Pain by inadvertence or negilence

Janov's Reflections On Pain by Inadvertence (click to access)

Art,

Reading your words: “It was not what my parents did, but what they did not do”, I got icy feelings over my entire body; I was taken back in time, and I could feel the memory of the emptiness from my youth when my parents were waiting for me to provide comfort, when it should have been the other way around. After I have felt a lot of pain over the years, the more I have realized that both my parents were unhappy “kids” who never had got the love they needed. 

An interesting proof of the continued existence and strength of the feelings is that the sentence; “It was not what my parents did, but what they did not do”, in a written, foreign language stirred up the latent memories of being unloved. It was not my parents intention, but they never had anything else than their own pain, so I always had to fantasize about being held and caressed, followed by other neurotic behaviors, in order to survive. 

Whenever, nowadays, I tend to behave with icy feelings towards my daughter, I can fortunately feel it, and I can often tell her how stupid I act, and we can talk about it and give each other hugs!

Jan Johnsson