WHEN NUMBING BECOMES NORMAL - HABITS, DISTANCE AND FADING CLOSENESS
About emotional patterns and the quiet loss of connection
Volume 2 of the series "Between the Years
A man and a woman stand by the pool. A glass in their hands. A smile on their faces.
In the background, someone falls into the water. A brief moment. Then everything continues.
Nothing seems out of balance.
And that is exactly the point.
The joint in the evening. The glass of wine to wind down. Sugar, distraction, work, entertainment. Small things that provide pleasure, relief or simply a pause from everything else.
None of them necessarily looks like a problem.
WHEN NUMBING BECOMES NORMAL is about what happens when repetition gradually replaces choice. When something we once decided to do becomes something we simply do – and eventually stop noticing altogether.
It looks beyond the substance itself to the mechanisms underneath: stress and pressure, comparison and ambition, pleasure and repetition, habits and adaptation, inner restlessness and the constant availability of something that can make us feel different for a while.
Because numbing does not always look like escape.
Sometimes it looks remarkably like an ordinary evening.
WHEN NUMBING BECOMES NORMAL is for people who sense that something in everyday life has quietly become automatic – even though from the outside everything still looks perfectly normal.
It explores why habits become stronger through repetition, why immediate relief is so attractive and why stress, social expectations and constant stimulation can make certain behaviours increasingly difficult to question. Alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, sugar and distraction appear in different forms, but the more interesting question is often the same: What are we actually looking for when we reach for them?
This is not a guide, therapy programme or step-by-step method for eliminating every bad habit from your life.
That could quite easily become another obsession.
Instead, the book offers a calm look at adaptation and self-deception, emotional distance and inner restlessness, automatic behaviour and the limits of willpower – without reducing everything to personal failure.
Recognising a pattern does not mean you have to change it immediately. But once something becomes visible, it becomes a little harder to mistake habit for choice.
WHEN NUMBING BECOMES NORMAL is Volume 2 of the series BETWEEN THE YEARS about the silent drugs of everyday life.
Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger writes from lived experience – from setbacks, detours, new beginnings and encounters that never needed to be invented. His texts begin where real life leaves its mark.
If you have not yet read a volume from the “BETWEEN THE YEARS” series, you can begin with one of the following books. The books can be read independently of one another.
Volume 1: DRUGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Volume 2: WHEN NUMBING BECOMES NORMAL