It’s possible to love your family completely and still feel emotionally distant at times. To care deeply, yet feel slightly removed. As though you’re present in action, but not fully landed inside yourself.
This experience is rarely spoken about.
Parents often feel ashamed admitting it. They may worry it means something is broken, or that they’re ungrateful. Especially when they know, intellectually, that they love their family and value their life.
But love and connection are not the same thing.
Connection is sensitive to load. When life becomes demanding, when rest is scarce, when emotional labour accumulates, connection can thin. Not disappear, but recede. Parents may find themselves moving through routines efficiently, while feeling oddly flat or distant underneath.
This doesn’t mean love has gone. It means the system is stretched.
Disconnection often serves a protective function. It allows the nervous system to conserve energy when there’s too much to process. In this way, it’s less a failure of care and more a response to pressure.
The trouble arises when parents panic about the feeling. When they try to force closeness, or criticise themselves for not feeling enough. Pressure tends to deepen disconnection, not resolve it.
Connection returns through permission.
Permission to acknowledge what’s hard. Permission to rest emotionally, not just physically. Permission to let closeness ebb without assuming it’s lost.
Family relationships are not static. They move through phases of intensity, distance, repair, and return. Expecting constant closeness places unrealistic demands on already taxed systems.
When disconnection is named gently, without alarm, it often begins to shift. Small moments of presence become possible again. A conversation. A shared laugh. A quiet moment that lands more fully than expected.
Love doesn’t vanish when connection thins. It waits. And when conditions soften, it usually re-emerges in its own time.
