Protecting a lost child

We interrupt your regularly scheduled snark for another edition of Deep Thoughts by Reporter-Cub.

I will try to be short with this.

It is not my place to psychoanalyze anyone. After all, I do not have a Ph.D. in psychology, nor do I hold an M.D. so that I can be a psychopharmaceutical dispensary (which I am glad that other people are).

However, I can't help but feel this urge -- once I get over any shyness or reluctance to know a person better -- to try to know them better. To explore not just their likes, hates, loves, phobias and etc., but what is at the essential core that makes them tick. (I am probably scaring the shit out of my friends right now. Sorry, but I am, as Santi White says, an 'introverted excavator.') Perhaps it comes from training where I had to feel people out, and crush the naive belief that everyone is open, honest, trustworthy and transparent.

There are those whom I can't read easily. Who don't like to be asked honest, searching questions. Others happily tell me and discuss things with me in confidence that I dare not repeat to anyone else.

At the end of it all, I've found that at the cores of everyone I've met, we are all children. Some may be more childlike than others; others have become wiser and more thoughtful. But at the core, we are children of different stripes. We just speak differently, and change our behaviors to hide this.

There are those who are the leaders on the playground; those who are able to bring teams of people together.

There are those who bully others on the playground to hide weaknesses of their own. They continue to bully as grown-ups.

There are those who are rambunctious and rebellious, and never stop being this way, although the manifestation changes.

There are those who are cast aside and left lonely for whatever differences or quirks they have.

There are those who are abandoned or abused, and naturally raise their defenses to protect themselves.

There probably are those who have already thought of these archetypes and have made lots of money and built reputations upon this. Good for them. I have not studied psychoanalysis or psychology enough to know whom to give credit. I might have read all of this somewhere, who knows. I take no credit for anything profound. I know that this is nothing new, and that there is nothing new under the sun.

I just wanted to write, that's all, after experiencing deep emotional reactions recently. I am but a sponge.

I have had the experience of meeting the last man-child in the above list. A very sweet person at his core, but deeply troubled. Very much akin to a lost little boy, crying out to be found. A person trying to find a path forward, after years of misdirection of different types. All I can do for someone who's going through so much, and has experienced so much emotional abuse from elders, is simply to hold him while he weeps and pray to God that he doesn't self-destruct. There's some kind of parental, protective instinct that gets activated when you connect and empathize with others.

I don't know how to make someone love him/herself when I have had that same problem myself.

This is why I can never be a shrink, nor a nurse or doctor, or someone who works with abused or neglected children. Or even a journalist again. I connect too well to ever build emotional distance between me and the subject -- a necessary shield to survive in those fields.

OK, I'm done.

---We now return to your regularly scheduled snark.---