What an interesting dialogue! Illustrates what I could never have conveyed if I’d just tried to talk about it.

When one is hurt by someone they love and then “numbs” or “kills” it because of the pain and disruption it causes in one’s life (and survival motivation takes over), then the conscious feeling is numbed out but the nervous pathways are still there. One still has the “capacity” for love, potentially, but may not know it, may not experience it.

Also, being “in love” with someone is different from simply loving them. Sometimes being “in love” turns into love for the real person, sometimes it doesn’t.

Love with one’s parents or family members is also different. . .I haven’t had any contact with my mother’s family since my mother died over 3 years ago. There was a family issue that we couldn’t agree about and I left, saying “this is a value system that I cannot be a part of.” Breaks my heart. I love them. Maybe they love me. But what the dysfunctional family system “required” of me, basically that I NOT be myself, was too much. I didn’t need that any more for my continued survival at age 68 or for my relationship with my mother, who had passed away. The anger and sense of betrayal from 3 years ago has faded but I still can’t be a part of the family “value system” of denial and “looking good”. And I also still love my aunts – the reality of them, the good and the bad, and the sad fact that in their 80’s it’s not likely that they will change the views and values that they lived by most of their lives. Why should they.

I also feel uncomfortable with something I wrote earlier. “Neurological deficit associated with psychopathy” could be viewed by some as demeaning. Not me, from the little I know it’s technically accurate. And it’s not so much that I want to apologize for possibly hurting Atypical’s feelings – I hope that perhaps it’s not possible to hurt her feelings, so then I couldn’t have. But “neurological abnormality” might have been a better description. Whether it’s a condition that’s mostly “caused” by environment, like I understand NPD to be, or one that’s mostly “caused” by genetics, as psychopathy may be, people who have abnormalities are PEOPLE. If I can’t trust them, I can be careful. If some of them don’t feel the same way, because they can’t, that doesn’t change how I feel about it.

My son is color-blind. It’s a neurological deficit. He was made fun of once in the second grade because of it. It was NOT a trauma, he knew he was color-blind and he knew the girl didn’t know what she was talking about. Also, people with color-blindness have better contrast sensitivity and are better able to pick out moving prey or enemies in the woods. So it’s a neurological deficit but it doesn’t mean it’s a life deficit. The color-blind people don’t need to all be shunned. Why not let the color normal do their thing and the contrast-sensitive people do their thing and exchange information for a common good?

To the OP if you’re still around – I hope that you can find a way to relate to your mother even if right now she can’t face how she affected you in the past. My daughter and I haven’t talked in 3 years. I certainly didn’t handle conversations well when she tried to tell me how should know how I “hurt” her. At the time, believe it or not, I didn’t feel “hurtness”. Because mine was numbed out from my own childhood – and in spite of much therapy which never got to the core. (No, no, no do NOT blame me. I really tried. It’s the profession that’s failing people and unless/until enough of us get “well” with the help of therapists who DO know what they’re doing. . . well, eventually it will happen. Just so sad about those who have fallen through the cracks.) I didn’t feel “hurt”, just anger, “she shouldn’t be talking to me this way”. So now, because I’ve been through the good trauma therapy it took me so long to find, I can feel hurt. But she has cut herself off from me, in part because of one of many websites for children of emotionally abusive parents. . . who of course were “emotionally abused” by their parents, etc., etc., etc.

As Atypical has said, “It’s called life.”