How Childhood Emotional Neglect Fucks with Your Adult Life
What Is Childhood Emotional Neglect? The Trauma You Didn’t Know You Had!
The concept of childhood emotional neglect (CEN) can take some getting used to if you grew up in an environment where you didn’t realize you were being neglected. After all, emotional neglect is about what didn’t happen as opposed to what actually did happen. It’s kinda like a wound that you can’t quite name because no one ever actually technically physically harmed you so there’s no bruises to show. The fucked-up thing about emotional neglect is that the hole it leaves behind can do real damage to your psyche and well-being.
Emotional neglect is the silence you received when you were in need of soothing. It’s the eye-roll you got instead of empathy. It’s that absence of attention that made you felt like you’re invisible. Children of emotional neglect grow up believing that our feelings don’t matter, our needs are burdensome to our parents and caregivers, and just existing in their presence is either way too much or not enough.
Many children of emotional neglect don’t even realize how neglectful their upbringings were until well into adulthood and when that happens, it’s a total mind-fuck to realize your childhood wasn’t what you thought it was when you were growing up. If we’re luck enough to have access to therapy, our vocabulary suddenly increases with our ability to name things like narcissism and love bombing and trauma bonds and enmeshment and infantilization and gaslighting — and understanding emotional neglect can only help us in our healing journey. Let’s read on!
What Does Emotional Neglect Look Like?
The thing about emotional neglect is that it’s not always cruel and intentionally done with malice. In fact, it often comes from emotionally immature parents who were themselves emotionally neglected and have no idea what a healthy emotional presence even looks like. In addition to their own limited emotional intelligence, they tend not to have a lot of self-awareness and almost certainly have had their own history of personal trauma that they’ve probably haven’t had the tools to process.
Sometimes it’s a parent who is depressed or addicted or constantly distracted or just plain overwhelmed by how much work it is to raise children. Other times, they think they’re practicing tough love or are focused on not coddling you. The reality, tho, is that they are emotionally missing in action and are unable to provide the kind of validation that children with big feelings often crave.
Examples of emotional neglect from your caregivers can look like:
- Parents who only notice your behavior, never your feelings behind your behavior
- Parents who don’t address any behavior problems you may display
- Avoiding difficult conversations, including sex education
- Not showing affection and resisting requests for physical touch
- Responses like “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”
- Being praised for being “low-maintenance” or “independent” because you learned not to ask for anything
- No one ever asking, “How are you?” and expecting an in-depth response
- You don’t hear “I love you” often, if at all
- Indifference! They just don’t seem to give a shit about what’s going on in your life and who you are as a person
As a child, you were owed a certain amount of attention and affection from your caregivers because that’s part of the responsibility and decision to have children in the first place. If you can relate to several of the above bullet points, then you may very well have been emotionally neglected.
Signs You Were Emotionally Neglected
Children who grew up emotionally neglected often know that something was off about their childhood, but they just can’t put their finger on what was missing. You can’t show off bruises and scars from being emotionally neglected, which can make it that much more tricky to name it when it happens. In addition to the signs your caregivers display that demonstrate their emotional neglect, it’s important to pay attention to how you’re feeling. If any of the following sound relatable, perhaps you’re a victim of emotional neglect.
- You don’t know what your needs are, let alone how to express them
- You feel guilty or “dramatic” anytime you try to open up
- You people-please like it’s your job, because your worth has always been tied to not needing anything
- You struggle to identify or regulate emotions, or you emotionally shut down
- You tell yourself things like “It wasn’t that bad” even though you’re clearly hurting
- You’re terrified of being a burden — even to your therapist
As we’ve said before, emotional neglect is about what you DIDN’T get when you were growing up, and lots of children of emotional neglect go thru life thinking their childhoods were just fine because they never were in need of shelter, food, and clothes. Many CEN don’t realize that parents who only provide those things — and nothing else — are just doing the bare fucking minimum of what parents are supposed to do.
The Long-Term Effects of Emotional Neglect
Unfortunately, children of emotional neglect do not turn out “just fine,” and there was even a 2016 study done by the smartypants at University of Manitoba, Canada that talked about the long-term psychological harm done on CEN. If you grew up emotionally neglected, you may be experiencing unfun shit like:
- Chronic low self-esteem
- Depression
- Difficulty trusting others as well as your own instincts
- Anxiety disorders galore!
- A hard time forming and keeping healthy relationships
- Trouble with boundaries
- Drug and alcohol use to fill that empty hole inside you
- A deep, haunting feeling of emptiness or being too much and not enough at the same time
You might realize you’re having trouble with some parts of adulting, if your emotionally neglectful parents never showed you basic life skills like how to cook or how to change a tire or how to ride a bike or how to do your taxes or how the washing machine works. We see moments between parent and child like those romanticized for a reason, and it’s because they’re big life lessons mothers and fathers use to bond with their children, and many children were denied those moments. This kind of shit can only compound our anxiety issues as we navigate life learning how to do those simple things without guidance.
Healing from Emotional Neglect
Good news! Emotional neglect can be named and understood and even healed. There’s a whole lot that you need to unlearn, tho, and the not-so-good news is that unlearning won’t happen overnight. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to cope with the emotional neglect:
- Therapy! Ofc, we understand that healthcare in the United States is unaffordable and inaccessible to many folks here. We empathize if you are not able to see one immediately.
- Books! Not all self-help books are great at helping you help yourself, but there are plenty of good books that can validate what you’ve been through, like our list of 6 Books to Help You Unfuck Yourself After Being Raised by Emotionally Immature Parents
- Community! If you don’t have anyone in your life that you talk to about this sort of thing, there are tons of online forums of people going through the exact same thing you are, like r/emotionalneglect
- Journaling! This is a great way to pay attention to what you’re feeling and how your body experiences being triggered
Ideally, the above options will merely supplement the hard work you’re probably already doing, like learning how to develop compassion for yourself and acknowledging how the neglect has impacted your life. Keep in mind that emotional neglect can end up convincing you that you were not worthy of attention. That is a bullshit lie, tho, one told by someone else’s limitations that has nothing to do with your value as a human being.
Cover Image by Alexa from Pixabay
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