Acts of Omission: Childhood Emotional Neglect Across the Lifespan. PART I

12, July, 2018Posted by :Wioleta Koziol(1)Comments

Acts of Omission: Childhood Emotional Neglect Across the Lifespan. PART I

Before I dive into the effects of childhood emotional neglect across a lifespan, take a look at the questions below and keep a mental tally of how many resonate with you.

• Do you have trouble making decisions and question everything you do or want?
• Do you struggle with trusting yourself and others?
• Do you often feel like nothing you do is ever good enough?
• Do you have a tendency to seek external validation from others?
• Do you feel disconnected from your emotions?
• Are you overly critical of others and struggle attuning to others’ emotional needs?
• Do you feel a pervasive and painful feeling of “internal emptiness?” 
• Do you tend to focus on others’ needs instead of your own?
• Do you pride yourself on being “strong” because you stifle your emotions?
• Do you have a tendency to obsess over what people think, making sure they like you, even if it means compromising your own wants and needs?
• Do you struggle acknowledging positive aspects of yourself and have low self-esteem?
• Do you frequently feel “out of place” when you’re around other people?
• Do you overuse/abuse drugs or alcohol to avoid emotions or to actually feel something?
• Do you struggle to identify your emotions until they are so out of control that you don’t know how to manage them?
• Do you feel like “you take up too much space in the world?”
• Do you have trouble asking for what you need and want?
• Do you often feel angry at yourself for having wants and needs and believe that your relationships would be much better off if you just didn’t want and need anything?
• Do you self-sabotage yourself because of your lack of confidence and self-attunement?

How many of the 18 questions did you answer ‘yes’ to?

The struggles and challenges listed above are common symptoms and signs of childhood emotional neglect as experienced in adulthood. However, as we know, the journey of unlearning and re-learning often demands we see and realize the truth of how things came to be the way they are. This part is usually the toughest. And still, recovering from childhood emotional neglect and reclaiming your place in the world, your world, and within yourself is possible.

How Emotional Neglect Affects the Child

Due to the invisible nature of childhood emotional neglect, clients are usually surprised to find that the above difficulties find their origin in the quality of emotional nurturing they received as children. The cumulative effects of childhood emotional neglect begin to appear in adulthood when the stakes get higher. Adult relationships and jobs call on us to tap into specific skills to manage life’s stress, expectations, and pressure. If never developed or never practiced, how can we expect ourselves to be able to do something if we’ve never done it before? I always tell my clients that regardless of age, if you haven’t learned or weren’t taught how to do something, you won’t automatically know how to do it just because you’re an adult. However, accessing self-compassion can be one of the most challenging things for adults with childhood emotional neglect. The same applies to healthy emotional regulation, effective stress management, accountable self-compassion, and non-defensive communication (to name a few). These can all be quite challenging if never learned before or practiced. With no physical scars as reminders of past pain, childhood emotional neglect instead transforms into emotional triggers, emotional dysregulation, and a persistent attack on the self for even having feelings.  

But how can something that happened so long ago have such an abounding effect decades later?

The answer lies in one of the most fundamental pieces of who we all are – one’s emotional development and maturity. This piece of the puzzle, although all too often overlooked or dismissed, is the glue that holds everything together and explains why things fall apart.

As human beings, we are all wired to receive love, attention, affection, care, nurturance, safe touch, gentleness, empathy, guidance, validation, attunement (mirroring), and consideration in childhood and beyond. This type of consistent (enough) love and care allows the child’s brain to grow in neurological connections in the areas responsible for learning, memory, emotional regulation, and healthy self-concept. This all contributes to the child learning that their needs matter, their emotions and experience are valid, and that they are important to the adults around them.

The opposite happens when the child does not receive good (enough) love and attention – the areas of the brain responsible for all the aspects that make us emotionally well-functioning adults, do not fully develop. If this goes on long enough, the child grows into an adult that struggles with emotional expression, emotional regulation, and relationships. Let’s dig further.

So What Exactly is Considered Childhood Emotional Neglect?

Childhood emotional neglect is when a parent or caregiver fails to notice, fails to attend or attune to, or respond appropriately or enough to a child’s emotions, feelings, and needs. This can include the parent consistently ignoring, rejecting, withholding love, and isolating the child. When emotional invalidation and neglect pervade a child’s life; the child, as a form of self-protection and in order to adapt to this emotionally painful situation, begins to repress their desires, needs, and feelings. This causes a fragmented (split-off) part to form within the self – which represents a part of the child that’s unexplored, unacceptable, and blocked from the child’s waking consciousness. This repressed part of the self is usually what drives the problematic symptomology caused by childhood emotional neglect in adulthood. 

If your parent(s) failed to talk to you about emotion, perpetually failed to listen, consistently invalidated, and failed to acknowledge your emotions, you began to treat yourself the same way. So you suppressed your emotions and acted as if your needs and feelings didn’t matter. This continues into adulthood.

Furthermore, the lack of consistent parental attunement to a child’s needs does not provide a positive and healthy mirror for the child’s feelings. Without a positive parental mirror, children feel confused about what they want, doubtful about what they’re feeling, and have difficulty forming a healthy emotional identity and a positive sense of self. Instead of learning that their needs and feelings are worthy and valued, they grow up always feeling unimportant, unworthy, and empty.

Consequently, as an adult, you feel like something is always missing, unable to discern exactly what and where to find it. This fragmented part of you can have negative implications for your self-esteem and self-worth. In turn, these can lead to chaotic, unfulfilling, and abusive relationships. 

Not All that Glitters is Gold – Examples of Emotional Neglect

Childhood emotional neglect is a covert type of abuse, meaning that it’s subtle, difficult to recognize, and displays no physical or visible signs. Due to this, when you were a child, you didn’t know it was happening, and as an adult, it’s difficult to acknowledge that you were emotionally abandoned.

In fact, the emotionally neglectful household (barring the presence of physical or sexual abuse), most often embodies a family who, from the outside, seems to “have it all together.” All the physical/material needs are almost always met to a high standard, the child goes to a good quality school, it’s a double-income household and/or money is not an issue, etc.

The child’s material needs are all perfectly met, yet the child feels alone and lost. No one talks to the child about their feelings, doesn’t ask about their day or interests, doesn’t comfort them nor helps them figure out difficult issues. The child learns, very early on, the covert message in the household – “take care of it yourself.” While this might seem like an admirable quality for an adult to have, paradoxically, this type of mentality perpetuated by caregivers doesn’t allow the child to actually learn how to cope with life maturely and effectively as they grow up. So as an adult, you probably experience many difficulties with decision-making, self-trust, and trust in others. You may possess an intense internal pressure to succeed with little belief and confidence in yourself, thus leading you to feel high levels of stress and isolation.

What Types of Homes Are At a Higher Risk of Emotional Neglect? 

1. An alcoholic household.
2. A caregiver battling a mental health disorder – especially depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder.
3. A physically absent parent – due to illness, divorce, or death.

All the above put the child at a greater risk of exposure to childhood emotional neglect. In the above households, internal and external chaos tends to persist; leaving the child’s needs as last on the list. As a result, children grow up  internalizing messages such as:

‘You are not important.’

‘You need to make your emotions and needs disappear.’

‘You need to not feel so that you are not a burden.’

As an adult survivor of childhood emotional neglect, you carry these embedded messages in your subconscious, and whenever anything goes wrong in your life or in the context of your relationships, you immediately engage in unhealthy self-blame and self-degradation. This is because you grew up with the message that your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and needs don’t matter.

Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect on Adults & Complex PTSD from Childhood

The invisible wounds on your mind and heart caused by childhood emotional neglect reveal themselves in adulthood in forms of anxiety, depression, PTSD, Complex PTSD, etc. Due to its chronic, interpersonal, and inescapable nature, childhood emotional neglect can be considered a complex type of trauma. It’s never a single-event of emotional neglect; instead, it is the case of a thousand paper cuts. 

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is a mental condition that results from severe, persistent, and repetitive exposure to traumatizing situations. The exposure usually occurs within the child’s closest family/support system, with no perceivable end in sight. C-PTSD often develops from trauma occurring early in life, involving a combination of different traumas types, including:

• emotional abuse/neglect,
• physical abuse,
• sexual abuse,
• living in a domestically violent home with or without alcoholism & drug abuse, and/or with a mentally ill caregiver,
• being held captive,
• human trafficking and other organized rings of abuse,
• and more.

Tags: Alcoholic homes, Childhood emotional neglect, Complex PTSD, Effects of childhood emotional neglect on adults