Subtle signs of childhood neglect you’ve been missing
Were you the victim of childhood emotional neglect? The signs aren’t always as easy to spot as we think they are.
by: E.B. Johnson
You didn’t have to grow up in a grind house film to experience emotional neglect at the hands of the people you loved. This kind of neglect is one of the most damaging. And what’s worse is that it can occur in the most insidious and subtle of ways. When these behaviors and patterns are implanted within us, they do a lot of damage in terms of our adult lives. Accepting the pain of emotional neglect is only a first step. Once we’ve faced the truth, we then have to take action to limit the destruction across the width and breadth of our future relationships.
The subtle signs of childhood neglect.
A lot of us grow up amid childhood neglect without ever realizing it. This is the home in which you feel like an unwanted intruder. Your feelings were probably dismissed, denied. You were probably taught that they didn’t matter in any actual way. And this takes a serious toll on your adult life. When you grow up as the victim of Childhood Emotional Neglect (or CEN) it changes the way you see yourself, express yourself, and even the way you connect with others around you.
Inability to open up
Do you struggle to open up to others? This is a classic symptom of someone who was never allowed to express their emotions freely. If your parents shut you down, or responded in a way that made you feel unsafe — then it’s highly likely that you learn to shut yourself down in your adult life. You’ll bury your emotions away before you dish them out with others. And this usually results in an explosion.
Lack of emotional awareness
What is your emotional awareness like? This is a tool that not only helps us to manage and understand our own emotions. When we are emotionally aware, we can also connect with others through understanding and compassion. Lacking emotional awareness leads to immature relationships, explosions, and poor decisions. If we’re serious about manifesting a life (and relationships) that we value, we have to increase our emotional awareness.
Feeling empty
Feelings of emptiness are another highly common side effect of emotional neglect in both childhood and adulthood. This changes the way you see yourself, and it changes the way you see your relationship with others. Beaten down by the lack of belonging or “being wanted” that you feel, those feelings can turn into feelings of hopelessness. Or the idea that you’ll never be valued by anyone else.
Failing self-compassion
Self-compassion is a crucial part of living a good life. No matter what you try to do, you’re going to get things wrong. Mistakes are going to be made. You’re going to choose the wrong partners, and life is going to throw a lot of challenges your way. In order to stay focused on your goals, you’ve got to be compassionate with yourself. Understand why things went wrong so you can work to make them better the next time around.
Irrational behavior
Have you ever gotten yourself stuck in patterns of risky behavior and poor self-discipline? This can look like dangerous behaviors. It can also look like impulsive decision making. Maybe you burn your candle at both ends by engaging in your substance addictions, while you struggle to balance a career and a never-ending (and reckless) social life that’s full of fast partners and faster experiences.
Toxic self-reliance
While being self-reliant can be a good thing, there’s such a thing as being too self-reliant. No person is an island. You can’t be all things to yourself. Sometimes, we need help. Maybe that’s material help. Maybe that’s mental, emotional, or physical help. Whatever it is, you have to allow yourself to ask for it. More than that, you must allow others to help you in your lowest moments.
Over-personalization
The emotionally neglected child is one who usually comes to blame themselves for everything. They can often feel responsible for the lives of those around them — and the happiness they gain from their own lives. It makes sense. Unable to get the love they crave from their parents, the neglected child looks for reasons “why”. More often than not, that results in the child blaming themselves and settling for a pattern of over-personalization. They always assume they are the mistake in the equation.
Zero sense of self
It’s hard to gain a sense of self when you’re desperately chasing the love and affection of people who can’t value you or love you. When you can’t see yourself, your skills, and your inner and outer beauty accurately, it can commonly boil down to a lack of love at earlier developmental points in your life. A sense of self is crucial in order to act on and define a life that’s entirely your own and fulfilling too.
Superficial otherness
Not being loved or emotionally safe with our caretakers causes us to internalize some nasty feelings and beliefs (see above). For this reason, many victims of emotional neglect feel an “otherness” with those around them. From the inside looking out, all you see is people who seem to live and love much easier than you do. They seem happier, more loveable and worthy. But none of that is true. We are just as lovable and just as worthy as they are.
Physical decline
Physical decline is not uncommon in those who are victims of emotional neglect. Our emotions and our physical body are closely tied. What you feel in the heart affects the body. Children who aren’t properly shown affection and attention through key developmental stages can find their adult bodies declining as a result. As their mental health declines, it’s not uncommon to see their physical body follow suit.
Addressing your childhood neglect honestly.
If you were the victim of CEN, you can’t afford to ignore the divides and deceptions it creates. You can have a happy life, and you deserve to have that life. But it’s going to require that you relearn the way you see yourself and your place in the world. All of your emotions hold value. And it’s okay for you to take up space. You’ve got to acknowledge the truth, though, and then find the courage to take up space for yourself in the world.
1. Stop running from the truth
The truth is a hard thing to face. Especially if it means seeing people you love in a different light. Nonetheless, we have to face this truth if we’re going to get where we want to be in our own lives. We have to let go of the emotional pain this neglect brings us, and see it instead as a lesson on the shelf. Until you stop and face the truth of your pain, you’ll never be able to resolve it. You’ve got to look the storm in the face and weather it.
Stop running from the truth. All transformative journeys worth taking start with embracing the truth and accepting where you’re at and what happened. Look at your history and accept it for what it was. This doesn’t lessen who you are, and it doesn’t detract from any happiness you found in those dark moments.
Face your past with confidence. Shed your shame and the feelings of failure that may be tied to those buried emotions. You had no hand to play in the way others chose to treat you. In every moment, you were only doing the best that you could with the knowledge and the tools that you had. Give yourself some credit, then extend compassion to that person who was dismissed, belittled, and otherwise denied of the understanding that they needed. You weren’t to blame for the emotional neglect, but it still happened.
2. Talk to people who get it
Are you surrounded by people who cherish you? Are you being lifted by the people you choose to bring into your personal life? We need to talk to people who get it when we’re on the wrong side of emotional neglect. This helps not only to balance our emotional state, but it helps us to peel back the layers of who we are, who want to be, and what happened to us.
Talk to people who get it. Build a support system around yourself that you can truly rely on. This can be friends, family with shared experiences, or coaches, counselors, and therapists. The point is that it is a mixed group of diverse experiences and people you can truly trust.
Share your childhood neglect with them, and allow their own stories to provide you with a sense of comfort. So many of us have the shared experience of not being emotionally safe with our partners, our friends, and even our parents and family. That’s just life. Realizing that we are not alone allows us to lessen the burden, though. Create a chosen family of people who see you as you are, and those who can help you forge a new future for yourself.
3. Be more aware of your emotions
Emotional awareness is a superpower. But it’s hard to develop that when you are neglected emotionally as a child (or an adult). If you were taught to bury your emotions away, you don’t spend time questioning them and studying them. Instead, you get stuck in patterns of reacting and lashing out. This damages our relationships, our opportunities, and even our sense of who we are.
Be more aware of your emotions. Embrace them in your life. The way we feel is valuable. All of our emotions come with deeper messages. We must know these messages (and what they’re tired to) so that we can manage them. Managing our emotions is key in relating to our outside environment in the right way.
Now is the time to get yourself on a path of emotional awareness. Dig into the root of your emotional issues and where they are coming from. When your parents made you feel small, or bad partners terrorized you — you learned how to run away from the emotions you could not handle. Understand those emotions now. Question each of your feelings, and work with a coach or a counselor (worth their salt) to help you identify your emotions and the driving factors behind them.
4. Re-parent your inner child
There’s not enough good that can be said about re-parenting your inner child. We all have one. You know, that most-vulnerable part of yourself that is pure, and innocent, and filled with fear. Healing from emotional neglect requires that we take this child by the hand and lead them back out into the light of love. That can only happen when we re-parent them and become the caretaker that they experienced.
Re-parent your inner child. Give them all that love and affection they never got from your caretakers. Make it safe for them to come out of their shell and express themselves with joy and in lightness. Give them the tools to look after themselves. Hold them in your heart and make space for them in your life.
It’s not all about fun and games, though. Re-parenting our inner child is all about making them feel safe and loved, but it also means teaching them new patterns for relating to the world around them. You’ve got to show your inner child how to be resilient. How to set boundaries and limits with the way people treat them. Even greater than that, you have to show them how to stand up for themselves. How can you do that if you don’t do it for yourself right now in your adult life?
5. Consciously take up space in the world
Too many of us don’t allow ourselves to take up space in this world. That’s especially true for those who are emotionally abandoned or neglected. It’s hard to see yourself as worthy when the people you love most don’t treat you that way. If they don’t value what you think or what you have to say, then you start to believe that those things aren’t valuable. So you shut down and pull back in ways that completely deprive the world of your shine.
Allow yourself to consciously take up space in the world. Feel what you feel. Speak on the things that are genuinely important to you. Stand up for the things that matter and don’t let anyone tell you that you that your truth is invalid.
You (and your inner child) need to take up space in the world. You need to show who you are and what you expect from those who fill up the space around you. All of this takes conscious declarations. Even when it’s hard, you have to refuse to allow others to dictate your path. We take up space by allowing ourselves to be as we need to be — rather than the way people expect us to be. Our claim is made when we insist on being ourselves unapologetically.
Putting it all together…
Many of us grew up in dysfunctional homes, but even more of us grew up in homes in which we were emotionally kept at arm’s length. The child’s emotions are not often welcome in the land of adults. So we get taught to make ourselves small and our emotions even smaller. This emotional neglect, though, only leads to bigger difficulties in our own adult lives. We struggle to see ourselves as worthy, and we struggle to find those who honor us. Getting back to a place of happiness requires facing the CEN that’s haunting us.
Stop running from the truth. There is no shame in admitting that your caretakers failed you. That’s their burden to bear. The only thing you are responsible for is your own happiness. Step out of your box and find a network of others that understand the experiences of your past. Talk to them. Learn to be safe with them, and in that safety, learn that it’s okay to trust and be vulnerable. Embrace your emotions and make space for them in your life. As your emotional awareness increases, you realize how special and powerful you are. Re-parent your inner child. Make it known that it’s safe for them to be safe and open with you. Bring them out into the world and make it nice for them. Take up space for yourself in the world and make no apologies for it. Now is the moment to become the person you were always supposed to be.