For the two weeks that we were on vacation, my friend Parnika and I had an exhausting nighttime routine. Right before we went to sleep, I would turn to her with a pout and declare, “He hates me.” Sitting up with a sigh, she would list all the logical reasons why the man I liked did not, in fact, hate me.
For one, he had just called me a few hours ago, and we’d been all day. Some days, he’d informed me he would be busy with work; on other nights, he’d fallen asleep early. Even if, three hours ago, he had told me he liked me, I would find myself convinced his feelings had since changed.
Surely he loathed me by now; maybe he’d realised I was annoyingly clingy or found out I was secretly a terrible person. No matter how irrational my thoughts were, I was convinced they were true. Unbeknownst to me, there was a term for the insecurity I was feeling.
Emotional impermanence, as a told me a few days later, is when “you don’t believe that the feelings of others still exist when you’re not with them or talking to them. You don’t trust that people still care for you even when they’re not around or actively giving you affection.” The words made me gasp.
Only recently, I’d realised that I struggled with the idea that people missed me: every time someone said they did, I’d find myself confused, thinking, “Surely not?”. In my mind, my loved ones only thought about me if I was with them, despite the fact that I found myself missing them frequently. In all my relationships, I was anxiously attached, repeatedly needing reassurance from other people.
My friends were used to receiving texts asking, at least once every couple of days, and even the slightest change in tone (no fullstops in messages please!) would make me go cold. Yet, I never thought this was because I doubted the permanence of others’ feelings. Instead, I reasoned that my insecurities reflected on my own self: maybe wasn’t loveable, interesting or cool enough.
Like (the awareness that an object exists even when you cannot see it), emotional permanence develops during childhood. However, in instances of neglect, volatile home environments and abuse, the concept fails to be established. Therapist Deepika Bhandari explains that one of the major contributors to emotional impermanence is unstable emotional signals received during the formative years, especially from primary caregivers.
“As children, we don’t have the tools to deal with our emotions due to underdeveloped nervous systems. We rely greatly on our environment to receive this stability,” she elaborates. “When there is emotional ambiguity in our childhood experiences, we start believing that emotions are unreliable.
” People with emotional impermanence, she adds, may battle , leading them to seek reassurance and struggle to trust themselves as well as others. Think: your friend who dismissively brushes off any compliments or the paranoid girlfriend who is perpetually worried about being cheated on. Aged 14 and in love for the first time, I remember the way my stomach would drop every time the girl I loved suddenly decided to be cold towards me.
As hormonal teenagers trying to figure out our sexualities, we were volatile, to say the least. She was often hot and cold, her sudden indifference towards me incited by nothing in particular. In response, I became clingier and more panicked.
After one such instance, wiping tears in the passenger seat as my father drove, he turned to me and said, “Remember one thing: you can never control how someone else feels.” The statement was meant to be reassuring but it had the opposite effect. As someone who liked controlling every possible scenario, I felt infuriatingly helpless when I realised that no matter how hard I tried, I could never This frightening loss of control remained at the back of my mind every time I made a new friend or developed a crush on someone.
had me in their grip. When, after an argument, one of my closest friends blocked me on every platform or a man I liked hooked up with every other girl in the city while not texting me back, this anxiety was reinforced. “Of course, if you don’t trust, the person in front of you will react to that because your nervous systems are always interacting,” says Akanksha Chandele, holistic trauma therapist.
“If I’m talking to you and I’m coming from a place of uncertainty about how you feel, you will consciously or subconsciously pick up on that uncertainty and respond accordingly.” Emotional impermanence can manifest in different parts of one’s life, from romantic relationships and to generally not trusting people’s words. It makes building healthy, long-term relationships much more difficult.
“Therapy definitely helps make sense of it and understand the connection between the present and past trauma,” Chandele states, adding that a support structure is just as necessary, “Tell the people you trust this is a vulnerable area where you may need reassurance regularly. These kinds of trauma don’t fully heal; we just learn to support ourselves better.” Recently, a year after not speaking to my best friend from school, I missed her enough to pick up the and dial her number.
I was convinced she hated me but to my surprise, she had missed me just as much. My lack of trust, I found, had done a disservice to someone who loved me. It may be my own low self-esteem that makes me think I’m unlovable, but it is still other people’s feelings that I question.
By projecting my own insecurities onto them, I paint them in an unfavourable light and presume they are capricious. When I assume their emotions are fleeting, they feel the pressure to prove their love for me again and again, despite already having been there for me through thick and thin. Years of maintaining several close friendships has reduced my anxiety around my abandonment issues.
I can go months without talking to my friends and know things will still be the same. Even when I like someone , I remind myself it’s not healthy (or very nice) to assume the worst of them every time they don’t text me back. I’ve found that even if I can’t control others’ emotions, as my father warned, I can control my own.
That, in itself, is a huge deal. Yes, feelings change: one more nighttime anxiety attack later, Parnika may decide she hates everything about me. But hopefully, I’ll be able to deal with it just like I dealt with my friend blocking me or a man I liked not liking me back.
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