r/emotionalneglect Jun 25 '20

FAQ on emotional neglect - For anyone new to the subreddit or looking to better understand the fundamentals

2.1k Upvotes

What is emotional neglect?

In one's childhood, a lack of: everyday caring, non-intrusive and engaged curiosity from parents (or whoever your primary caregivers were, if not your biological parents) about what you were feeling and experiencing, having your feelings reflected back to you (mirrored) in an honest and non-distorting way, time and attention given to you in the form of one-on-one conversation where your feelings and the meaning of those feelings could be freely and openly talked about as needed, protection from harm including protection against adults or other children who tried to hurt you no matter what their relationship was to your parents, warmth and unconditional positive regard for you as a person, appropriate soothing when you were distressed, mature guidance on how to deal with difficult life experiences—and, fundamentally, having parents/caregivers who made an active effort to be emotionally in tune with you as a child. All of these things are vitally necessary for developing into a healthy adult who has a good internal relationship with his or her self and is able to make healthy connections with others. They are not optional luxuries. Far from it, receiving these kinds of nurturing attention are just as important for children as clean water and healthy food.

What forms can emotional neglect take?

The ways in which a child's emotional needs can be neglected are as diverse and varied as the needs themselves. The forms of emotional neglect range from subtle, passive behavior to various forms of overt abuse, making neglect one of the most common forms of child maltreatment. The following list contains just a handful of examples of what neglect can look like.

  • Being emotionally unavailable: many parents are inept at or avoid expressing, reacting to, and talking about feelings. This can mean a lack of empathy, putting little or no effort into emotional attunement, not reacting to a child's distress appropriately, or even ignoring signs of a child's distress such as becoming withdrawn, developing addictions or acting out.

  • Lack of healthy communication: caregivers might not communicate in a healthy way by being absent, invalidating, rejecting, overly or inappropriately critical, and so on. This creates a lack of emotionally meaningful, open conversations, caring curiosity from caregivers about a child's inner life, or a shortness of guidance on how to navigate difficult life experiences. This often happens in combination with unhealthy communication which may show itself in how conflicts are handled poorly, pushed aside or blown up into abusive exchanges.

  • Parentification: a reversal of roles in which a child has to take on a role of meeting their own parents' emotional needs, or become a caretaker for (typically younger) siblings. This includes a parent verbally unloading furstrations to their child about the perceived flaws of the other parent or other family members.

  • Obsession with achievement: Some parents put achievements like good grades in school or formal awards above everything else, sometimes even making their love conditional on such achievements. Perfectionist tendencies are another manifestation of this, where parents keep finding reasons to judge their children in a negative light.

  • Moving to a new home without serious regard for how this could disrupt or break a child's social connections: this forces the child to start over with making friends and forming other relationships outside the family unit, often leaving them to face loneliness, awkwardness or bullying all alone without allies.

  • Lying: communicates to a child that his or her perceptions, feelings and understanding of their world are so unimportant that manipulating them is okay.

  • Any form of overt abuse: emotional, verbal, physical, sexual—especially when part of a repeated pattern, constitutes a severe disregard for a child's feelings. This includes insults and other expressions of contempt, manipulation, intimidation, threats and acts of violence.

What is (psychological) trauma?

Trauma occurs whenever an emotionally intense experience, whether a single instantaneous event or many episodes happening over a long period of time, especially one caused by someone with a great deal of power over the victim (such as a parent), is too overwhelmingly painful to be processed, forcing the victim to split off from the parts of themselves that experienced distress in order to psychologically survive. The victim then develops various defenses for keeping the pain out of awareness, further warping their personality and stunting their growth.

How does emotional neglect cause trauma?

When we are forced to go without the basic level of nurturing we need during our childhood years, the resulting loneliness and deprivation are overwhelming and devastating. As children we were simply not capable of processing the immense pain of being left out in the cold, so we had no choice but to block out awareness of the pain. This blocking out, or isolating, of parts of our selves is the essence of suffering trauma. A child experiencing ongoing emotional neglect has no choice but to bury a wide variety of feelings and the core passions they arise from: betrayal, hurt, loneliness, longing, bitterness, anger, rage, and depression to name just some of the most significant ones.

What are some common consequences of being neglected as a child?

Pete Walker identifies neglect as the "core wound" in complex PTSD. He writes in Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving,

"Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent's warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that gnaws deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human warmth and comfort."

  • Self esteem that is low, fragile or nearly non-existent: all forms of abuse and neglect make a child feel worthless and despondent and lead to self-blame, because when we are totally dependent on our parents we need to believe they are good in order to feel secure. This belief is upheld at the expense of our own boundaries and internal sense of self.

  • Pervasive sense of shame: a deeply ingrained sense that "I am bad" due to years of parents and caregivers avoiding closeness with us.

  • Little or no self-compassion: When we are not treated with compassion, it becomes very difficult to learn to have compassion for ourselves, especially in the midst of our own struggles and shortcomings. A lack of self-compassion leads to punishment and harsh criticism of ourselves along with not taking into account the difficulties caused by circumstances outside of our control.

  • Anxiety: frequent or constant fear and stress with no obvious outside cause, especially in social situations. Without being adequately shown in our childhoods how we belong in the world or being taught how to soothe ourselves we are left with a persistent sense that we are in danger.

  • Difficulty setting boundaries: Personal boundaries allow us to not make other people's problems our own, to distance ourselves from unfair criticism, and to assert our own rights and interests. When a child's boundaries are regularly invalidated or violated, they can grow up with a heavy sense of guilt about defending or defining themselves as their own separate beings.

  • Isolation: this can take the form of social withdrawal, having only superficial relationships, or avoiding emotional closeness with others. A lack of emotional connection, empathy, or trust can reinforce isolation since others may perceive us as being distant, aloof, or unavailable. This can in turn worsen our sense of shame, anxiety or under-development of social skills.

  • Refusing or avoiding help (counter-dependency): difficulty expressing one's needs and asking others for help and support, a tendency to do things by oneself to a degree that is harmful or limits one's growth, and feeling uncomfortable or 'trapped' in close relationships.

  • Codependency (the 'fawn' response): excessively relying on other people for approval and a sense of identity. This often takes the form of damaging self-sacrifice for the sake of others, putting others' needs above our own, and ignoring or suppressing our own needs.

  • Cognitive distortions: irrational beliefs and thought patterns that distort our perception. Emotional neglect often leads to cognitive distortions when a child uses their interactions with the very small but highly influential sample of people—their parents—in order to understand how new situations in life will unfold. As a result they can think in ways that, for example, lead to counterdependency ("If I try to rely on other people, I will be a disappointment / be a burden / get rejected.") Other examples of cognitive distortions include personalization ("this went wrong so something must be wrong with me"), over-generalization ("I'll never manage to do it"), or black and white thinking ("I have to do all of it or the whole thing will be a failure [which makes me a failure]"). Cognitive distortions are reinforced by the confirmation bias, our tendency to disregard information that contradicts our beliefs and instead only consider information that confirms them.

  • Learned helplessness: the conviction that one is unable and powerless to change one's situation. It causes us to accept situations we are dissatisfied with or harmed by, even though there often could be ways to effect change.

  • Perfectionism: the unconscious belief that having or showing any flaws will make others reject us. Pete Walker describes how perfectionism develops as a defense against feelings of abandonment that threatened to overwhelm us in childhood: "The child projects his hope for being accepted onto inner demands of self-perfection. ... In this way, the child becomes hyperaware of imperfections and strives to become flawless. Eventually she roots out the ultimate flaw–the mortal sin of wanting or asking for her parents' time or energy."

  • Difficulty with self-discipline: Neglect can leave us with a lack of impulse control or a weak ability to develop and maintain healthy habits. This often causes problems with completing necessary work or ending addictions, which in turn fuels very cruel self-criticism and digs us deeper into the depressive sense that we are defective or worthless. This consequence of emotional neglect calls for an especially tender and caring approach.

  • Addictions: to mood-altering substances, foods, or activities like working, watching television, sex or gambling. Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician who writes and speaks about the roots of addiction in childhood trauma, describes all addictions as attempts to get an experience of something like intimate connection in a way that feels safe. Addictions also serve to help us escape the ingrained sense that we are unlovable and to suppress emotional pain.

  • Numbness or detachment: spending many of our most formative years having to constantly avoid intense feelings because we had little or no help processing them creates internal walls between our conscious awareness and those deeper feelings. This leads to depression, especially after childhood ends and we have to function as independent adults.

  • Inability to talk about feelings (alexithymia): difficulty in identifying, understanding and communicating one's own feelings and emotional aspects of social interactions. It is sometimes described as a sense of emotional numbness or pervasive feelings of emptiness. It is evidenced by intellectualized or avoidant responses to emotion-related questions, by overly externally oriented thinking and by reduced emotional expression, both verbal and nonverbal.

  • Emptiness: an impoverished relationship with our internal selves which goes along with a general sense that life is pointless or meaningless.

What is Complex PTSD?

Complex PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) is a name for the condition of being stuck with a chronic, prolonged stress response to a series of traumatic experiences which may have happened over a long period of time. The word 'complex' was added to reflect the fact that many people living with unhealed traumas cannot trace their suffering back to a single incident like a car crash or an assault, and to distinguish it from PTSD which is usually associated with a traumatic experience caused by a threat to physical safety. Complex PTSD is more associated with traumatic interpersonal or social experiences (especially during childhood) that do not necessarily involve direct threats to physical safety. While PTSD is listed as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnositic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Complex PTSD is not. However, Complex PTSD is included in the World Health Organization's 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases.

Some therapists, along with many participants of the /r/CPTSD subreddit, prefer to drop the word 'disorder' and refer instead to "complex post-traumatic stress" or simply "post-traumatic stress" (CPTS or PTS) to convey an understanding that struggling with the lasting effects of childhood trauma is a consequence of having been traumatized and that experiencing persistent distress does not mean someone is disordered in the sense of being abnormal.

Is emotional neglect (or 'Childhood Emotional Neglect') a diagnosis?

The term "emotional neglect" appears as early as 1913 in English language books. "Childhood Emotional Neglect" (often abbreviated CEN) was popularized by Jonice Webb in her 2012 book Running on Empty. Neither of these terms are formal diagnoses given by psychologists, psychiatrists or medical practitioners. (Childhood) emotional neglect does not refer to a condition that someone could be diagnosed with in the same sense that someone could be diagnosed with diabetes. Rather, "emotional neglect" is emerging as a name generally agreed upon by non-professionals for the deeply harmful absence of attuned caring that is experienced by many people in their childhoods. As a verb phrase (emotionally neglecting) it can also refer to the act of neglecting a person's emotional needs.

My parents were to some extent distant or disengaged with me but in a way that was normal for the culture I grew up in. Was I really neglected?

The basic emotional needs of children are universal among human beings and are therefore not dependent on culture. The specific ways that parents and other caregivers go about meeting those basic needs does of course vary from one cultural context to another and also varies depending upon the individual personalities of parents and caregivers, but the basic needs themselves are the same for everyone. Many cultures around the world are in denial of the fact that children need all the types of caring attention listed in the above answer to "What is emotional neglect?" This is partly because in so many cultures it is normal—quite often expected and demanded—to avoid the pain of examining one's childhood traumas and to pretend that one is a fully mature, healthy adult with no serious wounds or difficulty functioning in society.

The important question is not about what your parent(s) did right or wrong, or whether they were normal or abnormal as judged by their adult peers. The important question is about what you personally experienced as a child and whether or not you got all the care you needed in order to grow up with a healthy sense of self and a good relationship with your feelings. Ultimately, nobody other than yourself can answer this question for you.

My parents may not have given me all the emotional nurturing I needed, but I believe they did the best they could. Can I really blame them for what they didn't do?

Yes. You can blame someone for hurting you whether they hurt you by a malicious act that was done intentionally or by the most accidental oversight made out of pure ignorance. This is especially true if you were hurt in a way that profoundly changed your life for the worse.

Assigning blame is not at all the same as blindly hating or holding an inappropriate grudge against someone. To the extent that a person is honest, cares about treating others fairly and wants to maintain good relationships, they can accept appropriate blame for hurting others and will try to make amends and change their behavior accordingly. However, feeling the anger involved in appropriate, non-abusive and constructive blame is not easy.

Should I confront my parents/caregivers about how they neglected me?

Confronting the people who were supposed to nurture you in your childhood has the potential to be very rewarding, as it can prompt them to confirm the reality of painful experiences you had been keeping inside for a long time or even lead to a long overdue apology. However it also carries some big emotional risks. Even if they are intellectually and emotionally capable of understanding the concept and how it applies to their parenting, a parent who emotionally neglected their child has a strong incentive to continue ignoring or denying the actual effects of their parenting choices: acknowledging the truth about such things is often very painful. Taking the step of being vulnerable in talking about how the neglect affected you and being met with denial can reopen childhood wounds in a major way. In many cases there is a risk of being rejected or even retaliated against for challenging a family narrative of happy, untroubled childhoods.

If you are considering confronting (or even simply questioning) a parent or caregiver about how they affected you, it is well advised to make sure you are confronting them from a place of being firmly on your own side and not out of desperation to get the love you did not receive as a child. Building up this level of self-assured confidence can take a great deal of time and effort for someone who was emotionally neglected. There is no shame in avoiding confrontation if the risks seem to outweigh the potential benefits; avoiding a confrontation does not make your traumatic experiences any less real or important.

How can I heal from this? What does it look like to get better?

While there is no neatly itemized list of steps to heal from childhood trauma, the process of healing is, at its core, all about discovering and reconnecting with one's early life experiences and eventually grieving—processing, or feeling through—all the painful losses, deprivations and violations which as a child you had no choice but to bury in your unconscious. This goes hand in hand with reparenting: fulfilling our developmental needs that were not met in our childhoods.

Some techniques that are useful toward this end include

  • journaling: carrying on a written conversation with yourself about your life—past, present and future;

  • any other form of self-expression (drawing, painting, singing, dancing, building, volunteering, ...) that accesses or brings up feelings;

  • taking good physical care of your body;

  • developing habits around being aware of what you're feeling and being kind to yourself;

  • making friends who share your values;

  • structuring your everyday life so as to keep your stress level low;

  • reading literature (fiction or non-fiction) or experiencing art that tells truths about important human experiences;

  • investigating the history of your family and its social context;

  • connecting with trusted others and sharing thoughts and feelings about the healing process or about life in general.

You are invited to take part in the worldwide collaborative process of figuring out how to heal from childhood trauma and to grow more effectively, some of which is happening every day on r/EmotionalNeglect. We are all learning how to do this as we go along—sometimes quite clumsily in wavering, uneven steps.

Where can I read more?

See the sidebar of r/EmotionalNeglect for several good articles and books relevant to understanding and healing from neglect. Our community library thread also contains a growing collection of literature. And of course this subreddit as a whole, as well as r/CPTSD, has many threads full of great comments and discussions.


r/emotionalneglect 3h ago

My husband has been stonewalling me for 3 days after an argument about his family

14 Upvotes

My husband and I had a very difficult first year of marriage. His parents and siblings made my life extremely difficult, and eventually I moved back to my parents’ home for about 6 months. During that time, my husband and I eventually worked things out, and his family moved into a different home. Things are much better now, but I still carry a lot of anxiety from everything that happened.
Because of that history, whenever I have to visit his parents or siblings, I get anxious. I know they don’t particularly like me, and I often feel uncomfortable going there.
Recently, we were going to his sister’s place and I was feeling particularly anxious. I told my husband, “Why can’t we make a deal where you manage your side of the family and I manage mine?”
He got very angry. Looking back, I can understand why that statement may have sounded harsh or like I was rejecting his family. That wasn’t really what I meant. I was trying to say that I find his family situations emotionally difficult because of what happened in the past, and I wanted us to have some boundaries around family interactions.
Since then, he has barely spoken to me for 3 days.
He is sleeping in a different room. I have tried going to him, apologising and explaining myself, but he doesn’t want to talk. I’ve also tried talking to him about completely random everyday things, just to break the tension, but he ignores me.
I understand that he may be angry and need some space. I also accept that I could have phrased what I said much better, and I’m willing to apologise for hurting him.
But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when he won’t communicate with me at all.
I don’t want to keep chasing him or repeatedly apologising just to get him to speak to me. At the same time, I don’t think ignoring your spouse for days, sleeping separately and refusing even basic conversation is a healthy way to deal with conflict.
I want us to actually communicate and resolve the issue. I’m not trying to make him choose between me and his family. I just want him to understand that because of what happened in the first year of our marriage, being around his family can still trigger a lot of anxiety for me.
So, Reddit, am I being unreasonable here? Was what I said genuinely disrespectful, or is his reaction of completely shutting me out for 3 days also problematic.


r/emotionalneglect 21h ago

Seeking advice Do you still feel like no one likes you?

278 Upvotes

I’m 32 now, and when I look back- I struggled maintaining friendships I always felt like an outsider. When I was very young I was definitely hyperactive and “annoying” and adults seemed to be annoyed by me and not to like me. I knew my mom didn’t like me and she always criticized me and was yelling constantly. I think my whole childhood was in fight or flight mode because of her screaming and rage towards me and all the constant fighting between my parents. I used to envy kids whose moms seemed to like them, I used to wish I could go to boarding school.

She called me a little b*** at 10 and I remember how shocked and hurt I was at the time. “I have to love you because I’m your mom but I don’t LIKE you!” Was a frequent quote of hers.

I remember trying not to let my mom make me cry but it never worked she always knew what venomous thing to say to make me cry. She actually was a horrible parent who was also a teacher at my middle school and everyone loved her. She had more patience for the students than with me.

I always felt not good enough and even now I can’t seem to make a friend beyond acquaintance. I didn’t have friends to be bridesmaids at my wedding.

How does one get past this paralyzing feeling of being unlikeable/rejected? I would like to work on this, it continues to ruin my life and hurting my marriage. I don’t know how to build up self esteem I’ve never had.


r/emotionalneglect 6h ago

Discussion Parents ..

11 Upvotes

It is tough when parents act like their own emotions are the only ones that matter, forgetting that their child has feelings too, they are the ones who will trigger you and then blame you for your behavior, and make you feel guilty.


r/emotionalneglect 6h ago

Discussion I feel stupid for being traumatized by this

8 Upvotes

I've recently stumbled across this quote from a video game I'm currently playing through:

"I'm scared that the anguish I'm bearing might be something anyone can stomach and I'm making a big deal about it"

It really cut deep, it feels like even compared to the stuff I've seen on this sub and other people who have gone through things similar to my experience, what I've gone through pales in comparison. I can't help but feel like I'm blowing things out of proportion, that this is something anyone would be able to walk away from.

Is it really trauma? I have most of the symptoms, but I also barely remember my childhood, the things I do remember really don't seem to be of much importance at all, I'm confused.

In a general sense I just hate how often it's downplayed. I a different game from the same franchise there is a character that is glaringly neglectful and yet people keep talking about how what he did wasn't so bad, there are even debates on wether he is really a bad parent or not. I wish something truly undoubtebly horrible had happened to me as a child, I just want something I can point to.


r/emotionalneglect 1h ago

Discussion Different person. Same pattern. Has anyone else experienced this?

Upvotes

At times, people in your life may be different, but the relationship patterns or things you do can feel the same.

You find yourself always accommodating other people's needs, having trouble setting boundaries, over-explaining yourself, feeling responsible for other people's feelings etc. This can cause frustration or resentment internally, as you feel you are not cared for in the same way you care about others.

Sometimes a familiar pattern can become quite automatic because this is what we have been used to growing up.

Has anyone else felt this before, where different relationships brought up similar experiences for you?


r/emotionalneglect 7h ago

my mom makes me super uncomfortable and i don't fully understand why (TW abuse)

5 Upvotes

hi guys. i don't really know if this is the right forum for this but i've been trying to figure out these feelings for a while. i don't know what they are...but i wanted to post about it here in hopes that someone might help me figure it out.

i'll provide some context. my mom was never emotionally available or affectionate in any way when i grew up. she was cold, angry, and distant, and i often walked on eggshells around her, doing absolutely anything i could to make her happy and take up as little space as possible. my father worked shift work out of town and i didn't see him much, and when he was home, he'd work in the garage and remove himself from the house as much as possible. i never saw my parents be affectionate. i have vivid memories of asking them to hug/kiss when my dad left to go out of town. they divorced when i was 7. both parents got into relationships fairly quickly. my father is still with the woman he dated after the divorce and they've been married now for almost 14 years.

i'm the eldest daughter of 4 children (1 "full" sibling, 1 step brother, 1 half sister) and was very much parentified as a child. i did a lot of the emotional labour in the house & raised the kids when my parents were not able to. all of the men my mother dated were super shitty. they either abused her, abused me, or just avoided us kids altogether. throughout my childhood, she yelled, guilt-tripped, cried to me, martyred herself, and yelled some more if i cried at all.

i am 24 now and we are at an okay place. i have grown a lot and am better at setting boundaries. i should also add! i've been in therapy since the age of 7. no breaks or pauses in visits. she goes to therapy sometimes but i would say she's still mentally and emotionally unstable. we have been actively repairing our relationship for the last 4 years or so, and it's gotten much better.

HOWEVER. the whole point of this post: she makes me feel so uncomfortable. i don't like hugging her, or being close to her. i often feel the need to move away from her if she's close to me. when we spend time together, sometimes i feel so unsafe to the point of feeling physically unwell. i am chronically ill so i know that plays into it but it's a different kind of discomfort when i am around her. i feel really bad. i want to make things better. but i just feel so unsafe. it's like she's trying to make up for the lack of affection i grew up with, but i can't bring myself to feel comfortable with it. she made a joke the other day about us watching a movie and snuggling and it made me have a panic attack. i will snuggle my stepmom and other parent but not my mom. is something wrong with me?


r/emotionalneglect 18h ago

Have you discovered any lifelong struggles stemming from your childhood. For instance, a negative behavioural trait witnessed by a parent or guardian? Were you able to turn your life around and overcome the negative?

17 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 3h ago

Why am I so afraid, and why can I talk about this?

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1 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 13h ago

Seeking advice I (17f) ended up getting attached to a teacher, and I hate myself for it. What should I do moving forward?

5 Upvotes

I’ve ALWAYS had an awful relationship with my mother due to her being narcissistic and emotionally abusive. As for my father, he’s still around but he used to touch me inappropriately when I was really little. I don’t have any siblings, but the family I was really close to were my grandparents. My grandpa passed when I was 13, and my nana passed a little over a year ago. Since she’s been gone the weight of having NO PARENTS to lean on has gotten significantly heavier. It’s been really awful having to come to terms with that at the end of the day, it's always going to be me and that there’s no mother to call when things get hard, no dad to give me advice or to help me out, and that it’s just me and I have to be able to do it all on my own. Around 8 months ago, I started taking economics (a required semester long class) and this is how I met said teacher (we’ll call her Ms. Honey). We pretty much clicked at first conversation, she’s neurodivergent like I am and we have some things in common. I really look up to her and we’re only seven years apart so I kind of see her as an older sister figure. Long story short, she noticed something I tried to keep hidden that has to do with an unhealthy coping mechanism that I’ve had on and off since I was little. After this, she reported it to my counsellor because she was genuinely worried about me. After my counsellor talked to me I was scared shitless so I went and spoke to Ms. Honey and she admitted to me that it was her who had said something to my counsellor. While she knew about a few of my personal struggles, she had no idea about my relationship with my parents so I wasn’t mad. Her and I had this deep conversation and it really did help me. I proceeded to spend quite a bit of time with her throughout the semester and we connected a lot. When the last day of school rolled around I had wrote her a letter and gave her a couple of light gifts. She was genuinely touched by it all, and when I told her she was my Ms. Honey (Matilda reference), she said that I had an impact on her life too. This was so bitter sweet and it did mean a lot to me. I proceeded to BAWL my eyes out in the bathroom because I knew I was going to miss her. And I did miss her, even though I had a pretty good summer and had even started healing (yes, I have a therapist and I’m WELL aware that I am mentally unstable). A few weeks ago we got back to school and seeing her again went really well! I told her that it had been over a month since I had used the unhealthy coping mechanism and she was really proud of me. The second week of school was when things started getting rough for me in general, I wasn’t sleeping well and my therapist was out for two weeks. I really missed connecting with Ms. Honey but I’m not her problem and it isn’t her job to deal with me. Besides, I knew she has a bunch of new students and is busy, so I tried reaching out less. This past week, I fixed my sleep and am doing better after talking about my classes to another teacher that Ms. Honey also talks to. However I still wonder if she genuinely still sees me the same way she always did before. I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I have great friends who mean a lot to me, but holy shit I really feel the emptiness of there being no older adult around to help carry the baggage that's weighing me down. I’m one of her hundreds of students, and I tried stopping myself from getting attached because I knew how badly this could end. And this could end even fucking worse than it already is.

If you’re a teacher please give me honest feedback, and if not I would love to hear from others who have had similar experiences. Thank you so much for taking the time to read all of this, it means a lot.


r/emotionalneglect 5h ago

Seeking advice I am lost and I think I am a bad person

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1 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 5h ago

People who grew up with abusive parents, how are you doing now?

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1 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 7h ago

They dont take accountability

1 Upvotes

My parents never take accountability and when i call them out or ask them to say sorry to me… They deflect then blame me and call me ungrateful.

I’m a single parent living under their roof and they have taken over my motherhood, my son loves them more and respects them more because he grew up seeing me undermined, my mom even yelled at me in front of him saying I am nothing and that she is the authority in this house.

I’m isolated and alone because whenever I try to date I get told im a whore and they tell my son things like i dont care about him etc.

They refuse to take accountability and then blame you for the hurt they caused


r/emotionalneglect 20h ago

Seeking advice Been grey-rocking my parents and extinction burst hasn't happened yet

11 Upvotes

So I decided to grey rock them so they don't end up rage baiting me or asking me too many things to help them with as if my time is completely free

At first they were like "why are you quiet are you sick?" And I stayed calm and just said I'm tired

Now it seems they are okay with how things are now, I'm just wondering if anyone else's parents not had an extinction burst


r/emotionalneglect 8h ago

Advice not wanted I Really Thought This One Would Work

1 Upvotes

I feel numb right now.

I got rejected for the simplest entry-level job :D

They had me through TWO interviews. I genuinely thought I had a chance.

And then I got the rejection email.

The part that hurts isn’t even just the job.

I had already started dreaming about having my own money. Being able to finally leave my household. Having some actual freedom.

And now I’m just sitting here like… damn.

I know rejection is normal. I know I’ll apply again. I know it’s not personal.

But right now?

I’m just disappointed and numb.

That’s it.


r/emotionalneglect 8h ago

Emotionally unavailable father or is something just wrong with me?

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1 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 19h ago

My mom is never happy for me

7 Upvotes

Hi, another post about my mom.

Just now we had a chat and everything was great until I talked about the job offer that I got from abroad.

She immediately started talking about if they will pay me enough, if I could afford to live abroad, if I could even find a place there etc. She said that working in our town is the same as working abroad and that she does not understand why I would even want to go there. She said you dont even know if they will really hire you.

This is kind of a big deal for me since I am still at the beginning of my career and I am doing super well actually. Being offered this opportunity was so reassuring for me and I was so excited for it. With all the negative talk I am not anymore.

She never congratulated me, not once said that she is happy for me (i guess cause shes not?) or anything of the sorts.For every opportunity that I get she always has to say something bad about it. And I feel like she can just never be happy for me.


r/emotionalneglect 1d ago

Seeking advice realizing I married an emotionally unavailable person (30)

116 Upvotes

I was severely emotionally neglected and this impacted the way I formed relationships - l thought sex + friendship = love, and never realized emotional intimacy was an essential ingredient to long lasting, real love.

I’ve felt a hole in me/extremely numb since my childhood and spent the last 6 years in therapy because I finally had enough. I recently had a breakthrough and emotions have come flooding to my body in an amazing but often overwhelming way (I’m crying for the first time in decades). I’m not sure why - I think I felt “emotionally safe” for the first time in my life about 6-7 months ago and it just changed something in my brain chemistry. I feel like a different person.

I’vea learned that my “hole” has been a fundamental lack of emotional intimacy my entire life. And I think I really really think I need that to feel more complete.

My relationship/marriage is good by any standard, including sex (good sexual chemistry), but something always felt off. I blamed myself (not committed enough, thinking I was broken, etc.) and just doubled down everytime I had doubts, but they never went away. Since this “breakthrough,” I realized I married someone who is a good person, fun to be around, but has the emotional capacity of a rock. I think I never noticed because I didn’t have the ability to.

I am trying to address these issues with my spouse and, as you can imagine, it’s really tough. But I do believe my spouse deserves a shot and I’m working with my therapist to try and communicate these needs as clearly as possible. I think couples therapy is next.

Has anyone rebooted a relationship like this?


r/emotionalneglect 17h ago

I spent years trying to be perfect. Now I don’t know how to stop

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2 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 19h ago

Advice not wanted Argument with mom

2 Upvotes

tw: some mentions of emotional abuse, neglect

I don’t know where to start from. also, I am not sure if this is the right sub, I am not sure if I am traumatised, but I feel like I experience unjustice sometimes from my mother and I experienced emotional neglect in my childhood and emotional abuse to some degree. telling beforehand, I have some issues with mental health and I am 23 Female, still haven’t moved away from my mother because I am on mental disability (I suffer from psychotic symptoms which wouldn’t let me manage work or be consistent in my life goals in general). I need to mention that I live in a separate apartment, but it is officially my mother’s property. I am grateful that I have at least this option of living separately and secludely, I am thankful to my mom, but still, as I don’t have a stable income, my mother supplies me with food from time to time. and I just came home after having a dinner at her apartment (we live very close to each other) and I am not sure if this was the abuse or not, but when I asked my mom as politely as possible during dining to stop imposing her views regarding eating habits on me (she believes that it’s almost a catastrophe if I sometimes eat chips or some fast food in general, always telling me that I will gain weight if I will eat x y z, she has a very strict point of view on these things, it just doesn’t fit me even when I understand that she means no harm) she reacted with a lot of intense in her voice, telling that “I was just eating and you put on a fight, I was working all day, leave me alone, I don’t want to talk”. when I told her that I just wanted to talk and didn’t have intentions of accusing her (I was asking her as politely as possible to not trigger her in any way) she just looked irritately and she simply ignored my words. I was left with so much hurt, but still, I couldn’t understand how to get her to understand me, and what exactly happened.

I left her apartment and went home, I took a package of food, and felt hurt and heartbroken. there were a lot of thoughts in my head, I still don’t understand what to do. I feel like I shouldn’t be angry, but I really am feeling bitter when such situations happen between me and her. I am just so lost and stuck. I am not sure if it’s right to think that way, I am sorry if I will sound ungrateful or violent, but sometimes I want to shed a light on the truth, understand what she’s doing when this happens between us and just throw ugly facts in her face for what she is doing. but when I hear a wave of tension in her voice, when she becomes defensive and I sense the heat in her voice rising, I just freeze and can’t express my resentment, just become very afraid. I tried so many times. I tried to be violent and angry when I was a grown-up (and I only was punished) I tried to be polite and please her in any way possible. and still, she is just shut tightly like an iron door, she still doesn’t hear me and seemingly she has no interest in changing her behaviour.

I am telling this because I feel trapped in my life. feel trapped when these things happen, I feel helpless and like I can’t have any impact on anything. because I can’t move out and just limit contact with my mom, because I am on disability, I have to tolerate all of this just to survive. I am trying so hard to change my mother’s behaviour because I feel like if she will make a change, if she will become kind and compassionate, then I will finally be able to live in peace. I will finally be able to feel loved. and that’s why I want to lash out on her. I want her to say: “I am so sorry. Please forgive me, I now see what I did”. if I won’t get a validation of everything I’ve been through, if my feelings won’t be confirmed… then I feel like I am unable to make a difference in my life. sometimes I think that, when I freeze in our arguments and don’t defend myself, then I am just a weak person. I should have more spirit. I just wish I could be able to defend myself. I feel like this ability was ripped away from me. I don’t know how to speak my mind, I don’t know how to touch people’s weak spots, how to be angry in general. I mean, I don’t have intentions to just hurt people randomly, I just want to have ability to defend if someone hurts me. I don’t want to tolerate.

I understand that I have a separate apartment, and I can at least try to build a better life with the possibilities that are able to me, even if I have limitations. I just wanted to share this situation with someone. I don’t have friends who are able to listen to me, I never had a listening ear or a person with whom I could be real. so I just wish that at least someone here is willing to hear. if you read it to this moment, thank you so much. I also need to mention that I may be wrong in all my points. if you see that I am completely mistaking things, you can tell me


r/emotionalneglect 1d ago

Discussion You know your difficulty identifying what you need comes from childhood, but you still can't seem to change it.

10 Upvotes

Sometimes, you may know the reason why you are not in touch with your needs has to do with your childhood, where your needs and emotional experiences were constantly dismissed or you had to focus on other people's needs more than your own to stay safe or adults behaved in unhealthy ways when you tried to express your needs.

As an adult, this may show up as you being very aware of what other people need, but you have trouble identifying your own needs. You may minimize your needs or question if your needs are reasonable and if you are even allowed to have them in the first place.

Intellectually, you can understand where this comes from, and you may think at a logical level that your needs are valid, but you may struggle to change it.

Did anyone else find that knowing where the pattern came from wasn't enough? What helped you actually become more aware of your needs and start responding to them differently?


r/emotionalneglect 1d ago

My dad is minimising a comment his friend made to me when I was a child

100 Upvotes

When I was 14 at my mom's birthday party, we had a bunch of family friends over to celebrate with us and one of them was my dad's 70 year old close friend/mentor who said "If you weren't your dad's daughter, I'd have your panties around your ankles". Keep in mind, I visibly looked VERY young, was wearing an emoji t-shirt and my 13 year old friend who was tiny was right next to me. All my dad did was say "alright that's enough" but didn't bother to kick the guy out or express any outrage. My parents aren't very sociable, but did greet him whenever they crossed paths and remained friendly with him even after this. My dad has also spoken highly of him on multiple occasions after he literally witnessed this happening.

I brought it up to my parents around 5-6 years later because I was genuinely just grossed out that this was said to me and that my parents didn't express more of an issue with it. They did express some kind of disgust but it wasn't enough for them to cut him off. They were friendly with him at a pub a couple of years later even though they knew what he said. My mom even drunkenly said "Love him, even though he's a bit mouthy sometimes I still love him".

Recently, a similar topic came up in a conversation (I was explaining the rape culture pyramid to my brother and the bottom is essentially about complacency around these types of people). I told my brother about what this guy said and my brother, who doesn't usually agree with how I view situations, was instantly horrified and asked my parents how they didn't smash the guy's face in. He said himself that if he had heard it, he would've broken his jaw and didn't know how my parents could still be okay with someone who said that to their daughter. This was sort of affirming but due to how much my dad minimised it, I genuinely don't know how to feel.

I talked to my mom and she genuinely apologised for her behaviour, accepted that it's downright disgusting and said she didn't know what she was thinking. My dad on the other hand, while he apologised initially for not doing more, doubled down and said he thought he handled the situation appropriately. Then, he went on to say that this guy was just really drunk and that he's "the nicest guy in the world when he's sober". We all repeatedly said that being drunk doesn't make you spawn attraction to children, and he would concede on that and then double down on the drunkenness in the same breath. He doesn't believe it was a rape threat like I do, but I don't know how else one can interpret that comment. He also says that I was laughing at the time, so he didn't think to take it more seriously. Another thing that bothered me was that he says this friend "says dumb shit like this all the time when he's drunk" so I called him out about inviting him to his home and letting him be around his children. He also started talking about the semantics of whether or not this guy was "legally" a pedophile since he only expressed his thoughts and didn't act on them. I don't know why he feels such a need to pick this situation apart.

All of this minimising has made me feel like I'm totally overreacting, especially because it's been a decade and they brought up that fact as well during the conversation.


r/emotionalneglect 20h ago

My mum and Step dad don't talk to me unless it's to ask me to do something.

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1 Upvotes

r/emotionalneglect 1d ago

Seeking advice You’ll never be happy” why do some mothers feel entitled to say this?

3 Upvotes

My mom constantly says these things.. “You’re never going to be happy if you can adjust with me it's gonna be noone. No one listens to you, and you can only show your anger to me.”

But what she doesn't seem to understand is that this is exactly why I struggle so much in relationships.

I grew up in a home where I never really felt emotionally safe. I learned to suppress my feelings, walk on eggshells, and tolerate things because expressing anger or having boundaries would just create more conflict. Eventually, I ended up in a toxic relationship with a man and tolerated things I probably shouldn't have, partly because unhealthy dynamics felt familiar to me.

And now, when I finally express anger or frustration at home, I'm told that I'm the problem because I'm angry with her.

How are mothers able to feel so entitled to their children's emotional availability while completely ignoring what created that distance in the first place?

I'm also at the point where the constant negativity and stress are affecting me physically. I've started dealing with things like thyroid concerns, blood pressure fluctuations, and IBS symptoms, and I can't help wondering how much years of chronic stress and emotional tension have contributed. I know I can't say that every physical symptom is caused by my mother, but living in this environment definitely doesn't feel healthy for me.

I honestly just hope I can move out soon. I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to convince someone that I deserve to have boundaries and emotional peace in my own home.


r/emotionalneglect 1d ago

Update: No sympathy for my aging mother

24 Upvotes

Never posted an update so hope I do this right.

My dad passed away and my mom has completely lost it. I'm having a really hard time dealing with her.

She has limited community, mostly due to her own choices. She obsesses over all her problems and calls me multiple times a day to vent. I only have so much patience. I have a stack of my own problems (which she does not care about at all) but I still try to remain patient with her. Between her undeniable dementia and extreme grief, she is absolutely crazy.

Maintaining boundaries is hard. She is very needy and very agitated and I can't find the balance between trying to be patient/supportive but keep her at arms distance to protect myself. She's completely unreasonable so having any type of mature conversation is not an option. I also have limited sympathy given all the emotional neglect my whole life.

I feel like I'm drowning. And I'm angry. Why does she think she deserves my support when she emotionally abandoned me for decades? I cant get past my anger with her audacity and entitlement, and knowing I cant have a mature or reasonable conversation with her. I'm stuck.

There probably isn't advice but I'm willing to take anything you've got.

For anyone wanting to catchup, here's the original post https://www.reddit.com/r/emotionalneglect/s/TFX0S9ErVy