So, we often find ourselves in situations where we need support or comfort from others. We expect the people we care about to be emotionally available to us when we are emotionally stretched.
But what happens when someone we hope to lean on just can’t be there for us? Worse yet, what happens when they shut down, or even lash out at you for the possible outcomes of the struggle with which you are dealing?
We all have times in our lives when we aren’t there for people we love. Whether it’s because we are dealing with too much ourselves, or because in that moment we lack the capacity or emotional intelligence to offer any comfort or support, the ripple effect of our ineptitude is the same.
Someone gets hurt.
In the case of simply being too overwhelmed with personal issues, the slight can be forgivable, even if it takes time. After all, the airline attendant reminds us to always put on our own oxygen mask first before we assist others. There are times when you simply cannot help someone else because you yourself need help.
If we’re lucky, the person who needs us in those worst of times scenarios understands, and can patiently wait for us to rejoin them in the struggle when we get back on our feet. Maybe they can even see so clearly what we are going through that they are willing to help us first.
Sometimes, the problem isn’t so simple.
We expect different things from different people. We may understand that our friends love us, but have full plates, and not being there is not about failing us. Family can be a very different story.
Growing up with parents who lacked the emotional intelligence and maturity to actually parent, I feel a certain level of expertise when it comes to feeling abandoned by people I needed at times I needed them most.
My mom was a teen mom before MTV made it cool, and without question she never received the nurturing needed to develop maturity, emotional strength, or a sense of self-awareness. My grandma was a young first-time mom as well, and she probably received even less nurturing as a child than she passed along to my mom.
My dad was “missing in action.” My mom being pregnant and alone was not his problem, and he allowed himself to believe he didn’t share in the responsibility of raising me, or even helping me. I grew up without him, and expecting nothing from him.
Sadly, we all need to be parented at times. We need to have our basic physical needs met. We need to learn basic life and survival skills. And we all require minimum emotional care that only parents offer.
In my case, my mother’s lack of emotional and intellectual maturity meant I grew up in a situation where our roles were often reversed. My dad’s absence in my life left my mom and me desperate for stability, security, and a home. My mom made some bad choices about all of that, and life was pretty awful.
When you survive a childhood from which you need to recover, you tend to believe everything else should be smooth sailing.
I met my father as an adult, and though I still expected nothing from him, I grew to believe that perhaps I could. Perhaps he could be the emotionally available and stable parental influence I had always needed. But as luck would have it, 20 years hadn’t been enough to make him the dad for which I desperately hoped.
And as time went by, I began to realize more and more that not only could my mom not be a parent to me, she couldn’t even maintain the imperfect mother-daughter friendship we had cobbled together throughout my childhood.
My parents just weren’t capable of providing me with the soft emotional place to land that even we as adults sometimes need. I found myself in so many grown-up situations that I just couldn’t take to either one of them. And despite the fact that I had never really had an appropriate relationship with either of my parents, for years I mourned the feeling of loss that such an emptiness left me.
As an adult, I started to seek out other nurturing relationships to fill that cavernous void. I began to slowly understand that other people could support me and comfort me in ways my parents just couldn’t. I also slowly began to recognize their emotional deficits for what they were—not maliciousness, merely an incomplete development of the basic tools they needed to be my mom and my dad.
I won’t say that I never stumbled. Not having something so basic as a core family unit to rely on leaves a big hole. At times, you try to fill that hole with the wrong things, and in the wrong ways. You often realize too late that the hole has no bottom, and you’re never going to fill it. Some holes are just black.
It still hurts sometimes. I occasionally still miss having the kind of relationship with each of them that most children have had with their parents. That being said, I also recognize that family isn’t always the group of people you are born into. Family is something you can create, foster, and grow with people who are able to love, comfort and support you.
All humans are flawed, just in different ways.
When we don’t receive the emotional and intellectual nourishment we need as children to develop into adults who have a sense of empathy, understanding and self-awareness, we have much to overcome. If we are lucky, we encounter the right people and situations to gain those things from others. If we aren’t, we will be stunted, and unable to provide even the basic emotional support to those who rely on us.
Emotional instability and darkness can be mistaken for avoidance, lack of empathy, or self-involvement. But to the experienced observer, cautious acceptance can allow someone we love to gather themselves back up, and return to us when they are healed.
Unfortunately, some of us have deeper flaws than others. Some flaws are created by habit, and years of being written over, again and again. Some of those flaws make us feel easily threatened by change or uncertainty, and that causes us to miss opportunities to be there for people when they reach out to us. Some of those flaws are like grooves worn into our being from years of having our wants and desires placed in front of everyone else’s—we literally don’t know that our personal sense of entitlement and status harm or slight the people we love. We have never had to be accountable for our bold sense of expectation from those around us.
In the end, when we need someone and they cannot be there—for whatever reason—we are left to decide the way forward, both in the struggle we needed help with in the first place, and in the unbalanced relationship that has left us feeling abandoned, or even harmed.
There aren’t always easy answers. We want what we want from people, for better or worse. But people don’t always meet us at the same emotional, intellectual, or stability level that we, ourselves, are on.
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