Please, Don't Normalize This Madness

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast · Jan 30, 2025 · 4m

Something often happens to people exposed to repeated trauma.

Gradually, they become conditioned to accept the horrors as commonplace. Time and brutality start to wear down their defenses and sap their emotional resources and they begin learn to live alongside the most malignant sickness as if it were ordinary.

Slowly but quite decidedly, they grow numb to the unthinkable cruelty and the sustained violence until it all begins to seem normal. Eventually, even the most compassionate of human beings loses the ability to be outraged or to push back or to even care. Self-preservation begins to…