Second Sense: Decision To Not Connect Emotionally
Emotional detachment in the second sense above is a decision to avoid engaging emotional connections, rather than an inability or difficulty in doing so, typically for personal, social, or other reasons. In this sense it can allows people to maintain boundaries, psychic integrity and avoid undesired impact by or upon others, related to emotional demands. As such it is a deliberate mental attitude which avoids engaging the emotions of others.
This detachment does not necessarily mean avoiding empathy; rather it allows the person space needed to rationally choose whether or not to be overwhelmed or manipulated by such feelings. Examples where this is used in a positive sense might include emotional boundary management, where a person avoids emotional levels of engagement related to people who are in some way emotionally overly demanding, such as difficult co-workers or relatives, or is adopted to aid the person in helping others such as a person who trains himself to ignore the "pleading" food requests of a dieting spouse, or indifference by parents towards a child's begging. Emotional detachment also allows acts of extreme cruelty, such as torture and abuse, supported by the decision to not connect empathically with the person concerned. As a result, the decision as to whether emotional detachment in any given set of circumstances is considered to be a positive or negative mental attitude is a subjective one, and therefore a decision on which different people may not agree.
Read more about this topic: Emotional Detachment
Famous quotes containing the words decision, connect and/or emotionally:
“Once the decision has been reached, close your ears even to the best counter-argument: a sign of strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Such were the first rude beginnings of a town. They spoke of the practicability of a winter road to the Moosehead Carry, which would not cost much, and would connect them with steam and staging and all the busy world. I almost doubted if the lake would be there,—the self-same lake,—preserve its form and identity, when the shores should be cleared and settled; as if these lakes and streams which explorers report never awaited the advent of the citizen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Your body must become familiar with its death—in all its possible forms and degrees—as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.”
—Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961)