Therapy for Childhood Emotional Neglect & Trauma

The consequences of childhood emotional neglect and trauma can bring a lot of pain and suffering. It can be confusing why you react in certain ways. Often, the behavioural patterns you adopted to deal with the feelings that the neglect and trauma evoked and to survive, have their own consequences. Ultimately, the suffering and struggles can drain you, and it’s hard to see the way out.

The Struggles of Emotional Neglect & Trauma

• Patterns of people-pleasing, perfectionism, constant worries, and internal criticism
• Feelings of emptiness and overwhelm
• Consistent feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, and self-blame
• Easily triggered by thing that make you feel unseen, unheard, unnoticed and insignificant
• Struggles with feeling like there’s something wrong with you or that you never can do anything right
• Struggles with low self-worth, low self-value, and low self-confidence
• Struggles with self-identity (knowing who you are and what makes you unique), self-neglect, and asking for help.
• Tension and stress with compliments, positive comments and emotions
• Always being on-edge, hypervigilance, and worries about making mistakes
• Struggles with trusting others and feeling safe enough to be vulnerable with others

The Path Forward

Fortunately, you are an adult now, and many of these strategies were ways you coped in a family system where you had little to no power. You may still instinctively be using those strategies, even though you have more power and control now. But now they’re doing more harm than good.

Fortunately, there are tools and strategies that can help to change the patterns that are common with childhood emotional neglect and alleviate the suffering. We can work together to heal some of the wounds and help you live with more contentment and ease.

Please book a free 15-minute consultation to find out how I can help you or continue reading below.

Who Am I and Why Am I Passionate about Childhood Emotional Neglect and Trauma

I’m Leona Westra and am a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) with lived experience of childhood emotional neglect and trauma. I know the mystifying weight of childhood emotional neglect and how it can be confusing to feel unloved, never good enough, and always striving for something. I know how hard it can be to reach out for help when you can’t put your finger on what is wrong, but you feel this deep dissatisfaction with life.

Still, there are ways to heal the wounded parts inside and feel heard and seen. We can work together to ease the suffering you’re experiencing, overcome your struggles, and start meeting some of the emotional needs you lacked in childhood. We can bring understanding to what you have experienced and turn the page to build you up stronger and freer than before.

I’ve completed extensive training to bring you the knowledge, skills, techniques, and strategies to improve your current challenges and work towards lasting change.

A Safe Environment to be Real About Your Experiences

So often we hide our pain for various reasons (don’t want to be a burden to our friends and family; doesn’t feel appropriate or safe). I provide a welcoming environment where you can be real about how your struggles are affecting you. A space you can be honest enough to feel seen, heard, and validated. A space where we can work through your deepest hidden burden and speak of the toll it takes to reduce the burden you’re carrying.

How I Approach Childhood Emotional Neglect & Trauma

Emotional neglect and trauma in childhood can be uniquely devastating, as those were the years when you form your identity, self-worth, and your sense of safety in the world. Your impressions of yourself and perceptions of the world can become core beliefs you unconsciously live by. Unfortunately, these patterns and beliefs can become ingrained.

Your Suffering is Real

Emotional neglect is about what didn’t happen but should have. It’s the lack of nurturing and acceptance as you are by the people who should have provided that. It’s the comfort you needed, but never received when you were distressed. It can cause you to believe that love must be earned or you aren’t worthy of it.

Childhood trauma is similar. What might not be traumatic to an adult can be devastating and traumatic to a child. These things shape our beliefs about ourselves and the world at a young age. They can shape how we operate in the world and our security with it.

Ways to Heal from Childhood Emotional Neglect and Trauma

Fortunately, there are ways to heal from childhood emotional neglect and trauma. We can understand the circumstances of how those beliefs were formed and use various skills, techniques, and strategies to modify those beliefs and reduce the suffering they are causing in your life. For the beliefs that are stuck in trauma, we can use modalities like EMDR and IFS to process, desensitize, and integrate them. For the patterns that are instinctive but no longer help, we can work on re-training your brain to be less negative as a default.

How Do I Apply My Training and Knowledge to Help You with Your Challenges from Childhood Emotional Neglect and Trauma

Some of the trainings I’ve taken and the techniques I use include:

• Use the relationship we form in therapy to help you feel seen and heard, while healing some of the missing needs and wounds from your childhood.
• Psychoeducation (including knowledge of Attachment, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and Narcissistic Abuse/Antagonist relationships) to normalize some of the consequences of childhood emotional neglect and trauma, and to reduce the shame and burdens you may be carrying.
• EMDR, Internal Family Systems/Parts Work, and other trauma modalities to help you process your trauma, desensitize your traumatic memories, and put your trauma in its place so it doesn’t affect you as much.
• Teach skills (including from CBT, DBT, and EMDR) to help you improve your coping strategies and give you tools to retrain your brain towards a more positive and purposeful mindset
• Mindfulness, Polyvagal Theory and Self-compassion to add techniques and strategies to help calm your nervous system and bring you into a more positive relationship with yourself
• Grief therapy to help you process some of the losses that you have experienced from your childhood, including the grief of not being loved and cared for the way you should have been

You are not alone in this process, and I can guide you through it. I firmly believe we can work together to reduce your suffering and help you get more out of your life.

Specific Aspects of Surviving Childhood Emotional Neglect and Trauma

The journey of healing from emotional neglect is not an easy one, but you can find relief and a reduction of your symptoms and patterns. Healing often involves retraining your brain to think differently and change the beliefs that have kept you in your suffering. These are the beliefs that helped you survive and cope in childhood but are burdening you in adulthood. These patterns are often not something we need to get rid of, instead we need to bring them into a balance that works for you.

Perfectionism and Fear of Making Mistakes

Perfectionism and the fear of making mistakes are common among people with childhood emotional neglect and trauma. We can work on accepting mistakes as part of being human, among other strategies.

Inner Pressure and Harsh Inner Critic

People with childhood emotional neglect and trauma often put a lot of pressure on themselves and have a voice inside that is a harsh inner critic that puts them down and second-guesses their choices. We can build skills to reduce inner pressure and decrease the inner critic’s power.

People-Pleasing and Self-Neglect

People who experienced childhood emotional neglect and trauma often learned to people-please to stay safe or earn acceptance. This can continue into adult relationships and lead to self-neglect when others are constantly put before yourself. We can work together to reduce people-pleasing instincts and to learn how to show yourself love and care.

Emptiness and Overwhelm

Emptiness and becoming easily overwhelmed are hallmarks of childhood emotional neglect and trauma. There seems to be a hole where the love and acceptance you needed as a child was missing. We can work together to fill the hole and help you enlarge your capacity so you don’t get overwhelmed as easily.

Guilt, Shame, and Self-blame

Chronic guilt, shame and self-blame are common struggles with people who experienced emotional neglect and trauma in childhood. You may feel shame or guilt for way longer than the small mistake deserves. You may blame yourself when the blame is shared, or it doesn’t fall on you at all. We can work on strategies and tools to reduce these struggles, so you can live more freely.

Struggles with Self-Identity

Often, people with childhood emotional neglect and trauma struggle with identifying who they are. They may focus on achievements or other external aspects, but being able to identify who they are internally through values and what they want from life can be difficult. We can work together to help you discover what is important to you and different aspects of yourself.

Feeling Invisible, Unseen, Unheard, and Misunderstood

The feeling of being invisible, unseen, unheard, or misunderstood is unfortunately common with people who experienced childhood emotional neglect or trauma. The lack of feeling seen or heard as a child can make you prone to feeling unseen or unheard. I will offer you a space in therapy where you can feel seen and heard. We can work on the trauma that leaves you prone to these perceptions and work to reduce the intensity of these experiences.

Feeling that There’s Something Wrong with You

People who experienced childhood emotional neglect and trauma often feel that there’s something wrong with them. When you are a child, it is often more dangerous to think that your parents aren’t good providers than it is to think that there’s something wrong with you. Our brains often go to the explanation that’s safer and in our control. If we think there’s something wrong with us, there’s something that we can correct or change. We can work on the wound and bring understanding to the belief as something you did as a strategy to survive in a difficult situation. Ultimately, we will work towards reducing the impact on you and freeing you from some of the chains of the past.

Tension and Stress with Compliments, Positive Comments and Emotions

Often, people who grew up with emotional neglect and trauma feel tension and stress when they receive compliments, other positive comments and emotions. Instinctively, you may deflect or rationalize compliments to avoid taking them in because they make you feel uncomfortable. This is because you never received them, and now you don’t know what to do with them. We can work on reframing them so they feel more comfortable, so you can receive them and start accepting the praise others send your way.

Always Being on Edge, Hypervigilance, and Worries about Making Mistakes

Often, people with childhood trauma have trouble relaxing and find themselves always on edge or hypervigilant. This happens because your sense of safety in the world has been diminished or never established in the first place. We can work on desensitizing your threat system so it’s not so sensitive and build up your sense of safety in the world. This will help your nervous system relax at appropriate times and in appropriate situations.

Reduced Self-Belief, Self-Worth, Self-Value, Self-Trust, Self-Confidence, and Self-Esteem

You are more valuable and worthy than you believe. I want to help you see all the good in yourself that you aren’t seeing and help you get to a better future, where you have more contentment and ease in life. We can work together to reduce your suffering, heal the inner wounds, and help you to embrace the person beneath the inner wounds and trauma.

What Results My Clients See

• Feeling more at ease and content in life
• Improved coping and feeling more in control of their lives
• Better boundaries, improved self-care, and feeling better about life.
• Increase in self-worth, self-esteem, and self-value
• Reduction in people-pleasing, perfectionism, and self-critical tendencies.
• Fewer feelings of emptiness, shame, and guilt.
• Increased awareness and knowledge of why they feel as they do.
• Increased self-love and self-compassion
• Decreased anxiety, worries, and stress

Take the Next Step and Get More Out of Your Life

Please Book a Free 15-minute Consultation to Find Out How I Can Help You

Related Blog Posts

• What is Emotional Neglect?
• Signs of Childhood Emotional Neglect
• Did You Experience Childhood Emotional Neglect?
• How to Heal from Emotional Neglect
• The Emptiness of Emotional Neglect
• What is a Sense of Safety?
• The Damage of Emotional Neglect
• How Your Christian Faith Can Be Used to Treat Emotional Neglect