A Surprising Emotion People With Childhood Emotional Neglect Often Feel
Children have physical needs that can include food, water, shelter, clothing, and more. For many children, when parents can not meet those needs, the effects are typically evident to them. For children who experience childhood emotional neglect, their parent(s) lack of emotional support is often more difficult for them to identify.
Survivors of childhood emotional neglect often endorse harsh criticism around how they view themselves. When children do not receive consistent attunement and validation from their parents, it can impact how they view themselves. The result in adulthood can look like crippling self-doubt, low self-esteem, and imposter syndrome.
Struggling to communicate feelings and emotions is a common symptom of childhood emotional neglect. If you felt as if your feelings and emotions were invalid in childhood, you likely thought you had to learn to bury them. Not only is it often hard to express emotions, but it can be equally challenging for survivors even to identify what their exact feelings are.
This can have an impact on friendships and romantic relationships. If you struggle with opening up and being vulnerable, it can feel like the relationship is one-sided, shallow, and emotionally exhausting.
Rejection sensitivity can be a common symptom adults of childhood emotional neglect experience. Rejection is difficult for many to experience, but it can feel especially triggering for an emotional neglect survivor. Rejection can feel like abandonment, which can be painful for those rejected by their caregiver(s).
For example, you might struggle to ask for a raise or promotion at work or maybe freeze up when you need to set a boundary with someone. It can be challenging for survivors of emotional neglect to feel deserving of what they need and advocate for themselves.
If any of the listed symptoms resonate, it could be worth working with mental health professionals to safely unpack the trauma, recover, and thrive. With self-compassion, you can give yourself the empathy and support you did not receive as a child and overcome childhood emotional neglect.
Since the picture of emotionally neglectful parents can be so mixed and confusing, it can be difficult to see the traits in your own parents. To help, I am sharing an excerpt from my book, Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships.
So you blame yourself for what is not right in your adult life. You feel guilty for the seemingly irrational anger that you sometimes have at your well-meaning parents. You also struggle with a lack of emotion skills, unless you have taught them to yourself.
Struggling parents emotionally neglect their child because they are so taken up with coping that there is little time, attention, or energy left over to notice what their child is feeling or struggling with. Whether bereaved, hurting, depressed, or ill, these parents would likely parent much more attentively if only they had the bandwidth to do so.
This category stands out from the others for two important reasons. First, self-involved parents are not necessarily motivated by what is best for their child. They are, instead, motivated to gain something for themselves. The second is that many parents in this category can be quite harsh in ways that do damage to the child on top of the emotional neglect.
As Psychologists and relationship Counsellors, we see many individuals, couples and families who suffer the consequences of emotional neglect. Good people of all ages with a void in their lives, longing for this invisible emotional attention.
The symptoms of emotional neglect are generally unrecognized until they begin to appear in young adulthood. Adults exposed to emotional neglect as children often have problems but remain oblivious as to their origins. They tend to struggle to with knowing who they are, what they expect of themselves and what others expect of them. For example, a classical pianist may be technically brilliant, but somehow his music fails to move others. And a high achieving CEO, expert in his field and superior intellectually (IQ) scores low on emotional intelligence (EQ).
Suppressing emotions or being disconnected from emotions has physical consequences that many do not know about. It increases stress on our bodies and increases chances of heart disease and diabetes. It affects our immune system exposing us more to illness, stiff joints and bone weakness. Recent research also shows a strong connection between avoiding emotions or being shut off from emotions and poor memory. People who regularly suppress their emotions may find it challenging when communicating with others. Thomas, mentioned earlier, may grow up having difficulty in picking up social cues, verbal and non-verbal in daily conversations, exposing him to feeling left out or misunderstandings in social settings.
Couples often attend Couples Counselling wanting to improve on their communication skills. Their frustrations have a similar theme: they simply cannot resolve differences or conflicts which tend to resurface again and again. This is largely due to partners missing emotional cues and failing to notice, attend and respond in a timely manner. Additionally, when one or both partners engage in regular emotion avoidance they simply end up in intellectual arguments focusing on the facts rather than the more vulnerable emotions evoked.
Adults who have experienced childhood emotional neglect tend to demonstrate consistent patterns of withdrawal from the stress and conflict of daily living, whether within a relationship or outside of one. They reach for escapes into addictions (including overworking, numbing behaviours like excess drinking/overeating/over exercising, or excess time spent in front of screens) and seek out other solitary activities to withdraw into. They may also tend to under achieve, stay in jobs they dislike but frozen unable to see ethier way through change. The people who are in relationships with them (their spouse, children, or siblings) are left feeling the emotional distance or lack of presence with their loved one.
Sometimes adults with childhood emotional neglect can act like a child, throwing tantrums instead of being able to verbalise, especially if the situation triggers strong emotions. This is where emotional neglect can turn into emotional abuse. The partner with childhood emotional neglect fails to understand his/her own emotions and, feeling out of control, acts out in destructive anger.
If you are questioning whether childhood emotional neglect may have affected you, be proactive and locate an attuned individual counsellor, psychologist or psychotherapist to help discover your suppressed or disconnected emotions. Your emotions can become your new compass in discovering the 'whole' of you. You will realize just how present you can be to yourself & others. And more importantly how very much your emotional needs do count and how very much you do matter.
But one of the most surprising things about Childhood Emotional Neglect is that emotionally neglectful parents are usually not bad people or unloving parents. Many are just trying their best to raise their children well. And are damaged themselves.
Fear of abandonment is a lingering feeling of insecurity, contributing to intrusive thoughts, emptiness, unstable sense of self, clinginess, neediness, extreme mood fluctuations, and frequent relationship conflicts. On the flip side, someone with a fear of abandonment might cope by cutting off completely and becoming emotionally numb.
The fear of abandonment is real. It can be incredibly debilitating and cause significant emotional distress for those affected. For some, the fear of abandonment may manifest in various signs and symptoms such as feelings of intense anxiety, frequent panic attacks, exaggerated worries about being alone or isolated, difficulty trusting others, extreme loneliness even when surrounded by people, thoughts of self-harm or suicide due to low self-esteem, persistent neediness or clinginess with friends and family members, and difficulty sleeping.
People with anxious-preoccupied attachment tend to experience a lot of fear of abandonment and rejection. While people with other attachment styles also have the same fears, people with this attachment pattern tend to feel them more consciously and develop persistent emotional and behavioral patterns around these fears. In contrast to avoidant people who are excessively independent, anxiously-preoccupied people may seek constant assurance, approval from their partners and become overly dependent.
Object constancy is an integral component of attachment theory that posits the capacity for an individual to maintain a feeling of security and mental stability even when confronted with significant moments of separation or disruption in interpersonal relationships. This concept of secure attachment allows for individuals to preserve an emotional connection with another person during times of distress, often enabling them to persistently recognize the worth and value of their relationship despite the potential for conflicts or disagreements.
In addition to helping kids feel secure when separated from their parents, this object can also help them develop self-soothing skills and provide an emotional outlet for feelings such as fear, frustration, and sadness. But transitional objects are not just limited to children and babies; they can provide comfort and security for people of all ages. These objects allow the user to access memories of safety and familiarity during stress or change.
This one often surprises people. A messy home environment doesn't always cause stress or anxiety for people, but in an individual with anxiety, it can make a huge difference. If you struggle with anxiety, consider evaluating your home environment. A cluttered home can sometimes be an issue because it sits at the back of your mind on your to-do list. The proverbial mental to-do list can be triggering for anxiety, resulting in a number of responses including insomnia, increased stress, reduced ability to focus, and more. Small changes, such as adding the house to your to-do list, or simply tidying up on a regular basis has the potential to reduce anxiety; but this may not be true for everyone.