by Leroy Kottke

Created on: July 03, 2008

I am an emotionally stunted person. I have no idea how to relate to others on an emotional level. This is a life-long situation and it stems from the family situation in which I was born and raised. I feel that God puts us here for a purpose and for me; it has been a lifelong quest to find that purpose. I think that I am finally beginning to get a handle on it. This state of ignorance regarding my feelings and how to deal with them has directed me into occupations that require little or no emotional knowledge. I remember one statement that my geometry teacher made to me regarding her philosophy of life and that was to the effect that these 'other areas' of life have nothing to do with geometry and that there is great comfort in directing ones attention to things that could be analyzed, and I adopted that philosophy because it allowed me to virtually ignore at least half of my life; the part that was so inscrutable.

The people around me have been very supportive and understanding. Unfortunately, I mistook this understanding to mean allowance for misbehavior. So I took advantage of this magnanimity and construed it as a license to behave the way I felt without regard for other's feelings; because I didn't know how to do that. Others around me did not so understand and reacted to my indifference with scorn and derision, and worse, by writing me off as beneath their consideration. After all, we, here in this culture, are allowed to be inconsiderate to others in our ego quest to be bigger and better than the next person, and we take advantage of every weakness in others to promote ourselves. Self promotion is foisted upon us by an uncaring, unfeeling culture that tells us "me first". Big me, little you, as my mom used to say. Mom told me one other thing that baffled me, and that was that "I talked like a wooden man." I didn't know how to interpret that, and I knew better than to ask her about what she meant, because I suspected that she didn't know either. So I continued to ride rough-shod over other's feelings, not deliberately, but unknowingly. If I can figure things out, I do, but if I can't begin to understand them, I give up. This is the situation I have been in regarding feelings for most of my life.

What does one do in light of this 'not knowing where to begin' syndrome? Well, in my case, I look around for explanations that may get me to a starting point. The movies were that kind of thing. Here I could see 'normal' human intercourse and hear verbal examples

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