There are forms of manipulation that wear a velvet glove. Not all harm shouts. Some smiles are knives with a sugar coating. And for those of us who were taught to equate stillness with safety, that smile becomes a map a way to silence our inner alarms while quietly extinguishing ourselves.
Emotional neglect is rarely about what is done to you. It is about what is withheld. Validation. Presence. The freedom to speak without fear of being frozen out. You learn not to cry because no one comes. You learn not to ask because the answer is already no. Over time, your body becomes your archive storing stories no one ever helped you translate.
Disembodiment is not detachment it is a form of disassociation.It resonated with something I have felt for years. How I could smile, nod, excel, even love but not feel from within. My nervous system became my gatekeeper. I began to rely on instinct more than presence, sonar-scanning every room I walked into, wondering who might erupt, who might withdraw, who I had to become just to get through the day.
This is the fawn response. It is not people-pleasing. It is a survival algorithm. You become someone else to keep the peace. To feel less alone. But in doing so, you abandon yourself.
Living now in Norman, far from old structures family, relationship, city I am meeting myself in unfamiliar silence. And sometimes I wonder if I am unraveling or being reborn. In these moments I return to the words of Dostoevsky:
“To live alone is the fate of all great souls.”
But it is not romantic. It is slow, aching work. Like peeling layers off your skin. Like tending to a wound that never had the chance to scar properly.
Kafka once wrote:
“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
There is something hauntingly beautiful about this line. Because when you step away from systems that demand your silence, you don’t immediately find clarity. You find echoes. Of who you were asked to be. Of what you buried. Of who you might become, if you dare to remember.
I think the inner child not as a poetic metaphor, but as a real psychic presence. I feel to parent that part of ourselves that was never comforted. To say to the scared, silent part: “I hear you now.” Reparenting, in this sense, is not self-help. It is resistance. Against systems that taught us to numb. Against families that demanded compliance instead of curiosity.
What frightens me most about weaponized kindness is how invisible it is. How it turns care into currency. How it rewards silence. How it traps us in shame stories: I am too much. I am the problem. I should be grateful. Shame becomes a wall around the self. And the only way out is truth. Even if it shakes. Even if it breaks what you thought was love.
Boundaries, then, are not barriers. They are recovery spells. They say: This is where I end. This is where I begin. They remind the nervous system that safety is not the absence of conflict it is the presence of honesty.
I am learning, slowly, that real kindness does not ask for your performance. That love is not earned through endurance. That silence is not peace if it comes at the cost of your spirit.
If you have ever doubted your own story, ask yourself who benefits from that doubt. If you have ever felt your body bracing in the presence of “niceness,” trust that. If your anger scares you, know this: repressed anger is not shame it is a messenger. It comes to say: You were meant for more than this.
And if you are alone now truly alone perhaps it is not exile. Perhaps it is initiation.
