Emotional Neglect

When you interact with another human being, and they fail to be fully present, this on some level, if you fail to perceive it, works to distance you from your own emotions.  What I am seeing is that other people, and to the main point here, parents, can say all the words you need to say but that if they don’t mean it, it hurts, on balance.

They can say “I love you”.  They can say “I am there for you”.  They can say “I am proud of you”.

But if they are narcissists, if they are watching TV while they say it, if they are heading out the  door, then that bond is not formed, that connection is not made.  And in point of fact, you are being trained in superficiality.

To look a child in the eye and say something you don’t know how to mean, or are unwilling to take the time to mean, is emotional neglect.  And what is interesting about this is that this neglect will not be easily perceived by either party.  The child will think “they said they love me, so this must be what love is”.  The parent will say “I said I love you, what else can I do?”

So often I think that in this and now other countries, media fills the gap where emotional honesty should have been.  People are hurt, do not know they are hurt, do not know they are missing something, and use constant distraction as a means of managing it without ever becoming consciously aware of it.

This is a fragile system.  In the past, absent these distractions, something would have given.  Some truth would have been told.  The delusion would have collapsed.  But in our modern world, delusion can survive a very, very long time, and it is buttressed by sentimentalism as a pseudo-moral creed.

I am consciously directing most of my thinking to my diary, but I felt this needed to be said publicly.

Things are going well for me.  I will have crossed the ocean soon.

Edit: could we not say that what we might term the Age of Divided Attention is the Age of Ineffective Love?