Adult children who feel almost nothing on routine calls with a parent - not love, not irritation, not connection, just dutiful neutrality - aren't emotionally numb, they're correctly registering that the relationship was never quite built, and the absence of feeling is the body's honest report on a closeness that was assigned rather than developed - Silicon Canals

"The adult child's eyes drift to the window, or to the dishes in the sink, or to nothing in particular. Twenty minutes pass this way. The call ends with the usual closing phrases. The phone goes back on the counter. And in the silence afterward, there is a registration, often quickly suppressed, that during the entire call the adult child felt almost nothing. Not love. Not warmth. Not irritation, exactly. Not anger, or distance, or active discomfort. Just a quiet neutrality, the kind that produces no story afterward, no replayed moment, no lingering anything."

"This is the feeling that very few adult children describe out loud, because the feeling itself sounds, when stated plainly, like a kind of indictment. Other relationships in their life produce strong feelings. Friends, partners, children of their own, work, ambitions, frustrations, pleasures-all of these produce the full range of human emotional response. The neutrality is specific. It activates around the parent. It does not activate elsewhere."

"The adult child, registering this, often arrives at a conclusion that is partially true and largely misleading. They conclude that they must be emotionally limited in some specific way around their parent. They conclude that they have, perhaps, repressed something. They conclude that the neutrality is a kind of failure of feeling, and that the feeling, if it could be excavated, is in there somewhere underneath."

"This conclusion is, in most cases, wrong. The neutrality is not a suppression of feeling. It is, more accurately, the body's honest report on a relationship that was, structurally, never quite built."

A phone call with a parent can proceed with appropriate responses while the adult child feels almost nothing. After the call ends, silence brings a recognition that internal weather did not change. The neutrality produces no story, replayed moment, or lingering emotion. Few adult children describe this feeling because it can sound like an indictment. Other relationships tend to generate a full range of emotions, but neutrality appears specifically around the parent. The adult child may conclude they are emotionally limited, repressed, or failing to feel. That conclusion is often misleading. The neutrality is not suppression; it is the body’s honest report on a relationship that was structurally never fully built.

Read at Silicon Canals