This comes to mind today. I wonder what it must be like to like people who fail to like one back, even when they might allow you to believe that's what they were doing.
For someone to fail to like another back is not an unusual scenario. The world is sad enough in this sense, and daily it is able to give us plenty of evidence of such realities.
There are, I would assume, many cases whereby a kindness is responded to in rather unhappy ways: where ensnaring maybe is the word we should use - where it replaces the simpler act of embracing.
Stockholm syndrome seems to be a particularly complicated example of this, given that it requires the full collaboration of the victim.
Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors.
These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.[1][2] The FBI's Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly eight percent of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.[3]
That's terribly dramatic, perhaps even melodramatic, of course; rarely taking place within the experience of anyone - certainly not within mine, and hopefully never in the future to be the case for any of us.
More commonly experienced, perhaps, however, will be the following circumstances, where the hostage event earlier described - and required - does not need to physically take place in order that something similar does.
Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes "strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other."[4]
One assumes this not only happens between individuals, but also between individuals and organisations; or even, maybe between organisations themselves.
It might serve to underpin a lot of what goes wrong on the planet: that confusion and blurring of lines which habit, neighbourship and simple shared existences do to the way we analyse the reality of our matters.
And so Freud - well, why not? For some, anyway ... - just has to make himself heard here.
One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual's response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be perceived as a threat.[5]
However, the main challenge - and where anyone in such situations as those described, especially in the milder (but far more prevalent) case described of traumatic bonding, always needs to focus - will surely be that of recovery.
Neither would relief from the trauma lie down the route of contemplating the return of favours.
In fact, further ensnarement would probably be the case.
Life - and its fairly shared pursuit - always first ... right?
I ain't got no answers to this one, mind; am realising I have fewer as the days go by.
But I do wish the future didn't, all the time, have to lie along the lines of this bigger being better; of numbers being the key to how we define and treasure mostly everything; of the fairly easily quantified so often beating hands down the more complicatedly qualitative.
I just wish it wasn't the case. I truly would like to believe.
So do tell me it isn't.
And if you can be kind, don't be cruel when you are - just be kind when you can, and leave it at that ...
