melody is to override all authentic emotions of suffering that he imposes on himself through enacting violence. Its like the songs of soldiers.

 

[Shieru]

that bear video is pretty cringe-worthy but i think it's more that he's being dismembered while still alive than the fact he dies afterward (or does he? can't entirely tell if he's dead..)

it seems like often people conflate death with suffering, although they're not the same thing. suffering is an experience quite in the context of a living human body. once you're dead, experience ends. (of course there's the whole 'afterlife' debate, but even if there were such a thing, we couldn't hope to comprehend what experience may be like in such a state, or if there existed something analogous to suffering.)

i've always wondered what people find so fearful about death itself. fearing suffering makes sense as it's a tangible thing, but it seems to me that the fear of death is relatively irrational and futile. we don't understand death like we do suffering, as it's outside of our experience, and so it seems what is feared is actually quite abstract.. the fear of death seems to be more about the fear of loss of potential experience - much like what @Cognisant describes as loss of hope, but perhaps even more directly, death may be as daunting as it is because it's something we don't understand. there is the potential for suffering in the ambiguity of our ignorance, our lizard-brains are biased toward seeing threats when in doubt, and so we fear the unknown.

i don't think exposure to the event of death would necessarily extinguish the fear of it - as is documented in the OP. the experience still remains a mystery to everyone except perhaps the person who's actually dying. and so there isn't really any personal reconciliation via observation. i can't speak for others, although what @Happy describes resonates with my own experience. but, for me death became more curious than fearful as i encountered it firsthand and came to develop a multifaceted concept of it over time. i nearly died several times as a child, and faced the fact of mortality many times after that. because of how unfavorable i found my upbringing and the society around me, death seemed like a favorable option for many years; and so i developed affinity for it. i learned to love it as a tragic and dark sort of beauty that i coveted in secret. later, i felt challenged by it and so got into finding ways to hack the body's system in order to elude it. seeing death as a set of causalities which can be thwarted made it lose its omnipotence and more of its mystery. finally, any fixation on the topic left was extinguished as i studied Jung's writings and became aware to my own satisfaction of the meaning of death in the human context. separating the subjective notion from the objective fact allowed me to reach a more unbiased perspective. in the end, death is part of the cycle of life, an inevitable consequence of the finite nature of living creatures. like all else, it's not good nor bad, it doesn't have any inherent meaning, how we react to it doesn't define its reality; it just is.