LIFESTYLE OUT OF MY MIND
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CARING TOO MUCH OR NOT AT ALL? By Philip Chard
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n gnarly relationships, finding a balance between caring too much or not at all proves a tough row to hoe. It constitutes a mental tug of war in the psyche, and Nina felt like the rope. “I’ve tried not to care but can’t seem to get there,” she confided to me, referring to her stormy romance with an on-and-off boyfriend, one with significant emotional issues. “For me, caring feels like a trap I’m trying to escape, but can’t.” Often, this conundrum emerges when a sensitive, empathic person becomes deeply embedded in a relationship, family or other interpersonal situation where caring leads mostly to pain. Nina knew that continuing to care for her beau would punch her ticket to considerable misery
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for both of them, but she still struggled to emotionally disengage. Many mental health types label such folks “co-dependent.” Translation? They lack sufficient emotional separation, so to speak, to avoid getting psychologically dragged around by the feelings and behaviors of a partner or family member. Often, counselors encourage such individuals to break off the interpersonal connection altogether, lest they suffer ongoing mental harm. What’s more, they advise them to become more emotionally independent.
Compartmentalizing Our Feelings But how? Granted, some of us are adept at compartmentalizing our feelings; when in a dysfunctional relationship, we readily move from a mental space of “I care” to “I
don’t,” or at least “not so much.” We place our painful concerns in a cognitive box, put it away somewhere in the psyche and move on. To convince ourselves to cut the emotional chord with someone who proves a poor interpersonal investment, we invoke the psychological law of diminishing returns: “The more I care, the worse I feel.” But for those like Nina, it’s not so simple. “Maybe it would be easier to just resign myself to caring, even though it hurts, instead of struggling to not care,” Nina lamented. In this “I don’t want to care but still do” space, there is a persistent conflict between the heart and psyche. Some who find themselves in this fix embrace unhealthy measures to numb out the pain of
