Emotional Inattention: A Guest Post from MSI Press Author, Dr. Dennis Ortman
EMOTIONAL INATTENTION
“He who looks outside dreams.
He who looks insides awakens.”
--Carl Jung
“It seems like almost everyone has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) these days!” We live on overload, constantly bombarded by information and driven by the fast pace of life. Adult Americans on average spend ten and a half hours a day watching TV, listening to the radio, or using their smart phones and other electronic devices (Nielsen’s Total Audience Report, 2018). We are driven to succeed and push ourselves to keep busy and productive. To survive, we learn to multitask. We strain to keep all the balls we are juggling in the air. We want more and more, yet never seem satisfied.
While technically only a few of us, about 6 percent, can be diagnosed with ADD, our culture keeps us distracted, impulse-driven, restless, and running in circles. So preoccupied, we never learn to listen to ourselves.
I propose that the high-stress and instability of the American family contribute to another kind of Attention Deficit Disorder. It is a disorder of our emotional life. Our personal relationships, then, reflect our culture. We have become distracted, impulsive, and restless in the ways we relate to ourselves and others. In the process, we have lost our stable emotional centers and capacity for honest intimacy.
As a psychologist, I meet daily with patients who suffer emotional disorder in their lives and relationships. They are at war with their own emotions, which they experience as the enemy within. They are confused and frightened by what arises from their madhouse minds. To cope, they may shut down their feelings. They may display a calm exterior, but feel dead inside, experiencing neither joy nor sorrow. Others move in an opposite direction. They are flooded by the emotional torrents and struggle to keep from drowning. Neither group knows how to pay proper attention to their feelings and how to manage and express them constructively. Not surprisingly, their relationships are either empty or chaotic, lacking authentic intimacy. In short, they suffer from emotional ADD, a disease to which we are all vulnerable in our high-octane society.
CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
The roots of emotional ADD are in childhood. Our first few years largely shape our personalities. We grow up emotionally through the mirroring of our parents. We come to see ourselves through their eyes. Their attunement to our feelings, comforting us in distress and celebrating our joy, enables us to develop healthy self-esteem. Through their accurate feedback, we come to understand and manage the energy of our own emotions. Furthermore, our parents are our role models. As they attend to their own emotional wellbeing, we mimic them.
Most of us, fortunately, have “good enough” childhoods. Perfection does not exist. We experience normal stresses and strains and grow through them. From our fairly secure childhood experiences, we establish healthy relationships with ourselves and others. We enjoy emotional wellbeing, working towards a friendly relationship with all our feelings.
However, many of us are not so fortunate. We experience early life traumas that shape our lives. A classic study in 1997 of these adverse childhood experiences (ACE) attempted to identify these experiences and their impact on our adult functioning. A number was given for each traumatizing experience. The results showed that the higher the number, the greater the risk of later harm. This study was of 17,000 white, middle-to-upper class adults. A similar study of poor people of color would likely show even more troubling results. The study addressed three areas:
1. Household Dysfunction:
The five harmful home life situations identified are not surprising, and tragically too frequent. Twenty seven percent of those interviewed reported that one or both of their parents abused substances. In 23% of the households, the parents either separated or divorced. One or both of their parents suffered from mental illness in 17% of the homes. Some were traumatized by either the attempt or success of a parent’s suicide. Mothers were battered in 13% of the homes and witnessed by the children. In six percent of the households, a parent engaged in criminal behavior, such as drug dealing. Some parents were imprisoned and separated from their children.
2. Abuse:
Twenty eight percent of those interviewed reported that they were physically abused by a parent. They said they were pushed, slapped, or hit, and things were thrown at them. They lived in fear of being injured. Another group of nearly a quarter (21%) reported that they were sexually molested or fondled by a parent, relative, or older sibling. Another eleven percent claimed they experienced significant psychological abuse. A parent swore at them, insulted them, put them down, or humiliated them.
3. Neglect:
Fifteen percent of those surveyed reported harmful emotional neglect. They felt a lack of love, support, and closeness from their parents. Another ten percent suffered significant physical neglect. They lacked sufficient food, clothing, and protection from their parents.
These traumatizing childhood experiences damaged the child’s developing brain. The traumas also had an accumulating negative effect as they aged. Not surprisingly, in later life those interviewed manifested the toxic effect of their early years. They experienced a greater risk for medical problems, such as heart disease and cancer. They suffered a higher incidence of mental and emotional problems, such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal behavior. Their relationships were troubled and unsatisfying. They also tended to abuse substances in higher numbers.
EMOTIONAL INATTENTION
A thread of emotional absence runs through these ten traumatizing experiences. When our parents are addicted, physically absent, mentally ill, battering their spouse, or involved in criminal activity, they are not fully present to us as nurturing parents. When our parents abuse us physically, sexually, or psychologically, they ignore our wellbeing and violate their responsibilities. When they neglect our basic emotional or physical needs, our security and safety are threatened. Lacking emotional attention from our parents as children, we grow up impaired in our ability to attend to our own emotional needs. We suffer an emotional attention deficit disorder.
I grew up in an alcoholic family and suffered the effects of parental absence. My brothers and I believed our parents loved us, but we knew we could not count on them for consistent emotional support. When intoxicated, hung over, or fighting, they were missing in action.
I felt lost, living at a distance from myself, without realizing it--until I began my own recovery. Through my involvement in counseling and Al-Anon and Adult Children of Alcoholics support groups, I learned that my parents were sick with a disease called alcoholism. Gradually, I could give up my moral judgment, forgive them for their flaws, and have compassion for their suffering. I also became aware of how their drinking and emotional distance affected me. I had become codependent, trying to rescue them and others to gain attention. In the process, I neglected my own emotional wellbeing and lost myself. Through my own recovery, I slowly learned to take good care of myself. Now, as a psychologist, I specialize in working with those suffering from addictions and their families. I have compassion for them, understand their dilemmas, and desire to accompany them on their journeys to new life.
PATHS FORWARD
The deficit in parental emotional attention shapes the way we relate to ourselves and others. If we lack emotional intimacy with our parents in childhood, we grow up feeling alienated from our own emotional experience. Furthermore, we cannot be any more intimate with others than we are with ourselves. If we are distant from or overwhelmed by our own emotional life, we will experience insecure attachments with others. In my practice, I have observed four paths forward from the childhood experience of the emotional unavailability of the parents.
Avoidance:
To cope with the emotional distance of our parents, some of us learn to cope by detaching from our feelings. We shut down to avoid the pain. However, in protecting ourselves from the pain, we also deprive ourselves of joyful feelings. Often we live in our heads. We keep busy with work, play, and obsessing, but never become intimate with ourselves or others. We live on automatic pilot. When I ask these patients what they want for themselves, they say, “I don’t really know.” Even if they have a glimpse of their own true desires, they ignore them. I pointedly ask, “If you don’t do what makes you feel alive, how do you think you will feel?” Of course, they feel dead inside, depressed.
When we shut down our emotions, our relationships suffer. There is no natural sharing of joys and sorrows that creates the bond of intimacy. We secretly hate our neediness and bury our natural desire to love and be loved. We do not believe we are lovable and close ourselves to others who may reach out to us in love. Living in the shadow of our childhood experiences of neglect, we tell ourselves a litany of stories, “I don’t want to be a burden to anyone. No one really cares about me. I can’t trust anyone to be there for me.” We choose a life of loneliness and quiet desperation.
Restlessness:
Others of us move in the opposite direction and jump into the rapidly flowing river of our emotions. We seek emotional stimulation to feel alive. We are often flooded by emotions we do not understand. Hidden impulses drive us. We feel at their mercy, unable to control them. We are restless, searching, but not knowing what we are looking for. Our need for stimulation pushes us to seek novel experiences, to try anything that might give us some lasting satisfaction. My patients tell me, “I have ‘FOMO,’ a fear of missing out on something.” I invite them to quiet down and ask themselves, “What am I really looking for? What really makes me feel alive? What will give me lasting happiness?”
Of course, the emotional instability bleeds into our relationships. We engage in a desperate search to fulfill society’s romantic fantasy, to find our “soul mate.” We look for someone to replace our absent parents who will love us and make us happy. We long to be rescued from our emotional emptiness by some “Magical Other.” We crave attention, recognition, and approval. Our self-esteem rises and falls with the reactions of our partners and friends. Love, we believe, is not really a free gift, but must be earned. Unfortunately, the childhood patterns of relating are deeply embedded within us. We are drawn to partners who display the same emotional unavailability as our parents, without realizing it. Then we sacrifice ourselves to keep the unsatisfying relationship or end up being abandoned.
Addiction:
Still others of us choose a third path of addiction. Our parents never taught us effective ways of comforting ourselves in painful times or of celebrating the joyful moments. Left on our own, we latch onto whatever is most readily available. Alcohol and drugs provide a quick and easy way to avoid pain and get pleasure. We can make painful feelings go away instantaneously and get high at will. We have the illusion that we are masters of our emotions—until the addiction takes hold. Then we become its slave.
We have a love affair with our drug of choice that mimics our childhood experiences with our parents. We wanted to believe we could count on our parents for our wellbeing, but in the long run they failed us. Drugs promise fulfillment that lasts for a moment, but inevitably betrays us. Our temporary pleasure becomes a lasting misery that eventually destroys us. As AA says, “The path of addiction leads in two directions: either recovery or death (some add imprisonment).”
RECOVERY: HONEST INTIMACY
The fourth path is recovery from the wounds of our childhood. I firmly believe there is no hopeless case. No matter how great the childhood traumas, we can heal and grow through them. We may see ourselves as prisoners of our childhoods, but we have the key for our own release. However, work is required. I would give this advice to anyone who desires to live a full emotional life. Socrates taught, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” These are the abbreviated steps I suggest for my patients and that I implement in my own life:
Awareness:
I tell my patients, “The goal of our work is that you simply be yourself.” They often object, “But I don’t know myself? How can that happen?” I reply, “Just spend time alone and quiet with yourself and see what you learn.” At first that seems like an impossible task. We are so accustomed to either avoiding our feelings or drowning in them that we never have the experience of stopping, looking, and listening to ourselves. We never come to discover and trust our own innate goodness, wisdom, and strength. We ignore our deep desire for connection with others and with the whole of Reality (God). So accustomed to looking outward to find our happiness and meaning, we never look inward. That shift of attention inward is the beginning of overcoming the deficit.
Action:
Insight alone is not enough to transform our lives. We need to take action, and persist. Healing and growth take us out of our comfort zones. We live most of our lives on automatic pilot, conditioned by our experiences as children and living in our society. We develop habits of thinking, reacting, and behaving that we blindly follow until they cause us enough misery. The pain of our habitual reacting motivates us to explore and begin the process of developing better, more constructive habits of living. Therapy is about habit change. It requires courage to do something new and perseverance to make it a new habit.
In paying closer attention to ourselves we discover our hidden habits and how they affect our lives. The next step is to act consciously against these self-defeating ways of thinking and behaving. For example, if we recognize our tendency to be impulsive, we can practice the seven Ts: “Take time to think the thing through.” If we tend to withdraw into our own mental worlds, we can push ourselves to be more social. If we always want to please others, we can risk expressing our true opinions. If we normally put ourselves down, we can catch ourselves and challenge the negative thinking. In therapy, we develop a new habit of questioning our thinking, not automatically accepting our thoughts as absolute truth.
Acceptance:
Through therapy, we become more aware of both our hidden strengths and flaws. We may not like what we see. We are not who we think we are. The final step is one of full acceptance of the reality of who we are, and giving up our fantasy-based self-images. We acknowledge our brokenness, grieve our losses, and face the inevitable pain of being human. We become humble, which means accepting without illusion the truth of who we are. We are good enough, but may still need some improvement. In fact, the traumas of our childhood may always haunt us to some degree and make us more humble and trusting in God’s mercy.
Our childhood traumas are like St. Paul’s thorn in the flesh. His faith was nourished by his sense of powerlessness over that wound. He wrote: “In order that I might not become conceited I was given a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan to beat me and keep me from getting proud. Three times I begged the Lord that this might leave me. He said to me, ‘My grace is enough for you, for in weakness power reaches perfection.’ And so I willingly boast of my weaknesses instead, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” (2 Corinthians 12: 7-9) Like St. Paul, we may gradually transform our grief into gratitude.
We live in an attention deficit disordered culture. Our ability to focus on essentials is impaired. Perhaps the most painful attention deficit we suffer regards our emotional wellbeing. Especially if we have been traumatized as children, we never learn to pay full attention to our feelings, which are life’s natural energy. The path to healing and health requires a shift of our attention inward. In learning to know, value, and trust ourselves, we can connect with others on a deeper level and find a lasting happiness.
For more posts by and about Dr. Dennis Ortman, click HERE.
For more posts about ADD/ADHD, click HERE.
For more posts about addiction, click HERE.
For more posts about abuse, click HERE.
For more posts about recovery, click HERE.
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