Need to stop pushing

[asitis]

Asitis,

You wrote:

On detachment. Don't see it as something that you do 100%. I don't think any of us can aspire to that. We still care.

This isn't what detachment is all about here.

Detachment is not having a person's actions impact you at all. You still can be loving and caring while being detached. For example, your then 2-year old threw a tantrum in the store because he was told "no, you cannot have that Darth Vader bobble head toy." Did you spin and go into naval gazing angst when he threw that tantrum? No. Of course not...that is what detachment is all about.

Detachment means your knickers do not get all twisted up when your W says or does something stupid. It is her circus, her monkeys. No effect on you emotionally. That's detachment.

See the difference between detachment and not caring?

I think we are parsing words a bit here. The way NDY was saying he needs to detach more was in an emotional way. He didn't react, but he was still feeling the impact. I get how you are using it, and I agree with most of it. However, detachment is also not about not feeling the emotions painful or pleasurable. This is connected to caring, but even when we detach, we often still feel the emotions. Emotional triggering happens at the pre-conscious level, so you cannot always stop it even with practices of detachment. What detaching allows is for those emotions that arise to not be powerful enough to trigger a reaction in word or deed. NDY was expressing that he was feeling a lot and therefore needed to detach more. I was trying to reassure him that detaching didn't mean we stopped feeling a lot of the difficult feelings, it just lost a lot of its power and didn't drive our actions.

I respect that the term has a particular usage that has developed here. Still, this isn't really the way our emotional responses work, and may set up false expectations of immunity from painful emotional responses to what our Ss do or say. You put that in terms of caring. Fine. I was putting it in terms of having emotional reactions many of which we can't really control (we can control how powerful they are and what we do in response to them, and maybe w/ a lot of therapy really reduce the triggering to insignificant) that come from caring and also from our decades of habituation.