9 Signs of Childhood Emotional Neglect

We often think of abuse in a very external or physically harmful way, but abuse can also be caused by what is not there, such as when a parent does not ask us how we feel or does not listen to us when we tell them that they could not support us either. us when we need it or hug us when we cry and this lack of

emotional

support and harmony leads to what is known as

childhood

emotional

neglect

and today I will explain the nine

signs

that you have experienced it if you are new. My name here is Katie Morton and I am a licensed marriage and family therapist.

I talk about depression, anxiety, eating disorders and really anything related to mental health, so if you want to subscribe, we would love to have you, I promise you will always leave with some useful information for yourself or someone you love, well , let's move on to today's topic before we get into the

signs

, I just want to say that most parents who fall into this category are not doing this to be harmful or malicious, they usually don't even do it. Knowing that you are

neglect

ing your children's emotional needs because they are not connected to yours and have never cared about their emotions or those of others before, this does not mean that what they did is right or that we do not have the right. feeling hurt or traumatized by it I just wanted to give you a fuller idea of ​​what's going on.

The first sign that we have been emotionally neglected is that we have difficulty regulating our emotions because they are so foreign and something we have never been allowed to have, we can bottle it all up and then burst out at people later or not be able to recognize when we feel a strong emotion, something like anger or frustration, sign number two, we have a pattern of unhealthy relationships and these are generally relationships. where we are dependent on a similar codependency or where there are no boundaries, also known as enmeshment, where your emotions are our emotions or we could possibly find ourselves in another abusive relationship where our emotions are ignored, closed down or minimized and we will find that we have one relationship after another, as Whether romantic or friendship, it looks like this.

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We have difficulty forming relationships which means we may isolate ourselves or struggle to connect with people, it is difficult to let people in so we may feel like no one really knows us and this can be very difficult, true, we may feel extremely alone and isolated, but we don't feel safe enough or good enough to be with anyone else, so we can feel stuck in this vicious cycle where we want connection because we need it because all humans need it, it's okay to need someone. the people we may need, but then it feels so dangerous and unsafe, so we don't and we're in this bind between the two of us.

The next sign is that we may feel numb or empty and this happens as a result of the fact that our parents never checked. He never asked us how we were doing and really listened to us, he never taught us how to control ourselves, so we may lack what is known as emotional intelligence, which is actually what it sounds like: our understanding of our own emotions and the landscape. emotional. of being a human right and therefore if we never learned how to do it, it was never okay to do it and maybe even if we tried to check it with ourselves, our parents would say we don't have time for that. it's deep like it keeps going so we essentially can't feel anything, we never get that chance therefore we believe no emotion is okay and we can struggle to connect with any of them and feel completely empty of anything, feel empty and numb It's something that I have heard over and over again from members of our community and from my patients, so it's almost as if we don't know how to identify anything, we feel like we don't feel anything or at least we think we don't.

I'm here to give you spoilers for what he actually does. I also want to mention that this can also be a sign of our depression and PTSD and just so you know,

childhood

emotional neglect can lead to things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc. so this could be part of a Now there is also a bigger picture, the fifth sign is that we struggle with self-pity and can have difficulty nurturing ourselves and if we think about this, this is an obvious side effect of emotional neglect, just if no one helps us. has offered support and compassion or nurtured us and shown us what that looks like, we have no knowledge of how to give it or how to do it and we can also get caught in this spiral of shame that something is wrong with me, I don't deserve this.

I'm not enough, therefore you know I shouldn't be taken care of, no one should be compassionate to me. Something is broken and wrong inside and this can also lead us to be very hard on ourselves or have unrealistic expectations which have occurred in my practice. As my patients are really perfectionists and they think that everything has to be right and sometimes we can even do this in the hope that if we do everything right then and only then we will be worthy or we will be able to ask for things and accept them well. almost like we have to earn it versus what we should have heard growing up is that you are worthy of it, you are important, you are enough, but because we don't get those messages, it can be hard for us to accept that as an important part of This is too the fact that we tend to find that those of us who struggle to give ourselves compassion and nurture ourselves can give it to other people in abundance.

We can be extremely kind and compassionate to others and we can be very patient with people, but we just can't give it to ourselves, so just consider: You know? Do you allow others to share what bothers them? And you are loving and understanding, but it doesn't feel right to share what you're going through. Just take a minute and consider that sign. Number six is ​​that we can have unhealthy independence. I want you to listen to that again. I didn't say dependency. I said unhealthy independence. Now the reason we can have this is because we feel like we can't count on anyone but ourselves.

We have to do everything on our own because we don't trust other people to show up and do what we need, so we can really have a hard time asking for help and actually allowing people to help us. This is because we don't. I think we can count on someone else, right, everyone always let us down, told us that we are not enough or that they didn't listen to us, told us to fulfill all our needs, our feelings and our thoughts, deep down, therefore, Who can we trust only ourselves? and we can push people aside and not let people in, not let people in, even if people offer and already show us compassion and care, we can poop, poop, like no, no, no , or if someone gives us a compliment, this is very common, someone will do it.

Tell us something nice about ourselves or try to control us and we will think that they are just lying or that they are only doing it because they feel bad. We completely deny anyone who offers support and help because we believe deep down that we can. trusting only ourselves, this sign can also make us hypervigilant and lead us to really unbalanced relationships in which we give but never receive anything in return. The next sign, and this is woven into every sign, is that we can really fight shame. We think that something is inherently wrong with us or that we are deeply flawed and this can obviously lead to really low self-esteem and this comes from the belief that how we feel and what we need is not valid or important and that obviously is. directly correlated to the fact that when we grew up our parents simply dismissed it or told us to turn it off or ignore it completely sign number eight we can be sensitive to rejection as we could have grown up constantly feeling rejected if we had reached our Parents and Us We ask them for support and care and they say that you are too much or that it is not important or that you sit down and shut up.

We can feel very sensitive to someone in our lives putting us down or not wanting us around or feeling like they don't accept us because it can remind us of what our childhood was like, it can be extremely triggering and final sign number nine is that we can easily feel overwhelmed or discouraged. , this is due to the fact that we can struggle to identify ourselves. any emotion we are feeling let alone accept any of them, right, those don't exist, the things that are below, we will ignore them when we feel something or something big happens to us, we don't know how to deal with it and we can quickly feel overwhelmed by our emotions or our experience, frankly, because everything is really strange and can be very uncomfortable, we think I don't even know what this is and we may just want to stick our head in the sand and like close, honestly, this is when a lot of people like my patients and Members of our community will report dissociating because our brains like this are too much for my system.

I have to pull the cable and disconnect it to get through. This is so, if you find this happening and you feel like you're going from okay, okay, okay, oh, overwhelmed, to dissociate, it could be a sign, obviously, it doesn't help to just know the signs that we've been emotionally neglected and we could have thought that. For a long time the important thing is to know how to overcome it and my first advice, I know you are not going to like this answer, but the truth is that the inner child is working now so that our thoughts, feelings and needs finally listen to us.

We will need to get back in touch with our younger self and offer it to them now. I know a lot of people feel this, but that's weird and I can't give myself what I need. I'm here. To tell you that you can and I am organizing a workshop for the inner child. You can click the link in the description for more information if you are struggling with this step, but we can use tools like children's books looking at photos or videos of ourselves as a child to reconnect and hear from our child selves what they long for. and then become adults because we have more means, we have more resources at our disposal, we can offer that to our children and that could be through a letter.

In writing, there are a lot of different exercises, like I said, I'm hosting a workshop because I know a lot of you struggled with this, but inner child work can really help us heal. My second piece of advice is to be more aware of our feelings, I know. but I promise you we all have them, we have tons of them every day we just don't take the time to recognize them and especially if in our childhood no one taught us to recognize them or showed us theirs to give us a better idea of ​​what anger can look like. or the emotion can take us some time, so go on Google and search for the feelings wheel or the feelings table and see if any of the words that you are reading sound familiar or are something that perhaps sounds familiar to you.

I think it might feel like I just start tapping, I start trying to pay attention little by little and my goals always start very small by trying to identify one a day and then after a week or so it gets a little bit bigger. easy. a muscle we're building, go from two a day to three four and I always finish around five, although we have a lot more feelings about it, every day, I don't feel like you have to make an exhaustive list, but get more.Being in contact with them is going to be incredibly healing.

My next tip is to practice what is called an emotion story, and honestly, that's what it sounds like when we feel something. Tell me why that feeling exists. Not critically. like a detective about it, a detective about your emotions, okay, so I feel very excited, let's choose that, I'm so excited, why am I excited, let me think, okay, that's because yesterday I checked off a big to-do of my to-do list. I really did it, I'm not lying, I honestly did it, so I crossed it off my to-do list, so I'm excited because it's done and that means the inner child workshop is paying off.

I've put in all this work and that's where it comes from that's the story of that emotion for me, that emotion of emotion, so as we start to get more in touch with our feelings, we have that list of one, two or three, tell me the story of them, okay, so I sit down. Really discouraged. Where does that come from? What is the story that led to that emotion? It sounds a little silly. Why am I going so deep into this? Because it's important for us to recognize and validate those emotions not just identify we need to say yes it's okay and exist for this this and this and this is how I got here it's something like we wish our parents would have given us but they didn't and that's why we're just To fill that gap another tip is to describe the feelings we have without using the feeling word and I've talked about this in the past but it could be anything like let's say I feel angry okay so if I were to describe to you the anger without using the word anger, how would I do that?

I would say anger feels like a fire in my stomach, it feels like clenched fists, clenched muscles, clenching my teeth and almost my head feels like there are too many thoughts racing that I can't understand. If I get them right, I feel like chaos in my head, that's how I would describe anger without just saying that anger feels angry, and again, it's just another way to get to know our emotions and better understand how we experience them. My next piece of advice is Know that feelings are not facts just because we feel in some way what is happening doesn't mean that is really what is happening.

I could be reacting to a past experience, meaning let's say growing up I had a really bad time in swimming class, I just made this up as we went along, so when I go to the pool with my friends for a party On the weekend, I may feel very agitated, anxious and very upset, really irritable, but those feelings don't mean that the situation right now is agitated and disturbing, it's actually something that happened before, so I know that this maybe difficult to conceptualize or understand, but what it means is that we can have feelings for many different reasons, that is why it is important to make the history of an emotion and those feelings do not mean that it is directly related to the reality of what is happening right now .

My next advice is to take time to recognize the needs we have and this is difficult. It's often a job I would do. I recommend that you do it with a therapist because our needs have never been met or never validated, therefore we may have difficulty even recognizing what they are, but I encourage you to start with your basic needs, we all need food and water, we all need them. we need sleep and we all need connection okay so those are just three basic needs that I want you to start with and then the next step is to try to do things to meet those needs i.e am I giving myself food every three or four hours?

Am I drinking enough water? I'm taking the time to connect with people who understand me, this could just be with our therapist or a friend, that's okay, that's enough, but taking some time to recognize those needs and take some steps to meet them will be incredibly helpful. in these last moments. Two tips are really quick and the first is mindfulness. It is important to be in touch with what our body feels, what we are experiencing, so that we can identify our emotions and what we are going through before it helps to harness and last. The advice is that once we get better at identifying our emotions, we can take it a step further and discover what that emotion is asking for, for example, if we feel angry, does that mean we need to be heard and understood?

I know he's kind. difficult but useful or if we feel sad, does that emotion tell us that we need to take care of ourselves a little or connect with someone? Just try to consider what your emotions are asking for because then we can really meet that need, I hope you found this helpful if you feel like I left something out because trust me, there are so many things I could talk about regarding this, but leave it at that. the comments below. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week and I'll see. you next time