Recovering from Emotional Neglect
Being emotionally neglected by my parents led me to develop dysfunctional protective buffers and a fear of receiving in my relationships.
As I mentioned in previous articles, I was emotionally neglected in childhood and therefore constantly lonely. My parents’ drama was the center of my life, leaving no room for me to receive attention and support for my emotional life or discover who I was deep down. I was also taught by my parents and grandparents to be the perfectly obedient daughter, staying at home to clean the house and shunning socializing (values from two generations ago). Having lived in a state of deprivation for so long, I developed learned helplessness as a child and long into adulthood. Lindsay Gibson, PsyD., the author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, explains that:
“Lack of emotional attention can make it feel as though what you want doesn’t matter. You may have been convinced that all you can do is wait until someone felt like giving you what you need. It’s important to realize that childhood experiences of profound helplessness can feel traumatic, causing people to later react to adult feelings of helplessness with sensations of collapse and a feeling of ‘There’s nothing I can do, and no one will help me.’ [Children] can be so affected by this feeling that later [in adult life] they are prone to feeling like victims with no control, at the mercy of powerful people who refuse to give them what they desperately need.”
There’s another consequence of suffering from deprivation for so long; it is the fear of receiving when I finally do get what I need. I developed the belief that my values in relationships came from what I gave. Thus, when I started to receive more, I started to fear that my value was diminished and that my partner would become resentful of me for having to give. I was taught to be ashamed of having needs and my self-talk went like this: “He’s going to resent doing this for me and later be critical of me.” Luckily, I recognized my dysfunctional thinking. I told myself to accept what was given to me and that I deserved what I received. After all, receiving is a big part of showing love. It was a big step forward for me.
Luckily, I found the courage and motivation to put myself in therapy and find healing relationships with friends and partners who are able to meet my emotional needs. As I spent more time with them, I was able to fill in some of those missing spaces and develop healthier patterns. I was able to identify what I needed and create or get it for myself. I was able to find the things that help me to feel balanced and calm, like a supportive partner and friends, and a puppy. I also cultivated routines like meditation and yoga which helped me to maintain my emotional equilibrium. Finally, I found a space to live where I had my privacy and felt safe.
As I spend more time being in a secure relationship, I start to uncover some areas where I had set up buffers to protect myself because of the negative experiences of my childhood. Firstly, I developed a “money buffer” and became financially independent to the largest extent possible. Learning to earn money early was essentially a survivor skill I developed in order to protect myself from relying on people who emotionally hurt me. I promised myself that I would not be financially dependent on my parents because I didn’t want to be subject to their criticism and control if I ever needed their financial help. I did everything in my power to maximize my earning power and was largely successful. This was all fine until I realized that I wanted to stop going full speed ahead on my career and instead focus on building my family life. I found it difficult to accept being a mediocre employee (instead of a top achiever) in order to channel more energy into my relationship.
Secondly, I developed “perfectionist buffers,” a problem I have been dealing with for the past several years. My mother was constantly critical of everyone around her, and years of listening to this criticism resulted in a critical inner voice in my head that targeted me and my partner. I started to notice that any time my partner made a mistake or didn’t do something perfectly, I felt irritated and scared. I started coming up with fearful projections about how my life would be “ruined” and started criticizing my partner in my head. When I was able to get out of my head, I was able to see that these mistakes were very minor and didn’t have an impact on an overall day. I realized I needed to stop focusing and obsessing over these small details and instead focus on my partner’s strengths and what was going right in our relationship. My partner’s strengths are why I chose him in the first place and I could appreciate them more if I didn’t keep focusing on the flaws.
The problem with my money and perfectionist buffers is that they don’t work. My buffers come from a fear of intimacy in romantic relationships and my feeling of anxiety. I was uncomfortable with how vulnerable I was and how intimate my relationship was, so I unconsciously used these buffer tactics to create distance to protect myself. The buffers and resulting thought patterns were a bit like mirages; they tricked me into thinking that the problem is my partner when the real problem is within me. Criticizing my partner did not help to resolve any of my anxieties; I ended up feeling the same or even worse because I kept focusing on negatives instead of positives. All the buffers did was prevent me from enjoying my relationship with my partner and creating a consistently loving atmosphere.
To overcome my fears and anxieties, I needed a change in mindset and the self-talk in my head. I needed to develop confidence in myself when it came to relationships. I needed to give myself credit for having chosen a good partner and believe that I could build a healthy relationship. I know that I have given a lot of thought to choosing a partner who is a good fit for me and thus have made a good choice for myself. I also knew that I was scared of the unknown future and needed to be cognizant of what I was filling the unknown space with. Instead of projecting worry, doubt, and fear into the future, I could project hope, peace, and calm. I can tell myself that I’ll be fine no matter what happens in the future. That is true.
“Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget observed that in order for people to learn anything new, their old mental pattern must break up and rework itself around the new, incoming knowledge. This process of internal breakdown and accommodation is key to continuing intellectual development. Likewise, Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski theorized that emotional distress is a sign of growth, not necessarily illness. He saw psychological symptoms as coming from a freshly activated urge to grow and coined the term “positive disintegration” to describe times when people break down inside in order to reorganize into more emotionally complex beings.” — Lindsay Gibson, PsyD., Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
When I was only a child, my mother was very unhappy and stressed and she shared many of her marital issues with me. I didn’t want to hear about her marital problems as a child, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter. She vented to me every day and her problems seemed to become so big that they became my problems. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I realized her sharing her marital problems with me was a major boundary violation and this pattern needed to stop, for my sake. I needed to start setting boundaries. At first, it was very difficult to tell her that I was no longer going to listen to these issues when she tried to share them with me. I told her that I would hang up on the phone if she didn’t stop venting to me when I asked her to. She didn’t listen and kept right on talking. I had to hang up on her more than 20 times before she realized I was serious. She finally got the hint that she would not be able to have any conversations with me at all if she wouldn’t stop telling me about her marital problems. Finally, she learned to turn to other people. I started having space to focus on my relationships instead of getting caught up in hers.
I knew this was a dysfunctional dynamic, but I didn’t understand what it was and the impact it had on me until recently. My mother was emotionally immature and she engaged in role reversal where she related to me as if I was her parent, expecting me to act as her therapist and confidant, listen attentively to her while she complained about her marriage problems, and expected me to comfort her. According to Lindsay Gibson, PsyD., role reversal is a hallmark of emotionally immature parenting. When I confronted my mother and told her that it is not appropriate to put her adult problems on me, she acted like it was a completely natural and correct thing to do. She asked me, “Who am I going to tell if I can’t you?” I replied, “Your sisters. Or make some friends and find a therapist. You are not supposed to share these things with your daughter.” She didn’t listen or respect my boundaries and requests for space at all until I effectively forced her to by repeatedly hanging up on her.
My mother was engendering a codependent relationship with me. She acted like she was the victim of her problems and it was my job to be the hero and listen to her problems and “save her.” This led me to develop the belief that my role and value in relationships is to fill a deficiency the other person had. I realized I unconsciously acted out the belief in my relationships, believing that I needed to cook for my partner if they couldn’t, help them with finances, or give them career advice if they didn’t seem to be doing well. I became exhausted from trying to heroically over-give. It also led to me attracting underdeveloped types in dating.
Finally, I unpacked this unhealthy pattern in therapy. I started to see how skewed this dynamic was. I was exhausted from focusing on others’ needs and not giving enough attention to my own. I felt like I couldn’t be loved unless I was constantly doing something for the other person; I didn’t feel like I could be loved just for being me. Luckily, my therapist helped me see healthy relationships are not based on roles. I am not a hero and the other person is not a victim. That was how my mother operated and it was in response to different circumstances and a different time. In addition, the other person is a fully autonomous adult who is responsible for helping themselves. They can see when they run into problems and they know how to take care of themselves. I don’t need to monitor the other person’s problems and constantly over-give in order to be accepted by them. I started finding a healthier balance in my relationships where I could take care of myself and was even encouraged to do that with the right partner.
Nowadays, I’m in a healthy and stable relationship with a secure and emotionally available partner. I feel the days of being emotionally neglected and deprived of support are behind me. I’m still in contact with my parents and see them regularly. I do my best to maintain boundaries so their problems don’t spill into my life. They are no longer the center of my attention with their anxiety spirals, marital conflict, and emotional immaturity. Now I use my precious energy to focus on myself, my partner, and building a life we want for ourselves. As I heal, I feel a “pain of contrast” between what is happening now (being given to and having needs met) versus the past when my needs were constantly unmet. However, I appreciate what I have now so much having known what it is like to be without. I feel I am now a person who “has” versus someone who is identified as a “has not.” I focus on rebirth, renewal, affecting life changes, and cultivating forgiveness and trust. I know this path will bring new experiences in life that I didn’t think were possible before. For that, I’m very excited.
“People who engage in self-development and emotional development get to have a second life — one that was unimaginable as long as they remain caught in old family roles and wishful fantasies. You really do get to start over when you open to a new consciousness of who you are and what’s been going on in your life. As one person said, ‘I now know exactly who I am. Others aren’t going to change, but I can change.’” — Lindsay Gibson, PsyD., Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
