Lydia wore white in September. Even when the grass went bristly and gold, even when the neighbors put away their deck furniture like creatures bracing for winter, she wore white linen trousers and a blouse that tied in a girlish bow at the neck. She greeted her son, Henry, with a kiss that did not quite land.

"My beautiful boy," she said, though he was nearly fifty and had stopped feeling beautiful decades ago.

Inside, the house smelled like dust, potpourri, and the leftover traces of a better era. The piano still had its crooked goose painting. The dog bowl—Maxwell, gone now ten years—still sat by the back door.

She poured two glasses of wine. Noon. "Tell me everything," she said, reclining like a woman expecting a portrait, not a visit.

"I called you last week," Henry said gently. "I told you about Elise’s promotion."

"Oh yes, that. Something with people. Or was it dogs? I lose track."

He smiled, the tired smile of sons who’ve already buried parts of themselves.

Her name — well, not her name, not the one they gave her at the thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraiser where they snickered sotto voce about her trust fund like a debutante beheading — but the name she used in the small circles of the self-aware and socially anxious — was Fiona.

Fiona had red hair like a warning sign. Like an old God’s middle finger. It flamed around her face like a Roman candle going off in slow motion.

She painted large, frightening canvases.

Wrote poems so intimate you felt indecent reading them.

And she had money. Enough to never work. Enough to flee any room the moment someone looked too long. Or smiled too hard. Or asked her, gently, “What do you do?”

And that was the rub. Fiona didn’t want to be looked at.

She wanted to be seen — but appropriately.

With the right kind of respect, the kind you reserve for tragic statues or rare birds or the last cigarette in the pack. And if you couldn’t manage that? She’d rather disappear. Into the garden. Into the bathtub. Into a painter’s smock so large it could qualify as an anti-espionage device.

People with ADHD face a different, but equally potent, variation of this. Many experience rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD) — a term popularized by Dr. William Dodson to describe the exquisitely painful emotional reaction to perceived criticism or social judgment.

It’s not an official DSM diagnosis, but it shows up in clinics, relationships, and therapy rooms every day.

Where the spotlight effect makes a neurotypical person slightly self-conscious, RSD says: Everyone saw me mess up, they now hate me, and I can never show my face again. In essence, it's the spotlight effect with gasoline poured on it.

And this becomes even more complex when you factor in emotional dysregulation, a common trait in both ADHD and autism. The fear of being seen making a mistake — or worse, being too much — can lead to avoidance, masking, people-pleasing, and burnout. These aren’t quirks. These are survival strategies.

If the mere idea of someone looking at you — really looking at you — makes your stomach flip, your throat tighten, and your sense of self fragment into a thousand regrettable sixth-grade memories, congratulations.

You might be experiencing scopophobia: the intense, often irrational fear of being watched.

But wait — isn’t that just social anxiety?

Or maybe the spotlight effect? Or just being mildly neurotic in a surveillance-saturated society?

Yes. And no. And it's complicated.

Let’s walk through it. Carefully. While avoiding eye contact.

First, What Is Scopophobia?

Welcome to the Trauma-Informed Beige Parade.

There’s a very specific kind of millennial kitchen. You know the one: fiddle-leaf fig by the window, wooden toys in a rainbow gradient, a gentle parenting book open next to the sourdough starter.

A magnetic chore chart with “co-regulate” scribbled in dry-erase marker.

Everyone has a Yeti cup. Everything is beige.

This, my friend, is not just a household—it’s a trauma-informed aesthetic event. It’s the vibe of healing. The performance of peace. The curated calm that says: “We don’t scream here. We sigh.”

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.