How Childhood Emotional Neglect Can Affect Relationships |
Understanding Child Development
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Emotional disconnection can make relationships feel one-sided and unfulfilling.
You may give a great deal to others while struggling to share your own needs and feelings.
Feeling alone in relationships often comes from being disconnected from your own emotions.
Growing up with your feelings ignored, childhood emotional neglect takes its toll on you. It’s true. In fact, it takes such a lasting toll that I can see its lingering effects decades later in my adult patients.
The Lingering Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect
A lack of awareness of your own feelings, wishes, and needs.
A feeling that you are less important than everyone else.
A massive struggle to talk about and share your own feelings.
Difficulty asking for help and accepting help from others.
A lack of understanding of how feelings work in yourself and others.
Children who grow up with their feelings ignored take a very powerful step to get by in their childhood home. They wall off the deepest, most biological part of who they are: their emotions. That way, they can stop burdening others with their feelings. What a remarkable solution for a child’s brain to create.
But this solution does not come for free. As an adult, your life is greatly affected by it.
The lingering effects above are important parts of the toll of childhood emotional neglect. When your feelings are walled off, you are missing some life ingredients that will have a profound effect on your quality of life.
I know this because I see it in my therapy office every single day.
Whether you........