We have a special prompt today from Bianca Torres, a freelance photographer who also volunteers at a crisis hotline — and she sent us something that I think lands differently because of where she spends her evenings. She's on the phone with people in their worst moments, and she's noticed a pattern. The prompt is about the grief that comes from not having a family you can lean on. Not estrangement as a decision or a conflict, but the thing underneath all of that — the void. She says people who lack nurturing family relationships carry a lifelong wound, this absence of a backbone of support that most people take for granted. And the part that really stuck with her is something somebody once told her: that in helping people recover from these relationships, it's helpful for them to accept that no matter how much they build a new supportive network, they will always feel a grief for the lack of a supportive parental relationship. Her question is whether that's actually true — not just a nice sentiment, but grounded in something real. And if it is, why this particular grief feels so overwhelming and so different from other kinds of loss.
The word she's circling is primordial. She uses it in the prompt and she's right to. This isn't like a falling out with a friend or a colleague. It's a different category of wound.
What makes it different?
Start with the obvious thing. You don't choose your parents. Every other relationship in your life — friends, partners, mentors, colleagues — those are elective. You opt in. The parent-child bond is non-elective and it's the first one. It's the scaffolding everything else gets built on.
So when it's missing, it's not that one relationship among many didn't work out. It's that the foundation was never poured.
That's exactly the framing. And there's a paper that came out earlier this year in the Journal of Marriage and Family that looked at what they called redoing family — adults who were estranged from parents and trying to construct replacement networks. The researchers tracked about sixty people over several years. What they found was that people absolutely do build meaningful替代 support systems. Close friends who become functionally like siblings. Older mentors who fill something like a parental role. The networks are real and they provide genuine support.
But.
But the grief doesn't go away. It persists alongside the new connections. The paper describes it as a both-and experience — people hold gratitude for their chosen family and grief for their family of origin simultaneously. They don't cancel out.
Which means the nice sentiment version of this — go make your own family and you'll be fine — is only half true.
It's true about the building. It's false about the fine.
And Bianca's question is whether that grief is somehow hardwired. Whether there's something biological about it.
This is where I think the neuroscience actually gives us a real answer, not just a metaphor. Jaak Panksepp — he was the neuroscientist who mapped the emotional operating systems in the mammalian brain. He identified seven primary emotional systems, and one of them he called the PANIC system. It's the system that mediates separation distress. When a mammal infant is separated from its caregiver, the PANIC system fires. It produces that specific kind of distress vocalization — crying, in humans. The system is ancient. It predates cognition. It's not something you think your way into or out of.
So the grief Bianca is describing — the void — that's not a metaphor either. It's a real circuit.
It's a real circuit that evolved to keep infants close to caregivers because proximity meant survival. And here's the part that matters for this conversation. That circuit doesn't disappear when you grow up. It gets elaborated, it gets regulated by higher brain structures, but the core wiring is still there. Panksepp argued that adult emotional life is built on top of these same ancient systems. When an adult experiences social loss or rejection, the same PANIC circuitry activates.
Which would explain why the grief of an absent parent feels different from other griefs. It's not just psychological. It's hitting a system that was designed to scream when the caregiver is gone.
And designed to scream in a way that is not negotiable. You can't reason with the PANIC system. You can't tell it you've built a nice chosen family now. The circuit doesn't care about your adult coping strategies. It fires because the template says there should be a caregiver here and there isn't one.
That's grim.
It is grim. But it's also clarifying. Because one of the things that makes this grief so hard for people is that they feel like they should be over it. They're competent adults. They've built lives. They've done the work. And then some random Tuesday they see a parent helping their adult kid move furniture and they're flattened.
And the flattening feels like failure.
It feels like failure because the cultural script is that grief has an expiration date. But if what you're dealing with is a primary emotional circuit that never actually goes offline, then the flattening isn't failure. It's neurobiology doing what neurobiology does.
Let me push on something. You said the PANIC system is about separation from a caregiver. But Bianca's describing people who never had the caregiver in the first place. Not separation — absence.
That's a crucial distinction. The system evolved to respond to separation from an attachment figure who was present and then absent. What happens when the attachment figure was never reliably there? The system doesn't just go dormant. It stays in a kind of chronic low-level activation. Or it gets triggered by the wrong cues. Or both.
So it's not that you lost something. It's that the thing was never installed and the brain keeps looking for it anyway.
And the looking itself is painful. There's a whole literature on what happens when the attachment system can't complete its expected sequence. The child reaches for comfort, the parent doesn't respond, the child learns not to reach. But the reaching impulse doesn't disappear. It just goes underground.
Which brings us to the competence piece. Bianca mentions that people who've charted this path develop unusual self-reliance and become unusually competent. I think that's right. But I also think it's a trap.
Say more.
The competence is real. You learn to solve your own problems because nobody else is going to. You get good at it. People look at you and see someone who has it together. And then you have a moment where you actually need to fall apart — where competence isn't the answer — and there's nobody to fall apart with.
The door she describes. Show up at someone's door in a mess and just say my job is a disaster.
Right. And the tragedy is that the more competent you've become, the harder it is to even ask. Because you've built an identity around not needing anyone.
This is where the hotline work Bianca does is relevant in a way she might not have intended when she sent the prompt. She's the person on the other end of the phone when someone's competence has finally hit its limit. And what she's observing is that for a certain kind of caller, the crisis isn't just the immediate problem. The crisis is that there's nobody else to call.
The hotline becomes the door.
It becomes the door. And that's better than nothing. But it's not the same as having someone who knows you.
Let's go back to the neuroscience for a second. You said the PANIC system is one of seven primary emotional systems. What are the others?
Panksepp's seven are SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. They're capitalized because they're technical terms — they refer to specific neural circuits, not just everyday emotions.
And the CARE system — that's the other side of the attachment equation?
CARE is the parental nurturance system. It's what motivates a parent to respond to a distressed infant. PANIC and CARE are a matched pair. The infant's PANIC system evolved to activate the parent's CARE system.
So if you're a child whose PANIC system never successfully activated a CARE response...
Then you learned something profound about the world at a pre-verbal level. You learned that distress doesn't bring comfort. And that learning gets encoded in a way that talk therapy can only partially reach.
Which is why the grief feels bottomless. It's not a memory you can reprocess. It's a template.
It's a template that got laid down before you had words. Before you had a narrative. Before you had a self, in some sense.
So when Bianca asks whether it's true that people will always feel this void — the neuroscience suggests yes, in the sense that the circuit doesn't get deleted. But I don't think that means people are doomed to suffer at the same intensity forever.
No, and that's the important nuance. The circuit doesn't go away, but the relationship to it can change. The grief can shift from something that hijacks you to something you recognize and accommodate. You know it's going to show up at holidays. You know it's going to show up when you see a functional family dynamic. You stop being surprised by it.
The grief becomes familiar rather than shocking.
And that's not nothing. Familiar grief is still grief, but it's not the same as being ambushed by it.
I want to go back to something Bianca said about this being primordial. Almost biological, she wrote. And I think the neuroscience says it's not almost biological. It is biological. But there's also a social dimension that makes it harder.
What do you mean?
The world is not built for people without family support. Every major institution assumes you have someone. Emergency contacts. Next of kin. The person who picks you up after surgery. The co-signer. The person you list when the form says who should we call.
The assumption is baked into everything. And every time you encounter it, it's a small reminder that you're missing something everyone else seems to have.
And if you're competent — if you've built the self-reliant exterior — people don't even think to offer. They assume you're fine. You've signaled that you don't need help, so you don't get offered help, and then you're alone with the thing you actually do need help with.
The competence trap again.
It's a vicious cycle. You get good at handling things alone, which makes people less likely to check on you, which means you handle more things alone, which makes you better at it, and so on. Until you're the person everyone else leans on and nobody thinks to lean toward you.
And leaning toward you is what the PANIC system is screaming for. Not problem-solving. Just presence.
The shoulder to cry on. Not the shoulder that says here's a five-point plan for your crying.
Right. And that's actually something that comes up in the hotline training literature. The most effective crisis line responders don't try to fix things. They sit with the distress. They validate it. They let the person be not okay without rushing them toward okay.
Which is what a good parent does. The CARE system response isn't solve the problem. It's be there while the problem exists.
The presence itself is the intervention.
So when Bianca's callers are on the phone describing a void that nobody else in their life can fill, and she's listening and not fixing — she's actually providing the thing that was missing. In a limited, professional, time-boxed way. But the mechanism is the same.
The mechanism is the same. And I think that's why the hotline exists, fundamentally. It's a substitute CARE response for people whose PANIC system is firing and has nowhere to land.
But she's asking whether the void is permanent. And I think the answer is yes, with an asterisk. The asterisk being that permanent doesn't mean debilitating.
Grief for a missing parent is not like grief for a dead parent, where there's a person you can remember and mourn. With the missing parent, there's no person to mourn. You're mourning an absence. A negative space.
Mourning a negative space is harder because there's nothing to hold onto. No memories to revisit. No stories to tell. Just the outline of where something should have been.
And that outline shows up in the strangest places. Someone offers you a cup of tea when you're sick and you realize nobody in your family ever did that. A coworker's parent calls just to chat and you feel this jolt of something you can't name.
The jolt is the PANIC system noticing the CARE signal and recognizing it as foreign.
Which is disorienting. Because the signal itself is pleasant — someone caring for you — but the recognition that it's unfamiliar is painful.
It's pain wrapped in warmth.
And that's a very hard thing to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. Which is another layer of the isolation. You can't even describe the wound without sounding dramatic.
Bianca's prompt doesn't sound dramatic though. It sounds precise. She's asking whether the grief is real and whether it's permanent, and she's doing it from a place of wanting to be accurate, not from a place of wanting to be comforted.
That's the hotline training talking. You learn to ask clear questions about hard things.
Let's talk about what actually helps. Not in a self-help way. But if the neuroscience says the circuit doesn't go away, what do people actually do with that?
The first thing is naming it correctly. Calling it grief rather than weakness or failure or not being over it. Grief is the right word. It's a loss. It's just a loss of something that never existed, which is a harder loss to explain but not a less real one.
The second thing?
The second thing is recognizing that the grief will show up on a schedule you don't control. It's not a project with a timeline. It's more like a chronic condition that flares.
So you stop being surprised by the flares.
And you stop interpreting the flares as evidence that you haven't healed. The flare is not a setback. The flare is just the condition.
What else?
The third thing — and this is where the chosen family piece actually matters — is building relationships where you can be incompetent. Where you can show up at the door in a mess. And the key is that you have to practice doing it before the crisis. You can't wait until you're drowning to find out whether someone will throw you a rope.
That's hard for the self-reliant.
It's excruciating. But it's the thing that makes the difference between having a network and having a network you actually use.
And the fourth thing?
The fourth thing is accepting that the chosen family will never fully replace the family of origin. Not because the chosen family is insufficient, but because the template is specific. The PANIC system was calibrated for particular people at a particular developmental window. New people can be wonderful and meaningful and life-saving and still not fill that exact hole.
Which is the both-and from the paper you mentioned.
Both-and. Gratitude and grief. They coexist.
I think there's a fifth thing too. And it's about what you do with the competence itself.
Go on.
The competence is real. It's not fake. People who grew up without a safety net can do things that other people can't. They can handle crises that would flatten someone else. They can navigate systems. They can self-soothe. Those are real skills. The trap is when the competence becomes a cage — when you can't put it down even when you're safe.
Because putting it down feels like vulnerability and vulnerability was punished.
Or simply not responded to. Which is its own kind of punishment. So the fifth thing is learning to put the competence down. But with someone.
And that's terrifying.
It's terrifying. Because the last time you were vulnerable and needed something, the answer was silence.
The silence is the wound. Not the conflict, not the rejection — the silence. The parent who was there physically but not emotionally. The parent who provided materially but not relationally. The parent who simply didn't notice.
And the silence teaches you that your needs don't matter. Which is a lesson that takes decades to unlearn.
If it ever fully unlearns. I'm not sure it does.
I'm not sure either.
But I think — and this is where I land with Bianca's question — the goal isn't to make the grief disappear. The goal is to make it manageable enough that it doesn't prevent you from receiving care from the people who are actually present.
The grief stays. The isolation doesn't have to.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
It's not nothing.
It's not nothing. It's the difference between suffering alone and suffering with someone who knows you're suffering.
Hilbert: The PANIC system isn't a circuit. It's a network.
What?
Hilbert: Panksepp called it a system, but the anatomy is distributed. Periaqueductal gray, anterior cingulate, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, a bunch of others. It's not one wire. It's a whole switchboard. I only mention it because people hear circuit and think they can cut it.
That's... actually important. It's not a single pathway you can disconnect. It's woven through everything.
Hilbert: Woven is right. I spent six months in eighty-four working in a lab that was doing lesion studies on separation calls in guinea pigs. You knock out one node and the calling changes but it doesn't stop. The system routes around damage. Evolution doesn't let the thing that keeps infants near mothers run on a single point of failure.
So the persistence Bianca's describing — the grief that won't quit — that's not a design flaw.
Hilbert: It's redundancy. The thing is built to survive you.
What lab was this?
Hilbert: Bowling Green. Guy named Tom was running it. We had about forty guinea pigs at any given time. The mothers and pups would do this call-and-response thing and we'd record the spectrograms. After a while you could tell which pup was calling just by looking at the pattern on the screen. They all had a signature.
And when you separated them?
Hilbert: The calls changed. They'd start with the normal contact call and if the mother didn't answer they'd escalate. Higher pitch, longer duration, more frequency modulation. By about minute four it wasn't a contact call anymore. It was a distress call. And the thing that got me — the thing I still think about — is that if you played a recording of the mother's response call, the pup would quiet down for about thirty seconds and then start up again worse than before. The recording wasn't enough. It had to be her.
The specific caregiver.
Hilbert: The specific one. The pup knew the difference.
So the circuit is specific to the individual and it can't be fooled by a recording.
Hilbert: Can't be fooled by a recording, can't be fooled by another lactating female, can't be fooled by anything except the actual mother. We tried all of it. The only thing that worked was reuniting them.
What happened to the pups that never got reunited?
Hilbert: They stopped calling eventually. Not because they were fine. Because the system downregulated. The distress was still there — you could see it in the cortisol — but the vocalization stopped. They went quiet.
They learned that calling didn't work.
Hilbert: That's what it looked like. And the ones that had been separated longest, when you did put them back with the mother, they didn't resume normal behavior right away. They'd be hesitant. Standoffish. Took days sometimes.
The template had been rewritten.
Hilbert: Something like that. Tom used to say the quiet ones were the ones he worried about. The ones still calling, you knew what they needed. The quiet ones, you didn't know if they'd ever ask again.
That's the competence trap in guinea pigs.
Hilbert: I wouldn't have put it that way. But yes.
Hilbert, what you're describing — the recording not working, the need for the specific caregiver, the quiet that isn't actually calm — that maps directly onto what Bianca's seeing in her callers. The void isn't just a feeling. It's a specific absence of a specific person.
Hilbert: The person who was supposed to answer.
And if that person never answered, the system doesn't just move on. It goes quiet. But the quiet isn't healing. It's adaptation to deprivation.
Hilbert: I had a guinea pig once — number twenty-three, I still remember — that never called. Born in the lab, mother rejected it at birth, we hand-raised it. Healthy animal. Ate fine, slept fine, normal weight. But it never made a sound. Not when we separated it, not when we put it back, not when we introduced new animals. Just silent. Tom said some of them are like that.
What happened to it?
Hilbert: Lived a normal lifespan. Had pups of its own eventually. Was an attentive mother, actually. But it never vocalized. Never.
The system was there. It just never learned to use it.
Hilbert: Or learned not to. I don't know which.
I think that's the question Bianca is really asking. Whether the silence is permanent. And what you're telling us is that in guinea pigs, at least, it can be.
Hilbert: I'm not saying it's the same in people. It's not the same. But the architecture is conserved. The separation distress system goes back hundreds of millions of years. Mammals share it. Birds share something like it. It's not a human invention and it doesn't obey human preferences about how grief should work.
Which means the cultural expectation that you should get over it is fighting against something much older than culture.
Hilbert: You're not going to win a fight with a system that evolved to keep infants from being eaten. It doesn't care about your timeline.
So where does that leave the person who's built the chosen family, done the work, and still feels the void?
Hilbert: In the same place as guinea pig twenty-three. You live your life. You do the things. You might even be good at them. But you don't make the call.
And the call — the reaching out, the showing up at the door — that's the thing that stays hard.
Hilbert: The call is the thing.
Can you learn to make it? Even if the original template says not to?
Hilbert: I don't know. I was a lab tech in nineteen eighty-four. I'm not a clinician.
I think you can. I think people do. But it's not a one-time decision. It's a thousand small decisions to reach out despite the template saying reaching out is pointless. And it's exhausting in a way that people with intact templates don't understand.
Because they don't have to override anything. The reaching just happens.
The reaching just happens. For them it's automatic. For Bianca's callers it's a deliberate act against every piece of wiring that says stay quiet.
That's the thing I want to sit with. The effort. The sheer effort of doing something that for other people is as natural as breathing.
And doing it while also being the competent one. While also holding down the job and paying the bills and being the person everyone else leans on.
It's two full-time jobs. One of them invisible.
Completely invisible. Nobody sees the override work. They just see the person who seems fine.
Bianca sees it though. She's on the phone at two in the morning with the person who's exhausted from overriding.
She is the person they call when the override fails.
And her question is whether the void ever closes. I think the answer from the neuroscience and from Hilbert's guinea pigs and from the research is that it doesn't close. But it can become something you live alongside rather than something that defines you.
The both-and. Grief and gratitude. Void and connection. Silence and the slow, deliberate choice to make the call anyway.
It's not a happy ending. But it's an honest one. And I think that's what Bianca was looking for. Accuracy.
The grief is real. It's wired in. It doesn't go away. And you can still build a life worth living. Those things are all true at the same time.
Thanks to Bianca Torres for sending in this prompt. It's one of those questions where the answer turns out to be both harder and more useful than the platitudes.
And thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for the guinea pigs. I'm going to be thinking about number twenty-three for a while.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us a question like Bianca did, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
