As children, we need explanations from our parents. This is how we make sense of the world. Parents need to have built up a lot of patience before becoming parents, by doing self-knowledge and philosophy properly. They use this patience in the service of articulating the nuts and bolts of the world to us.
If our parents are apathetic about our inner lives or even resistant, finding our curiosity and confusion intolerable, they will train us to reject nuance, depth, and complexity. This is an extremely painful experience for the child, as it is a rejection of the true self.
People such as this grow up with all kinds of social maladaptions, including coming up with their own explanations for things and running with theories instead of verifying how they know their knowledge. This is particularly harmful for relationships. It will result in “mind reading”, socially. This means the person will wrongly or rightly divine whatever motivations or thoughts in another person, run with these as their assumptions, and fly right off a cliff into conflict, gossip, and disconnection.
The way to heal from parents who were apathetic or actively in denial of your curiosity as a child is to indict your parents morally, internally, and to take an active, dedicated interest in your inner life over a period of years until the improvement is established. You will have to do this despite the various defenses your parents transmitted to you that you will now manifest unconsciously as an adult.
As adults, we are not OWED an explanation. Other adults don’t owe us their motives, inner thoughts, the “inside ball” in politics or business, or any sort of curiosity. The easiest way to not have to indict one’s own parents is to develop a political personality where others will reveal their motives, inner thoughts, inside ball, and curiosity to us because we have leverage and power. This is a consumptive process. The better way is to retrain the emotions to a philosophical condition, as much as possible. This will yield a personality where sensitive, kind, and gentle people will yield to us their motives, inner thoughts, inside ball, and curiosity as a kind of voluntary exchange in the service of the next generation.
