From the author: This article is devoted to the problem of emotional emptiness, the reasons for its occurrence and the characteristics of its manifestation in interpersonal relationships. What to do if you don’t feel empathy for other people? And what should you do if your partner rejects your emotions? Inside the glacier. Does an emotionally cold partner experience emotions? Yes! But the main emotional states are when the distance decreases and a significant person approaches: fear, anxiety, feeling of danger. Anger towards another is a factor in protecting one’s own boundaries. At the same time, boundaries seem to be constantly violated, as there is a fear of intimacy. An emotionally cold partner does not want to reveal to anyone, including himself, his true, emotional self. When communicating, there is no feeling of empathy, compassion, sympathy. In view of this, in interpersonal relationships, the partner often seems icy, the amplitude of emotional relationships swings, and one’s own feelings are displaced onto the other. A partner in a relationship has a constant desire to melt the “cold iceberg”, and “inside the glacier” there is a feeling of devastation, heaviness, misunderstanding, and emotional emptiness. Also, inside the glacier there can be a frozen feeling of shame, a deep feeling of love in relationships with other people, cold in manifestations affection, tenderness. For some “glaciers,” emotional frozenness becomes the cause of sexual frozenness. In interpersonal relationships, they are capable of feelings of love and passion. The level of the tip of the iceberg depends on how much a person has suppressed the emotional component in himself. Signs of emotional frozenness are: criticism of oneself, others, hiding personal information, flattery. These are forms of defense mechanisms against emotions. The reverse form of the defense mechanism can be excessive demonstrativeness, pretense, “gushing” with emotions - however, when we get closer, we discover emotional emptiness. Where does the desire to avoid meeting the emotional self come from? As I indicated earlier, there are two fears at the core: fear of intimacy, and the fear of meeting yourself. Fear of closeness and intimacy is acquired in the experience of parental relationships. Parents who are so hasty in their desire to have children, and have not learned to communicate with each other, take their problems out on the child. Parental figures are supposed to be the objects of teaching love, but to a greater extent they are unable to establish a trusting relationship with the child. If in childhood no one taught a child affection, much less violated basic trust in the world, then an emotionally cold person grows up. The best examples of deviations in parental upbringing are illustrated in the book of psychoanalyst Leneke K. using the example of men “Symbiotic mother-son relationships...”, I give an excerpt from it, but in the book itself, you can also read specific examples from life of how parental upbringing affects on the lives of their children."Most men were subject to narcissistic attention or love from vulnerable mothers to whom they became overattached. Being prisoners of their unhappy mothers, they felt hopelessly guilty if they tried to separate themselves. They were not perceived as autonomous individuals, but They were an extension of the mother’s own personality and a kind of mediator for her to express her own trauma. Such sons were forced to fill the inner emptiness of their parents, and were often used as allies in the battle with their father. They were alternately mommy’s princes, and then the same scoundrels as their dads. Inconsistent messages containing a “double bind” forced them to doubt whether they were good children or bad, loved or not. Their fathers were physically or emotionally absent during crucial periods of their lives. The subjects partly considered their fathers to be weak and helpless. The mother reinforced this impression by involving her son in her own marital problems. Fathers were often not just incompetent, but threatening"