Childhood Emotional Neglect Therapy for Women

Did your family talk about emotions when you were a child?

Do you find it hard to open up to others? It’s difficult to voice your feelings, and witnessing other people’s emotions isn’t easy either. It’s more comfortable to try to fix things rather than be present with someone else’s emotions.

Perhaps you’re very rational and live in your head. You stay busy to prevent feelings from coming up and when they do, you try to ignore them. You experience shame around crying or being emotional.

Maybe you feel deeply, personally flawed. Intimacy feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and you feel damaged and hopeless. You question what’s wrong with you. Perhaps you felt like or were treated as an adult when you were just a child. You felt responsible for your parents’ or caregivers’ emotions and you carry a deep sense of responsibility as an adult.

Talking about emotions was a rarity throughout your childhood. Maybe you did not experience physical or verbal affection much or at all. Perhaps your feelings were dismissed and you were told to “stop crying” or were labeled as a “bad” child for misbehaving.

You doubt your current or future ability to parent because being emotionally available does not feel natural. It’s difficult for you to envision finding or staying in an emotionally healthy relationship when you feel your default emotional response is shutting down.

Being emotionally neglected can be a devastating experience. Not only can this childhood trauma affect children’s sense of self, capacity to trust, and ability to build healthy relationships, but it can also affect children’s physical health.  The effects of psychological abuse can carry over to one’s adult life. Whether or not this was the intention of your caregivers, feeling unloved or unwanted by a parent is so deeply painful and negatively distorts our assessment of ourselves and the world around us.

What is child emotional neglect?

Child emotional neglect is the parent’s or primary caregiver’s failure to meet their child’s emotional needs during their early years. It involves unresponsive, unavailable, and limited emotional interactions between that person and the child. Children’s emotional needs for affection, support, attention, or competence are ignored.

Child emotional neglect also occurs when the parent or primary caregiver exposes the child to extreme domestic violence, allows the child to engage in maladaptive behaviors, refuses to seek treatment for the child’s emotional problems, or doesn’t provide them with adequate structure.

Examples of emotional neglect may include:

• lack of emotional support during difficult times or illness

• withholding or not showing affection, even when requested

• exposure to domestic violence and other types of abuse

• disregard for a child’s mental well-being

• lack of intervention on the child’s behalf (e.g., allowing behavioral problems to go unaddressed)

• social isolation

• being emotionally unavailable or absent

• ignoring a child

• pushing a child past their mental and physical abilities

A child’s perception of neglect is important. When a child perceives they’re being neglected emotionally, they are twice as likely to develop psychiatric disorders by age 15, including the development of depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Adolescents whose emotions were neglected as a child are more likely to have poor academic performance, substance abuse, risky sexual activity, and suicide attempts.

People who were emotionally neglected as children grow up to be adults who must deal with the consequences. Because your emotional needs weren’t validated as a child, you may not know how to deal with your own emotions.

The most common effects of childhood neglect in adulthood include:

• Anger and aggressive behaviors

• Difficulty trusting and/or relying on others

• Depression

• Discomfort with intimacy

• Emotional unavailability

• Feeling empty or lonely

• Increased likelihood of eating disorders

• Guilt and shame

• Feeling flawed or “different”

Therapy can help to uncover the underlying causes of these symptoms and heal from these painful experiences. We know how to best help our clients using evidence-based models, such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.