I’m not sure I understand your question. In order to think that there’s a problem with how much love he’s providing, you have to have a counterfactual in which he’s supposed to be providing more. For the amount of love to be insufficient, there has to be something to compare it to. If you aren’t (implicitly) comparing, then there is nothing to draw it to your attention in the first place.
In other words, you wouldn’t keep saying “I guess he didn’t”, because if you’re not comparing, then there’s not an issue any more—it’s just history, not an unresolved problem.
It sounds to me like the experience you’re talking about is incomplete grief, like maybe a description of a situation where someone is accepting (at least intellectually) that they aren’t going to get the love they want in the future, but has yet to accept that they didn’t get it in the past. Because as long as they think they should have gotten it, the grieving is still incomplete.
As for deadening, letting go of things generally makes us more alive, not less, because we stop obsessing over the things we can’t change, and move on to enjoying what we have (or can actually get). But before one actually lets go of something, the idea of letting go feels like it would be a loss.
As I suggested in the article, our brains treat unacknowledged losses like they are still assets on our inner books of utility. So the idea of writing off a loss feels like it is a loss. But once the write-off is actually done, then it no longer feels like a loss, because it’s now the status quo, and therefore it doesn’t keep coming back to conscious attention the way a perceived threat of loss does.
Not directly related to the specific question above, but as I do have a twin I do know that there’s nothing to be done that I won’t be able to regret. We envy each other and we both know it… and so ‘shoulds’ don’t work just because they never have.
I’m not sure I understand your question. In order to think that there’s a problem with how much love he’s providing, you have to have a counterfactual in which he’s supposed to be providing more. For the amount of love to be insufficient, there has to be something to compare it to. If you aren’t (implicitly) comparing, then there is nothing to draw it to your attention in the first place.
In other words, you wouldn’t keep saying “I guess he didn’t”, because if you’re not comparing, then there’s not an issue any more—it’s just history, not an unresolved problem.
It sounds to me like the experience you’re talking about is incomplete grief, like maybe a description of a situation where someone is accepting (at least intellectually) that they aren’t going to get the love they want in the future, but has yet to accept that they didn’t get it in the past. Because as long as they think they should have gotten it, the grieving is still incomplete.
As for deadening, letting go of things generally makes us more alive, not less, because we stop obsessing over the things we can’t change, and move on to enjoying what we have (or can actually get). But before one actually lets go of something, the idea of letting go feels like it would be a loss.
As I suggested in the article, our brains treat unacknowledged losses like they are still assets on our inner books of utility. So the idea of writing off a loss feels like it is a loss. But once the write-off is actually done, then it no longer feels like a loss, because it’s now the status quo, and therefore it doesn’t keep coming back to conscious attention the way a perceived threat of loss does.
Not directly related to the specific question above, but as I do have a twin I do know that there’s nothing to be done that I won’t be able to regret. We envy each other and we both know it… and so ‘shoulds’ don’t work just because they never have.