The invisible #3: They call it empathy

 

In my understanding, here is a description of the subtlest cause and effect in psycho­pathology. First though, some of the more obvious equations. We assume that a par­ent’s rage and contempt for a child will damage his self-esteem, as will physical and sexual abuse. We can intuit, by honest introspection, how a relative’s sarcasm can be a covert insult, also doing damage. Then there are standards of performance or perfec­tion, which will pull a child out of his feeling body and into his anxious, anticipatory head. Absence of love, hidden or blatant, will wound his heart.

Then there is the invisible equation. This is a double-entendre, sort of. Because the problem is invisible and the child is invisible.* The parent never sees and knows her child’s feelings, can never get outside of her own mirrored bubble which is her repressed past. She may have the most vivacious and warm conversations with her little boy or girl or teenager. They can spend a lot of time together. Mother or father listens with bona fide parental concern, responds to his problem with raised eyebrows, questions, advice, encouragements, personal anecdotes, lectures. But she never actu­ally hears the feeling, feels it herself. She never sees her child.

This causes an invisible kind of death.

I can only ask you to go back to your own childhood and remember being talked to and improved by your parent’s words. You will notice that you had feelings – which are your life – that could never quite come out and live because there was no receiver of them. The question:

What happens to those feelings?

They disappear. You stop feeling yourself and you disappear. Little by little with each parent’s blind eye, each wise saying or wish for you to be happy.

See how invisible this is. You are replaced by an alter-, under-self and never know it. You had spirit but then later, defiance. You had certainty but then later, confusion. What do I want? You had a chemical bond (oxytocin, the “love chemical”?) with your parent then later, cordial­ity and repressed need. You become a wraith, as substantial physi­cally but a head floating in the water with no direction. Later, in the whole ocean.

It’s known in some psychotherapy quarters that “this failure of empathy can leave, in the end, as much pain and disability as actual physical harm.”** Carry it forward, though, to where life goes on and you continue to be invisible because you disappeared in your youth in your parent’s gaze. Can you tell that this is what Thoreau saw when he wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”? We become thought and wonder, neurotic convictions*** and arbitrary directions. We feel out of touch but we don’t know with what.

I would think that anyone who can see this will endorse one kind of therapy: a feeling kind. A time machine that goes back and revisits moments of invisibility, finds that life and lets it out. And the pain that replaced it.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-invisible.html. Many other TPS blog posts address this invisibility from parent’s and child’s perspective. See Solipsism, Eyes that don’t see, The invisible #2.

** http://www.paulvereshack.com/helpme/chapt2.html.

*** https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/briefing/new-york-mayors-race-ranked-choice-democrats.html – “Nine Political Classifications”.