How to Heal from Emotional Neglect

You can heal from childhood emotional neglect and the consequences of it. Healing starts with awareness, acceptance and grieving what you lost to the emotional neglect. It continues with learning skills to replace what you never received, filling in the missing pieces, and discovering your value and self-identity. You can build a better future for yourself with reduced suffering from your childhood emotional neglect.

What is Emotional Neglect?

Childhood emotional neglect is the failure of your primary caregiver to provide adequate emotional support and nurturing to you as a child. It is subtle and often difficult to detect because it is about what didn’t happen rather than what did happen.

Healing from Emotional Neglect

Because emotional neglect in childhood creates difficulty in understanding emotions and relationships, effectively healing from childhood emotional neglect should include building self-worth, developing appropriate emotion and regulation skills, and forming healthy relationships. While healing from childhood emotional neglect may be difficult, it is possible.

The First Steps in Healing from Emotional Neglect

The first steps in healing from emotional neglect involve awareness, acceptance, and grieving.

Awareness

The first step of the healing process is the awareness that what you experienced was emotional neglect and how it affected you. It is this awareness that powers the rest of the healing process.

Acceptance

It can be difficult to come to terms with the emotional neglect. Acceptance is important for the healing process. Additionally, you need to accept how your experiences are still affecting you. The emotional neglect is not your fault and was out of your control.

Grieving

Part of healing from emotional neglect is grieving what you lost or what you should have had. Grieving not having a parent that supported you emotionally or nurtured you is a part of the process.

Healing from Emotional Neglect – Building a New Future

After you have accepted and grieved your experiences of emotional neglect, the next part of the healing process is learning new skills and building a healthier life.

Self-Awareness

It is important to increase your self-awareness around your emotions and who you are. You can gain self-awareness by paying attention to your emotions, what you enjoy, and what you find yourself reacting to.

Develop and Practice Self-Compassion

Often people who experienced childhood emotional neglect end up being very hard on themselves. Learning to treat yourself with more compassion is important. Picture treating yourself with the same compassion you give to family and friends is a good place to start.

Making self-compassion a practice is important because creating a new habit after years of a different habit takes time to change.

Building Skills – Emotions

When you experience emotional neglect during your childhood, you don’t develop the skills regarding emotions you should have. This can cause problems in how you relate to others and understand behaviours. You can still develop these skills even if you haven’t learned them in childhood.

Building Skills – Regulation

When you experience emotional neglect in childhood, you don’t develop regulation skills from your primary caregiver. Therefore, it is important to learn these skills now. These skills allow you to feel your emotions without allowing your body’s reaction to take over and enable you to bring your nervous system back into regulation after dysregulation.

Engage Your Body and Mind

Ultimately, your body and mind are connected. Your emotions express themselves through your body. Additionally, your body also holds your feelings and trauma. Childhood emotional neglect can involve an unconscious shutting down of one’s emotional and physical responses. It is important in your healing process to engage with your body healthily.

Healing the Wounds of Your Inner Child

Heal Your Inner Child

Your inner child is the part of you that is wounded from the emotional neglect. It is important to recognize and honour that is part of you. This can be done through engaging in activities that bring you comfort and enjoyment.

Write a Letter to Your Childhood Self

Writing a letter to your childhood self where you offer yourself the love, validation, and support you missed can be very healing. Acknowledging the pain and hurt can be healing and help you release lingering shame and self-blame.

Building Your Self-Identity and Self-Worth

Childhood emotional neglect can affect your self-identity and self-worth. You may struggle with feeling good enough and knowing who you are due to the lack of nurturing you received during your childhood. It takes a journey of discovery to find your value, worth, and identity.

Reach Out for Support

Know who you can trust for support, love, and validation and seek them out. Joining a virtual or in-person support group can be helpful to connect with others with similar experiences. Facebook groups with similar experiences can also be beneficial.

Treatment to Heal from Emotional Neglect

When trying to heal childhood emotional neglect, focus on finding the right therapist you connect with and who has experience with the effects of emotional neglect. Once you gain a feeling of safety with the therapist, work to allow yourself to trust the process. Healing and change are often uncomfortable. However, healing is worth the work.

Individual Therapy

Individual therapy offers you an individualized treatment for your specific experiences and struggles with childhood emotional neglect. It can focus on your struggles that you are impacting you the most. It can provide you with skill building to help you manage present symptoms of childhood emotional neglect. Additionally, it can help you explore your identity and how your experiences have impacted you. Your therapist can also provide you with some of the acceptance, validation, and nurturing that you missed in childhood.

For children, art therapy has been found to have significant effectiveness.

For adults, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is effective for treating emotional neglect and processing traumatic experiences. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) can be useful in identifying and challenging unhelpful thoughts and beliefs that developed because of your childhood emotional neglect. Mindfulness-based therapies, like Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), can cultivate awareness, acceptance and emotional regulation, which can be beneficial if you have trouble identifying and managing your emotions.

Family Therapy

Family therapy acknowledges that one person’s struggles affect the entire family system. This approach facilitates members to listen to each other and work together to become a healthy system. Note this type of therapy may not be effective if there are family members who are not willing to be part of the process.

Group Therapy

Group therapy starts with a controlled and safe environment and gives the opportunity for participants with similar experiences to connect, identify, and relate with each other. Additionally, group therapy can decrease feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Parenting Classes

Parenting classes can be beneficial to parents who were neglected in childhood and want to change the pattern. In these classes, parents learn how to support and nurture their children emotionally, what is healthy discipline, and healthy child development.

Conclusion

Healing from childhood emotional neglect starts with awareness, acceptance and grieving what you lost. It continues with learning skills to replace what you never received and filling in the missing pieces. You can build a better future for yourself with reduced suffering from your childhood emotional neglect.