3 Ways Emotional Neglect From Childhood Affects Your Adult Emotions
Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) is the silent scourge that hangs like a cloud over countless people’s lives, robbing them of the zest, the warmth, and the connection they should be feeling each and every day.
Childhood Emotional Neglect happens when your parents (perhaps unintentionally) fail to respond to your emotional needs enough when they are raising you.
Yes, that’s all it takes.
When your parents don’t respond to your emotions enough, they send you the powerful, subliminal message that your feelings don’t matter enough. This never-stated-out-loud message in your childhood has an incredible ability to disrupt your adult life in immeasurable ways.
As a child, when you receive the subliminal CEN message over and over, your brain somehow understands the unspoken request to hide your feelings, and somehow, surprisingly, knows just what to do.
It walls off your emotions so that they will not bother your parents — or you. Tucked away on the other side, your emotions almost seem to go away. This may allow you to cope in your childhood home, but as an adult, your walled-off emotions may become a great problem for you.
**Important: Before you read about these problems, I want to tell you that there are answers to all of them. The one good thing about CEN is that all 3 of these effects can be healed.
3 Ways CEN Affects Your Adult Emotions
- You don’t take your emotions seriously. Part of CEN is an important lesson that is false: that your feelings are useless, unacceptable, excessive, wrong, or bad. So when some emotions do manage to leak through your wall, you are likely to distrust them, disavow them, or even belittle them as a sign of weakness. You may even be ashamed of them. Since your emotions are the deepest, most personal expression of your true self, you are actually distrusting, disavowing, and belittling your true self. Over time, this takes a tremendous toll on your self-confidence, self-trust, and self-esteem.
- Emotions that are pushed away or ignored become more powerful. Deep emotions must be accepted, acknowledged, and considered before they go away. When they are walled off or minimized, emotions may seem to disappear. But they do not, they do the opposite. They get stronger. They grow and grow behind your wall, and may leak out at the wrong times, about the wrong things, or perhaps directed at the wrong person.
- You miss out on the subtle variations and depths of feelings that other people enjoy. To get through your wall an emotion has to be “big.” So you may go through most of your hours and days feeling nothing; and then suddenly experience an emotion unexpectedly intensely. But what about all the possibilities in between? Most people use the subtle variations in their emotions to tell them how they feel about things: what matters, what they care about, what they enjoy, like, and dislike. This is incredibly valuable in knowing yourself, making decisions, finding direction, and, most importantly, enjoying the richness of life.
The Solution
A subliminal message gains its power from lurking in the shadows. As long as you remain unaware, your belief that your feelings are useless silently, invisibly runs your life. But fortunately for us, the opposite is also true. When you shine a light on that shadow, and see this buried belief for what it is, you can redefine it as simply this: a false belief from your childhood that is now a problem.
Once you have done this, you have taken control. You can begin to actively take it on and change it. You can replace your old, false, harmful belief with a new, healthy strategy:
My emotions are important, and I will begin to welcome them and learn to work with them.
- Begin to value your emotions, as messages from your deepest self. When you feel your feelings, you are honoring who you are. Not all of your feelings are “right,” and not all of them should be acted upon, but they are all real, important, and a sign of your humanity and strength.
- Start paying more attention to the feelings of the people closest to you. All your life, your CEN message has been undermining your relationships. Paying attention to what others are feeling is a key to everything you’ve been missing so far.
If you work on these steps repeatedly, consistently, and persistently, over time it will make a tremendous difference in your life. You will drive away that cloud that’s been hanging over you, and you will experience the zest, the warmth, and the connection you’ve been watching others enjoy.
Finally, in honoring and living in your deepest self, you will, at last, be home.
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Childhood Emotional Neglect is often invisible and unmemorable, so it can be hard to know if you have it. To find out, Take The Emotional Neglect Questionnaire. It’s free.