Love is as Indifference Does
Indifference is a choice that you may not know you’ve made.
You can be indifferent towards a person, place or thing. You can even be indifferent towards yourself.
It’s not always a problem. Teenagers are famous for it as they go through their own adjustments towards their adult identity. On the odd occasion, feigning indifference is used as a way to “save face” and other times it’s a way of temporarily parking a situation to collect your energy.
But it can offer a false sense of well-being and limit your options. People who come to me for Peak Performance therapy & coaching state that they’ve used indifference too long as a way of distracting and masking themselves from important but difficult realisations. Here are their top 5 reasons for expressing indifference.
- It takes too much energy to care
- There is too much pain in the situation which is impossible to handle without self-destruction
- Demands clash with their own goals, generating feelings of helplessness and low self-worth
- To cover up embarrassment and shame
- To avoid taking personal responsibility or ownership of something
“I was indifferent. Thought it wasn’t my problem and it got easy to stop thinking how to make it work. Only now she’s gone do I see how I drove her away and what I could have done. ” – A Client
It is said that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. To what extent do you agree with this?
Are you expressing indifference as a way to avoid something? If so, what can you do today to help yourself find a better way?
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Image: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ilco
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