Why Am I Still So Mean to Myself?

You’ve read the books. You follow @BigFeelingsCoach.

You validate your kid’s frustration when they pour applesauce into the radiator. You whisper, “It’s okay to have big emotions,” while trying not to scream into your cardigan.

You are, in short, the embodiment of Gentle Parenting™.

And yet—at night, when the noise stops—you realize something awkward:
your inner child is healing... but your inner parent sounds suspiciously like a grumpy Victorian schoolmaster.

You might be practicing emotional regulation with your toddler, but internally?

You’re running a shame-based boarding school with no recess.

Imagine a couple sitting in their newly refinanced kitchen, sipping $7 matcha lattes from ergonomic mugs shaped like lowercase letters.

They can’t stop talking about money. Correction: they can’t stop not talking about money.

Every conversation is a performance review. Every silence, a spreadsheet.

Welcome to the world of “money focus”—a psychological script in which the Almighty Dollar becomes a third party in the marriage bed, elbowing out intimacy in favor of itemized deductions.

A new study out of Brigham Young University (LeBaron-Black et al., 2024) confirms what many therapists have suspected since the dawn of two-income households and TurboTax:

when couples obsess over money, their relationship satisfaction tanks.

Not because they’re broke, but because they’ve confused net worth with relational value.

There he was, every time—front row, clapping louder than anyone, camcorder in hand. He never missed a recital. Never forgot your birthday. He probably printed the soccer schedule and laminated it. But you never actually felt him.

Welcome to the meme: “Emotionally Unavailable, But Present at Every Recital.”

It’s not a dig at bad dads or cold moms.

It’s a Gen Z therapy meme, yes, but also a blisteringly accurate snapshot of a very American brand of emotional absence: the high-functioning, schedule-keeping, achievement-focused ghost parent.

This isn’t neglect with bruises. This is subtle neglect in beige khakis. And it’s not just a meme—it’s a research-backed social epidemic.

Welcome to the golden age of emotional regulation — where every mom on TikTok knows what a "rupture and repair" is, and every kid has a Ph.D. in "vibes."

But beneath the glowy reels of whisper-voiced bedtime scripts lies a new kind of childhood trauma: being raised by someone who never yelled, but also never really felt.

This is the meme: "My mom didn’t scream. She just clenched her jaw and softly narrated the consequences like HAL 9000."

It started as a miracle.

The idea that we could raise children without yelling, without threats, without rupturing their souls every Tuesday morning in the minivan.

Emotion coaching, as popularized by John Gottman and others (Gottman et al., 1997), told us: name it to tame it. Validate their feelings. Co-regulate. Show up with curiosity.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

If the early 2000s gave us the phrase "he's just not that into you," the 2020s have blessed us with its gender-neutral, psychoanalytic cousin: "he's love bombing you."

It started with good intentions.

Survivors of emotional abuse needed a term to describe the overwhelming attention used to manipulate and destabilize.

But like most useful psychological metaphors, it became a meme.

Now, any bouquet of flowers before date #4 is suspect. And God forbid someone listens to your Spotify playlist and remembers your cat's name.

Let’s begin where all modern love stories do: somewhere between a clinical manual and a TikTok comment thread. “Trauma bond” used to be a serious term.

It was born in the work of Patrick Carnes (1997), who studied the deep psychological tethers between victims and abusers—often in cycles of intermittent reinforcement, power imbalance, and dependency so intense it overrides logic.

Now? It’s shorthand for, "I dated a guy who texted me three times in a row and then didn’t answer my meme." We’ve gone from psychological rigor to pop-psych poetry.

But here’s the messy truth: most of what people are calling trauma bonding is actually some variation of Anxious Attachment, and the confusion is doing damage.

There was a time, not so long ago, when relationships moved from mystery to definition with the slow gravity of handwritten notes and long walks.

Today, your relationship status may be decided by a tagged Instagram post and how many mutuals watch your stories.

Welcome to the era of hard launching the situationship—a public performance of a private ambiguity.

What Is Hard Launching a Situationship?

Let’s start with the radical idea that’s somehow both ancient and futuristic: making babies with someone you’re not in love with.

Not a one-night stand. Not a nuclear family remix.

Just two (or more) consenting adults choosing to co-parent—on purpose—without the performance of romance.

Call it what you want: Platonic Parenting, Intentional Co-Parenting, or The Last Viable Family System Capitalism Hasn’t Monetized (Yet).

In the beginning, there was chaos. And Ritalin said, "Let there be focus," and lo, the child sat still. And there was much rejoicing. For a week.

Let us begin with the grand American tradition of solving complex socio-environmental problems with prescription drugs.

Enter your typical 1990s research psychologist, James Swanson.

A decent man in a lab coat, probably wore corduroy blazers, believed in graphs. He thought 3% of kids had A.D.H.D. and that Ritalin helped.

Not cured. Helped. That was the dream.

Then he blinked, and it was 11%. Now it's 15.5% of adolescents, 23% of 17-year-old boys, and somewhere, a pharma executive is buying his fourth house in Aspen.

If you’ve ever felt like your paycheck isn’t making you any happier—but a minor refund from the IRS did—you’re not alone.

You're just living in the surreal Venn diagram between objective income and subjective financial satisfaction, where emotional well-being is less about the number on your W-2 and more about how you feel about your wallet when you wake up.

A major new study published in the journal Emotion (Hudiyana et al., 2024) found that financial satisfaction—that internal thumbs-up you give your money situation—is a strong predictor of your current happiness.

But income—the actual dollars in your life—is better at predicting how your happiness will shift over time.

So: your feelings matter now. Your money matters later.

And yes, in case you're wondering: it’s more complicated than that.

This just in: marriage might give you dementia.

Also, coffee causes heart disease (until it doesn’t), and walking your dog may reduce your risk of premature death—assuming the dog is not too stressful.

The latest viral headline comes from a study out of Florida State University, which claims that unmarried people—especially the divorced and never-married—may have a lower risk of developing dementia than their married peers.

The story quickly became catnip for algorithmic news cycles and commitment-wary Redditors. After all, nothing sells like the slow erosion of one of civilization’s most resilient social structures.

But what the study actually shows is far more complicated—and, paradoxically, far more validating of why marriage still matters, even if its benefits are misunderstood.