Overcoming Childhood Emotional Neglect: The Path to Healing
This is Part II of my post about childhood emotional neglect and it focuses on the recovery process. Part I focuses on what constitutes childhood emotional neglect and its harmful effects across a lifespan. Read it here.
You’ve probably heard some variation of the saying “Your past always catches up to you, no matter how much you try to run.” When you think about your unresolved childhood wounds, this saying again hails true. That’s because the foundation of your adult behaviors and personality stems from the messages and lessons (overt and covert) you repeatedly heard and learned as a child (see Part I). Unfortunately, the way that unresolved childhood trauma makes itself most known is in your intimate relationship. That’s because the vulnerability that’s required to build a healthy, strong, and boundary-oriented relationship may be, for most adult survivors of childhood trauma, unfamiliar, triggering and scary.
You may think that it’s counterintuitive to think about the past in order to progress and move forward, but this is precisely the way. We cannot heal what we don’t acknowledge.
Healing from Childhood Emotional Neglect
Healing from childhood emotional neglect is a journey. It starts with having a full understanding of what childhood emotional neglect really is and how it has affected you during your life whole (see Part I). As a child in an emotionally neglectful home, you survived the pain by adapting to your environment with coping skills that worked for you then. But as an adult you find that these defenses and survival patterns no longer work for you, actually causing you more issues and pain. So, it’s important to acknowledge that as with any kind of trauma, childhood emotional neglect embeds itself on a cellular level and the healing process can take a long time. The time it takes to integrate past trauma with who you are today really has no timeline and ideally involves a trained psychotherapist. And there are essential components that need to be incorporated to move your healing journey along. Continue reading to find out what those are.
Essential Parts to Overcoming Childhood Emotional Neglect
#1 Feel Your Feelings: Attuning to Yourself
Growing up in an emotionally neglectful household, your feelings were often or almost always ignored and your caregivers made you feel like your needs and feelings were ‘too much.’ Therefore, you grew up stifling and repressing your needs and feelings in order to emotionally survive your environment. This developed a fragmented part within you (described in Part I), that was unexplored and blocked from your consciousness. Essentially for you, the lesson became “don’t feel.” You internalized this belief and you find that, as an adult, you struggle with identifying and expressing your needs and feelings. You may find that you have a much easier time focusing on other people’s needs and feelings and that you try to mold yourself to how others want you to be, believing that is the only way that you will be accepted and loved. This leaves you feeling disconnected from yourself.
This is why one of the most essential parts of your recovery process is learning how to attune to yourself and get in touch with your internal world – your emotions, needs, thoughts, and perceptions. This includes you viewing your emotions and needs as natural and healthy and allowing yourself to actually feel your emotions in a constructive way. Going within and attuning to yourself takes practice and it will entail you slowing down in order to be able to focus on what it is that you are feeling. Some people find it helpful to record their thoughts and feelings throughout the day or to journal about their feelings or various ideas, concepts, possibilities, etc. Mindfulness skills and meditation are helpful as both are designed to increase internal attunement. Another effective way to identify and experience your emotions is to talk about them with safe and supportive people.
Learning how to be compassionate and loving towards yourself is one of the most important, but also difficult parts for adult survivors of childhood emotional neglect. That’s because you cannot do something until you’re taught or teach yourself and you cannot do something well unless you practice. The same concept applies to self-love and self-compassion. This is where a qualified therapist can help. So, when you first begin this process yourself or with a qualified therapist, it’s important that you realize that the goal is not to know everything about your feelings from the get-go. The process from learning how to explore, identify, and honor your feelings to transformation of your feelings will take time and that’s okay. As you begin your recovery journey from childhood emotional neglect, it’s enough for you to begin to view your feelings and needs in a positive light. The following statements/affirmations may help:
“My feelings are important.”
“I’m important.”
“It’s okay to feel.”
“Everyone has feelings and that’s okay.”
“It’s healthy to get to know myself and my feelings.”
“It’s okay and healthy to talk about my feelings.”
“It’s okay to need things.”
“It’s okay to ask for things.”
“It’s okay to not like something.”
“It’s okay to have an opinion.”
“I can handle all my feelings.”
“My feelings help me summarize my external experience.”
“Feeling my feelings help me connect with myself.”
#2 Grieving Past Losses
“A trauma is a loss, either real or threatened. A loss may be sudden, gradual, or prolonged. It can be partial, complete, uncertain, or unending. It can occur singly or be multiple and cumulative. Always personal, it may also be symbolic.”¹
The presence of grieving in overcoming childhood emotional neglect is often overlooked, yet an essential parts of recovery. This is because childhood emotional neglect exposed you to losses throughout your life, including (but not limited to):
- Healthy parenting
- Getting needs met
- Healthy emotional development
- Close or meaningful relationships
- Self-esteem
- Expectations, beliefs, hopes
- Parts of self
- Healthy lifestyle, etc.
All losses and omissions create an energetic charge that needs to be released in a healthy and complete way in order to prevent chronic emotional, mental, and physical distress. This includes allowing yourself to fully experience the emotional pain associated with past losses – which were probably denied by the adults in your life when you were a child.
The grieving process constitutes you being able to identify past losses, exploring and experiencing the painful feelings evoked by past losses without trying to change them, and sharing these feelings with safe and supportive people over time. No timeline exists for grief work and your journey won’t mirror anyone else’s. Slowly allowing yourself the space to explore the past and your unmet emotional needs as a child is a great starting point.
Integration of past losses is the goal of grieving. This means that the level of acceptance you reach allows for sustained physical and psychological well-being, including a focus on the present and future and a sense of pleasure for the opportunity/awareness of post-traumatic growth. Integration also signifies a reorganization of a new identity that encompasses your own meaning and restitution for the loss. And when you think of the loss, it isn’t met with pain and blocking, instead with acknowledgment and self-compassion on your part.
#3 Healthy Emotional Boundaries + Healthy Relationships
Healthy boundaries to healthy relationships are like books to libraries – essential components to make something come alive. Your recovery process from childhood emotional neglect will include learning how to set and maintain healthy and strong boundaries with others. Since your tendency is to ignore your own feelings and focus on what others want, you are going to have to implement a practice of again slowing down, attuning to yourself, and checking in with your value system when something is asked of you. Helpful questions to ask yourself are:
- “How do I really feel about it?”
- “Does it align with my value system?”
- “Do I feel comfortable doing it?”
- “Does it go against what I need?”
One important aspect to mention here is that neglectful and traumatic childhood homes do not provide one with a developed sense of what is “normal,” healthy, or appropriate. Unfortunately, this lack of a reference point leads adults to have a high tolerance for inappropriate and unhealthy behavior, deeming their family dynamics as “the way life is.” This also explains why you may find yourself in perpetual toxic or abusive relationships, perhaps feeling like intimate partners mistreating you is “normal.” We don’t know what we don’t know and it’s “hard to know that something is missing if we never had the experience of its presence.” But this cycle can be broken and it may help you to read about healthy vs. unhealthy relationships ².
Keep in mind: “Healthy relationships are open, flexible, allow the fulfillment of some of one another’s needs and right, and support the mental, emotional, and spiritual growth of each person. They are intimate and close, their intensity has a flexible ebb and flow that respects each member’s needs and allows each to grow as individuals. By contrast, unhealthy relationships are closed, rigid, and tend to discourage the fulfillment of one another’s needs and rights. They tend not to support the mental, emotional, and spiritual growth of each person. Little or no ebb and flow of closeness and distance is allowed.”¹
It’s okay to ask for help and accept support from others. It’s also okay to take your time in building trust in relationships. It’s okay to acknowledge that it is going to feel scary to get close to others. One way you can practice healthy sharing to deem who is a safe and supportive person is practicing the “Share-Check-Share” method¹. This simply means that you share slowly with a person you feel initially safe enough and see how they react to what you tell them. You’re looking for the person to be present, non-judgmental, and to offer validation without trying to change you or your feelings. Any judgmental, rejecting, invalidating responses will probably not make you feel safe and may hinder you from sharing with this person again. Listen to yourself. Practice turning within instead of automatically focusing on what someone wants. It’s okay to say ‘no’ if something doesn’t align with your value system. It’s okay to remove yourself from toxic and abusive situations.
#4 Practicing Self-Care & Re-parenting Yourself
As an adult, your inner child holds all the past pain as well as all the other emotions you were unable to express as a child. By attuning to yourself (see #1 above), you will also focus on your needs. Since you have the tendency to be hyper-focused on others’ needs while ignoring your own, this will take practice. You need to pay attention to whenever you tell yourself that your needs don’t matter or that they’re ‘too much’ and instead of allowing these past false beliefs to win, you will instead need to practice healthy self-care. Self-care helps to connect you to your inner child and to really listen to what you need. Contrary to what you have learned, you deserve to take good care of yourself and to feel good physically, emotionally, and mentally. Focusing on physical and emotional aspects of your needs will help in developing an integrated sense of self and a healthy self-concept. We’re talking about healthy eating, regular exercise, quality sleep, open expression of feelings, journaling, engaging with safe and supportive people, etc. Think about the things that allow you to feel soothed and nurtured and do those. It’s okay to feel good.
Sticking to a regular self-care routine will become easier when you devote effort into another essential recovery aspect: re-parenting yourself. This means providing yourself with the emotional acceptance, support, and validation you should have received from your caregivers when you were a little one. You can do this by acknowledging your experiences and internally empathizing with yourself when faced with emotional overwhelm or stress. It’s okay to get stressed out and feel tired, triggered, angry, etc. Tell yourself that it’s okay and that some things take time. It’s also okay for you to feel and express the full spectrum of emotions. Be loving with yourself and talk to yourself in ways you would have wanted your caregivers to talk to you when you were a child. As an adult, you hold all the power in how you treat yourself. Re-parenting places you in a position of control and self-empowerment and helps to attune you to your inner child.
Footnotes:
1 Healing the Child Within – Charles Whitfield (1987)
2 How to Be an Adult in Relationships – David Richo (2002)