Was I emotionally neglected as a child?

Do you agonise over what you should have said or done, rehashing it long after everyone else has moved on?

Does saying ’no’ feel almost impossible, and asking for help even harder?

Deep down, do you carry a quiet sense that “something’s wrong with me” even though you can’t point to anything terrible that ever happened to you?

Nothing needed to happen to you. The wound is in what didn’t happen.

What are the signs of childhood emotional neglect in adults?

I’m writing this list using ’we’, because some intuition or feedback brought you to this page, and because I’ve lived every one of these myself. I hope it helps you feel a little less alone in it all.

• We doubt ourselves. We overthink, rehash, and need to talk it through, A LOT, trying to find the ’truth’ or reassure ourselves.
• We keep busy. It’s how we manage racing thoughts and any uncomfortable feelings that surface.
• Saying ’no’ feels impossible. Being needed lets us feel a little important, if not quite loved.
• We are people pleasers. If someone is upset, we immediately wonder what we did wrong.
• We never quite feel enough. So we hide behind roles and masks, or just hide.
• We feel criticism keenly, and can be really reactive to it. We try harder, or we give up trying altogether.
• We are fiercely independent. We prefer to cry alone. Closeness can feel uncomfortable.
• We struggle to trust, and will often reject others first, before they can reject us.
• Anxiety is the undertone of our lives. Unless we can be perfect, it’s not worth the risk.
• We feel flat, empty, numb, all used up, without fully understanding why.
• We distract: scrolling, binge-watching, over-eating, over-drinking, anything that fills the emptiness or avoids being present.
• We can’t own our talents. Imposter syndrome is familiar, and boundaries are just plain confusing: walked all over one day, impenetrable the next.
• We say sorry a lot, and feel bad when we finally do speak up.
• We beat ourselves up. Our internal critic is relentless.
• We cling to crumbs of love in relationships, because a crumb feels better than nothing. (If that one landed, you may want to read Am I Codependent, or Just a Kind, Caring Partner?)
• We are extremely loyal and protective of our parents, often insisting, “but my childhood was good”.

Yes, we can have cPTSD. And yes, we often develop gut issues, chronic conditions and autoimmune disease, our bodies proving that deeply internalised narrative: there IS something wrong with me.

But the only thing ’wrong’ with us is that we ache to have a voice, and to be loved and accepted as we use it.

Deep inside we feel “we are never enough”, yet more often it is, we didn’t get enough nurturing love.

How does childhood emotional neglect affect adult relationships?

I think it’s fair to say that everyone who seeks relationship counselling has some form of attachment trauma. What they don’t always realise is how their earliest experience of relationship is playing out in their present one. We are usually the very last to see what was programmed into our young unconscious brain. A client whose mother could never be pleased becomes hyper-vigilant to his partner’s slightest mood change. A client whose immigrant parents worked every waking hour finds depending on her partner for comfort unbearable, she’d rather isolate and cry alone. A client whose father drank and lied can’t stop checking her partner’s phone, even though he’s done nothing wrong. A client raised by a ’super-mum’ finds herself married to a man who tells her she’s too sensitive and too hard to live with, and believes him, because she’s heard it all her life. Brad Yates describes self-sabotage as a form of self-love that was programmed wrongly, and I would agree. Your sabotaging patterns are simply trying to protect you from more of the pain you knew as a child.

But a protecting way of being will never create the emotional connection you yearn for.

(If those relationship patterns feel uncomfortably familiar, it’s worth knowing that they can also make you more attractive to an abuser, and that emotional abuse doesn’t need a raised hand.)

What kind of therapy helps with childhood emotional neglect?

I find that trauma-informed relationship therapy is the most comprehensive way to heal. Using my somatic protocol Tapping into Relationships — eft²®, I guide couples to empathically hear the childhood experiences now playing out between them, and to reframe the sabotage as desperate efforts to hold onto the relationship.

In therapy, we turn protecting behaviours into connecting behaviours.

And if you’re not in a relationship, or prefer individual counselling, I weave together Tapping (EFT), Havening, Internal Family Systems, Interactive Drawing Therapy and Sand Tray work, journalling, and loving-kindness meditation, all within the safety of a warm therapeutic relationship, to help you calm your nervous system, give voice to your wounded younger parts, and finally begin to speak your needs.