The Damage of Emotional Neglect

Experiencing emotional neglect in childhood can be incredibly damaging and leave devastating consequences when our emotional development is neglected. Unfortunately, when there is no physical injury, the damage is often left untreated, and we are left in turmoil. However, we can heal, and there are ways to get what was neglected in childhood.

What is Emotional Neglect?

Emotional neglect occurs when a person’s emotional or attentional needs are disregarded, ignored, minimized, invalidated, or unappreciated. When it happens in childhood, it can have devastating consequences. Emotional neglect can be intentional, unintentional, or unconscious. Often, it is due to parents who never learned to deal with emotions themselves and are unequipped to deal with their children’s emotions. Emotional neglect can be seen as a lack of affection, physical touch, or positive attention, leaving an individual feeling unloved or unwanted.

The Damage of Emotional Neglect

This emotional damage that we bear can result in depression, anxiety or difficulties around sex and relationships. We may be confused about where the difficulties came from. Persistent emotional damage usually comes from childhood, especially early childhood. The care we receive as infants and young children dramatically affects how we relate to others in adulthood. A responsive parent who considers our needs with sensitivity and kindness is life-defining and life-saving. Without this kind of responsive love, we can be wounded for life.

The “Still Face Experiment” shows the distress a child can experience from a few seconds of cold and unfeeling behaviour. However, people who experienced childhood emotional neglect experienced it over years or more of neglect. Studies like this help us understand the origins of our sadness and complexity and that love isn’t a luxury so much as a gateway to survival and sanity. It helps us understand how we have been failed and the reasons for our struggles.

It’s About What Didn’t Happen and the Result of That

When parents don’t respond adequately to their child’s emotions, they convey to their child that their feelings don’t matter. In response, children who experience emotional neglect naturally push their feelings down to keep them from becoming a problem in their childhood home.

Unfortunately, as an adult, you end up living without enough access to your emotions. Your emotions should direct, guide, inform, connect, and enrich you. They should tell you who matters to you, what matters to you, and why. Your emotions are potent guides that should help you navigate the world and survive. Your emotions should alert you to danger and threats.

When you have experienced emotional neglect as a child, the compass you have for navigating the world has become faulty. This results in you struggling to make sense of the world and make healthy choices. You may struggle to know your place in the world, your worth, and who you are. You may live in a state of distress because you don’t know who to trust and if you can trust yourself.

It Prevented Your Healthy Development

The Damage of Emotional Neglect You Experience As a Child

Children who experience childhood emotional neglect by caregivers often struggle with emotional regulation, asking for help, forming healthy relationships, shutting down or feeling numb, and developing a sense of self-worth. They also may feel disconnected from their emotions and have difficulty trusting others or themselves. They may believe their feelings are not okay, lash out to be heard, and experience somatic complaints like headaches and stomach problems.

In the late 1980s, children in Romania in orphanages were given shelter and food but ignored. They were deprived of love, interaction, and normal social development, along with some other instances of trauma. It was found that there was long-lasting harm to their brains, that they could not learn at the same pace as their peers, and that there were other deficiencies from them having missed learning specific skills at certain times in their lives.

Bias Towards Physical Injury Can Cause Further Harm

Unfortunately, the law and society tend to privilege harm to the body. Where physical assault and the damage done are criminal, emotional assaults like verbal abuse and emotional neglect are not. Physical injuries get expert intervention, but when there is emotional harm without bodily injury, the harm done to the brain does not get similar intervention.

While broken bones, when set properly, heal in six weeks, a brain harmed by verbal or psychological abuse may not heal properly or even be recognized as injured. Children who have endured harm to their brains due to emotional neglect and abuse are often criticized or made to feel incompetent. This can create further harm by intensifying their belief that something is wrong with them.

Children who are betrayed and manipulated by adults often feel that they can no longer trust their emotions and instincts. They struggle with knowing who to trust. They don’t trust their capacity to understand reality. Their brain fails to predict and accurately identify threats, safety, and other aspects of reality. This vastly affects them throughout life, and they have trouble maintaining relationships. Life is more distressing than it needs to be.

The emotionally neglected child fails to have a healthy, high-performing brain. Children and youth need to learn how to develop positive, trusting, connected relationships with adults and peers, and this learning hinges on adults who give them positive, healthy attention.

The Damage of Childhood Emotional Neglect You Experience As an Adult

Those of us who were emotionally neglected as children often develop problematic behaviour patterns or coping mechanisms. Any of the following might be indications of emotional neglect in childhood.

Difficulty Expressing and Processing Emotions

Adults who experienced childhood emotional neglect often have difficulties expressing and understanding emotions. Because of the neglect in your early childhood, you may experience struggles in your ability to understand, manage, and nurture the feelings of others and yourself. You may experience deep discomfort or awkwardness when expressing feelings from others or yourself. This may apply to positive (happiness, joy) and negative (anger, sadness) emotions.

Childhood emotional neglect can cause you to avoid emotions altogether in adulthood. You may struggle to identify your feelings or find it challenging to process big feelings. Additionally, you may experience a general sense of “numbness” as a form of self-protection. You may choose to leave a relationship or situation instead of asking for something you need because leaving feels safer than the risk of rejection. You may withdraw or isolate yourself from social or peer groups because you feel different and because you fear being asked to talk about how you feel. It may be a struggle to deal with compliments because you don’t know what to do with them.

People-Pleasing Tendencies

If you were emotionally neglected as a child, you might end up becoming the “caretaker” or “burden holder” of your friends and family. Addressing other people’s emotions and needs allows you to feel worthy, loved, needed, and good enough. However, this can backfire if you focus so much on others that you fail to prioritize yourself.

Trouble Trusting Other People

You may find that putting up walls feels safer than exposing yourself to others who could potentially hurt you. You’re simply trying to protect yourself. If you’ve experienced pain in the past, you might end relationships the moment you feel threatened or avoid relationships altogether. Opening up to others may frighten you, limiting your ability to connect with others. You might even self-sabotage your relationships to avoid feeling abandoned, rejected, or neglected. If you find yourself in close relationships, you may struggle to access or voice your own emotions, which can negatively impact the relationship.

Self-Neglect

You may neglect your feelings and needs because you never learned they are important. You may struggle with self-care and self-compassion, leading to a pattern of self-neglect.

Problems with Self-Esteem

You may experience low self-worth, self-esteem, and lack of self-confidence. If your self-esteem is low, you might write off your own emotions or even let people walk all over you. Low self-esteem often results in struggles with self-compassion and self-love. Over time, emotional neglect erodes self-esteem and self-worth. Unfortunately, feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt can result from chronic emotional neglect.

Maladaptive Coping

People who have experienced childhood emotional neglect often have poor coping techniques as adults. You may have symptoms due to unmet needs in childhood and not having learned how to cope with your own emotions and needs adaptively. Unfortunately, you may attempt to meet those needs in maladaptive ways, such as becoming codependent on people who aren’t good for you or showing people-pleasing behaviours to keep people around. You might also rely on drugs, alcohol, or behavioural addictions (shopping, porn, food, etc.)to get you through difficult emotions.

Feeling Flawed, Misunderstood, and Disconnected

Adults who were emotionally neglected as children may feel chronically disconnected and misunderstood. These feelings can make developing healthy relationships a struggle, and you may feel drawn toward abusive or neglectful romantic relationships. You may have a secret belief that you are somehow inexplicably flawed. You may have a sense of being different from others in some unnameable way. Additionally, you may experience a tendency to feel guilt and shame.

Loneliness and Shutdown

Furthermore, experiencing childhood emotional neglect can lead to a pervasive sense of loneliness, emptiness, and shutting down. You may experience a chronic sense of emptiness or emotional numbness that comes and goes. It may feel like there’s a hole inside of you that you can’t fill.

Distorted Sense of Self

Due to the emotional neglect and lack of acceptance by caregivers, people who endured childhood emotional neglect may experience a distorted sense of self. Whether it is due to manipulations by a caregiver who is supposed to love them or from things the child interpreted due to emotional neglect, it is very damaging. It distorts the sense of self the child should develop as they grow.

Childhood Emotional Neglect Can Make You More Likely to Develop Mental and Physical Disorders

Some of the disorders that you may develop due to childhood emotional neglect may include:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Panic disorders
• Bipolar disorder
• Substance misuse
• Higher risk of suicidal behaviour
• Depression
• Anxiety disorders
• Dissociative behaviours
• Chronic Pain
• Mind-body disorders
• Stress-related disorders

A Faulty Foundation: The Reason Behind the Damage of Emotional Neglect

Childhood emotional neglect is so damaging because the foundation on which our emotional health is based is faulty. Rather than a foundation of worth and acceptance, it is a foundation of a lack of understanding of emotions and not feeling good enough. It is the confusion of what our emotions mean and trying to suppress something that should be beneficial. The damage of emotional neglect penetrates almost every aspect of our lives and can last a lifetime if not addressed.

Pathway to Healing the Damage from Childhood Emotional Neglect

The consequences of childhood emotional neglect can be addressed and changed. Know that you’re not alone. Others have experienced similar experiences and symptoms and have been able to overcome them. Healing is possible. Much healing can happen; you can experience personal growth and improve your self-worth. Over time, you can learn to trust and experience emotional intimacy with the right support system. You deserve to have fulfilling relationships, and you can still get them.

You are not bad, and your emotions are not wrong. They are there because of what you have experienced. Your emotions are there for a reason. You have emotions because they provide essential survival information. Unfortunately, you didn’t have someone who reflected them back to you, taught you that your feelings are welcome and valid, and helped you regulate them. Childhood emotional neglect takes courage to make the effort to heal the wounds. This healing can be done at any age.

In Therapy

Therapy provides the opportunity to explore past experiences, process unresolved emotions, process past trauma, develop healthier coping strategies, and learn better communication skills. You can also learn to identify and label emotions accurately, develop self-compassion and self-acceptance, and set and maintain healthy boundaries.

Out of Therapy

You can prioritize your emotional well-being by caring for yourself, engaging in activities that bring joy and fulfillment, promoting self-awareness, and expressing your emotions.

Healing is In Your Hands

Ultimately, you have the power to change this. You can become emotionally aware, connected, and enriched. You can gain an understanding of how childhood emotional neglect happens, its effects on you, and how to heal. When you understand what’s wrong, you can change the path.

The first essential step is to make an effort to pay attention to your emotions and what you are feeling. This will enable you to learn the emotional skills you’ll need to manage and how to use them. Overcoming emotional neglect depends on giving yourself what your caregivers could not: emotional attention, validation, and care.

Conclusion

The damage of childhood emotional neglect can have devastating consequences and struggles with life as we navigate the world. The consequences can come out in multiple disorders and the struggles to adapt to changing circumstances. However, there is hope, and you can heal and learn what you didn’t learn as a child.