Genuine Connection
Genuine Emotional Connection
(Originally written on 14/2/2020 - Valentines Day 2020)
A genuine emotional connection is not developed or cannot be based solely (or even mainly) on acts of reciprocity and thanks, and it’s not a good test for whether you really care for someone, especially if you are a “dutiful” person (as I believe I am).
This is because doing mutual exchanges is just a natural human inclination between *any * two humans, whether they have an emotional connection/emotional connections
Added on 26/1/2021 Genuine connection is formed by feeling joy when someone else feels joy, and vice versa. To engage one’s mirror neurons or something such that you can imagine what it would feel like for them, given various scenarios. You genuinely ‘feel their (joy and) pain)’.
It’s easy to show someone you care, as that’s a matter of behaviour. But the lived experience of caring about something or someone is quite different. You somehow ride the highs and the lows with them. Maybe this develops by spending time with someone, then it naturally develops.
I find it hard to care a lot about other people, yet somehow at the same time am easily affected by their emotions. I am affected a lot by someone else’s anger, for instance. I want things to go well for other people, but I find it fairly easy to “detach” myself from their suffering.
This may be a function of predispositions toward les emotionality, and also constant reinforcement that I shouldn’t get too close to other people (lest I be hurt).
This has been borne through experience through bullying and social exclusion when I was very young, which occurred again in early high school.