The Emptiness of Emotional Neglect

The most common symptom of childhood emotional neglect is a feeling of emptiness. This feeling of emptiness comes from the emotional needs that were not nurtured. There are things you can do to help fill the emptiness and heal from your childhood emotional neglect.

What Does the Emptiness of Emotional Neglect Feel Like?

Perhaps the most pervasive sign of emotional neglect is a frequent sense of numbness or emptiness. This can impact you in a variety of ways.

Physical Sensations and Feelings

At times you may feel like you are physically empty inside. It could be a literal physical sensation, such as:

• Knot in the stomach
• Tightness in your chest or throat.
• Hole in your chest.
• Pit in your stomach.

Emotional Sensations and Feelings

Other times it can show itself through sensations, images, metaphors, or feelings, such as:

• Sense of emotional starvation
• Vacuum or void inside of you
• Black hole.
• Sense of numbness.
• Detachment from your feelings and the feelings of others

Absence of Skills

When you experience childhood emotional neglect, you fail to develop skills for dealing with and understanding emotions. Your lack of skill may result in you having:

• Difficulty attempting to discern what people expect from you in social interactions and with emotions.
• Difficulty understanding why people behave as they do.
• Struggles with not wanting to feel or appear needy.
• Trouble expressing your feelings, not knowing how you feel, or having a lack of emotion.

The Chaos of Emptiness

The feeling of emptiness can cause a lot of difficulties in your life. You may have a fear of missing out but are unsure what you’re missing out on. This emptiness may quietly erode your joy, energy, and confidence. It subtly and can carry the power to degrade your quality of life.

Some of the chaos that this emptiness can cause includes:

• Struggle with the meaning and purpose of your life.
• Feeling that you are different from other people.
• Feeling that you are alone in the world.
• Struggles with self-identity and who you are in the world.
• Feeling fear and shame around someone leaving even if you don’t like them.
• Struggles with your self-worth and not feeling good enough.
• Feeling like something important is missing from your life or you are uniquely flawed.
• Finding yourself doing something to try to fill the emptiness such as overeating, overdrinking, shopping excessively, or drug use.

The Pain of Emptiness

Emptiness is one of the most uncomfortable emotions. It is the feeling of incompleteness. It’s a feeling that something is missing inside of you, like you are lacking, alone or numb.

What Does the Emptiness of Emotional Neglect Mean?

The emptiness lets you know that something vital is missing. That’s because something vital is missing. Your emptiness is a longing for the love and nurturing you never received. When you don’t receive that acceptance that you are loved as you are, it echoes in your adult self wondering if you are good enough. You crave a human connection that most people get during childhood, but you never got. This is not about being needy, it’s being human.

What Contributes to the Emptiness of Emotional Neglect?

The missing needs and the enforcement of false beliefs around your ability to be loved and accepted contributes to the emptiness of emotional neglect. These are the repercussions of growing up in a home where your emotions were not accepted, responded to, or validated enough.

Emotions are a deeply personal and biological part of who you are. You learn how to react to your emotions based on how your parents reacted to your emotions. If your parents ignored, invalidated, or failed to respond to your emotions, you learn to do that for yourself. Eventually, you adapt to ignoring, invalidating, and failing to respond to your own feelings.

When you become an adult, you are missing the same thing that was missing in your childhood, which is the acceptance, responsiveness, and validation of your own emotions and self. Instead of it not coming from your parents, it is now not coming from yourself.

If you feel emotions, it may be that your emotions are in some way held back, suppressed, or hidden. You may allow yourself to feel emotions only in certain ways that your body interprets as safe. This may mean suppressing certain emotions, like sadness or anger, that are deemed wrong or not okay. However, your emotional world is not free.

Targets for Filling the Emptiness of Emotional Neglect

These targets are useful ideas for some of the areas you can focus on to fill the emptiness of emotional neglect (adapted from Jonice Webb).

Inner Self/Thoughts/Behaviour

• Recognition of what you didn’t get in childhood.
• Grieve what you didn’t receive.
• Emotional awareness and management.
• Value your emotions.
• Self-care and self-compassion.
• Decrease self-blame and self-directed anger.
• Increase self-knowledge.
• Self-acceptance and self-love
• Reclaim the parts of yourself that your parents rejected or ignored.

Relationships

• Increase emotional connections.
• Boundaries as needed.
• Work on trusting others.
• Therapy relationship.
• Share your pain with others.
• Let down your walls.

What Can You Do Fill the Emptiness of Emotional Neglect?

Acceptance and Grieving

The first and most important step is to recognise and accept that your emptiness represents something you missed in childhood. Identify what you missed and grieve it all. Recognize that the emotions that come up are okay and you need to feel them to move forward.

Focusing on Your Emotions

Make an effort to access your emotions. Focus inward and use mindfulness and other techniques to notice your feelings. Accept your feelings are a part of you.

Learning the Emotions and Feeling Skills

You may have missed learning the skills to accept and regulate your emotions when you were younger. However, you can learn these skills now, some of them include:

• Start by tuning in to what you’re feeling and the reasons for it.
• Working on putting your emotions into words.
• Figuring out how and when to express your feelings.
• Regulating and managing emotions.
• Recognizing when your emotional responses are normal compared to over and under-reactions.

You may be able to learn them yourself or may need a therapist to help you get there. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is helpful for the deep, painful kind of emptiness, as it was designed to help you manage your feelings and impulses.

Self-Love

So often the emotional neglect impacted our ability to love ourselves. Learning to love yourself can be the best gift you give yourself. Know that it won’t come easy after years of putting others first or simply neglecting yourself, but you can get there. You may also struggle with believing you deserve love, but you do deserve love. Your self-love and self-acceptance can start to fill the emptiness you feel inside.

Real Love with Others

Real love is the natural affection that someone feels for someone else and doesn’t include any conditions for that care and affection. Know that you were made for love and love is available for you if you open yourself up to it.

Real love is not a transaction. You cannot make it happen, but it happens through you. Real love can happen through friends, intimate others, family, and some religion. Embrace the real love available to you.

Deepen Your Relationships

When you start to feel more, others will notice. As you heal you will be primed for better and greater connection with the people around you. You can be more real and can start taking more risks. Work on being more open with others, being more vulnerable, and sharing more.

Your Emptiness is a Part of You

Your emptiness is an important part of you that represents the old and the past and the potential for your future. Because your emptiness is a void that is looking for something to fill it. You are able to fill it with a new story, new possibilities, and new found emotions.

Ultimately, you can fill the emptiness with new self-knowledge, self-worth, self-care, self-compassion, self-love, and people that you connect with. You can fill it with the good things you find, new meaning, and new purpose.

Conclusion

The emptiness of chronic pain is like an anchor that drags you down. It is the weight of all the nurturing and emotional support that you didn’t get as a child. However, there are ways to fill the emptiness, find connection, and learn the emotional skills you missed. You can create a better life filled with the good things that nurture you.