WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT GROWING UP EMOTIONALLY NEGLECTED

Emotional neglect occurs when a child's inner emotional world, feelings, needs, perceptions, and preferences, is consistently unnoticed, unvalidated, or treated as unimportant.

The child learns “what I feel and need doesn't matter, or is somehow wrong.”

This is distinct from overt abuse. Instead of dramatic events, It's an absence of attunement, mirroring, emotional responsiveness, curiosity about who the child actually is.

The Impacts Of Emotional Neglect

Disruption of emotional development.

Children learn to identify, regulate, and trust their emotions through co-regulation with attuned caregivers. Without this, we don't develop:

• The ability to know what it is that what they're feeling

  1. Confidence that our emotions and a trust they are valid signals

  2. Resilence and skills to face emotional intensity

  3. Trust in their own perceptions and needs

Sense of self.

The self forms through being seen. Without our parent mirroring us back to ourselves, children develops:

• A vague, unstable sense of identity

  1. Difficulty knowing what we want, like, or believe

  2. A "false self"... constructed around what gets positive response (humans will naturally abandon authenticity to try to figure out the rules that give us the most access to love and belonging.)

  3. Shame about who we feel we are beneath the protective layers

Attachment security.

The nervous system learns the world is unreliable.

• Develop a hypervigilance to others' emotions (while numb to your own)

  1. Difficulty trusting or depending on others

  2. Either anxious clinging or avoidant independence

  3. A baseline state of mistrust in the body

The Problem

The child adapts to the experience of feeling unseen by:

• Disconnecting from their inner world - "If no one cares what I feel, feelings must not be important"

• Becoming hyper-competent - "If I can't get emotional needs met, I'll meet all my own practical needs"

• Minimizing needs - "I don't need much, I'm fine, I can handle it"

• Focusing outward - Becoming expert at reading and managing others' emotions while ignoring their own

• Self-judgment - Internalising the message that something is wrong with them
  

Adults who grew up emotionally neglected often:

• Function well externally (responsible, capable, intelligent)

• Feel profoundly empty, numb, or disconnected internally

• Don't understand why they feel so bad when "nothing happened"

• Struggle with self-compassion (they judge themselves harshly)

• Have difficulty in intimate relationships (can't articulate needs, feel like a burden, withdraw when hurt)

• Experience chronic low-grade depression or anxiety without clear cause

• Feel like they're "going through the motions" of life

• Have visceral reactions (fear) and blankness to being asked "what do you need?" or "how do you feel?"

The childhood adaptation that allowed survival (disconnecting from one’s inner experience) becomes the source of adult suffering. They're cut off from the very emotional guidance system that makes life feel meaningful and directs authentic choice.

What happened was real, even though it might feel invisible. The evidence is in your adult struggle. Your needs and emotional world are worthy, even though you’ve experienced it not being treated it that way. The emptiness you feel is not a character flaw.. it's the natural consequence of not being emotionally nourished during development.

The healing is NOT about getting over it or moving on. It's about gradually learning to re-inhabit your Self and own emotional experience, to treat your inner world as real, important and valuable, to develop the capacities that should have been built in childhood and reclaim the experience of being a valuable person.