Childhood Emotional Neglect: A Guide For Therapists & Clients

Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) happens when your parents fail to validate and respond to your emotions enough as they raise you.

Growing up this way leaves you with some significant challenges throughout your entire adult life.

As I have said many times before, Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) can be healed. Even beyond that, therapists and laypeople alike are realizing that taking the steps to heal CEN is a powerful way to change your life from the inside.

One of my greatest goals in writing and speaking and teaching about Childhood Emotional Neglect is to give both mental health professionals and CEN sufferers a common language to talk about what failed to happen, the gaps that are left by that, and what it takes to fill them.

This route to healing is both validating and compelling for those who grew up with Emotional Neglect. And more and more therapists are finding that walking their clients through the 4 CEN Recovery Steps is remarkably rewarding work.

For Clients

Looking For a CEN Trained Therapist?

If you are looking for a therapist who is familiar with the CEN concept and is trained in the recovery process, see my Find A CEN Therapist Page. It lists almost 500 licensed therapists located all over the world who have either read my books or have attended one of my CEN Therapist Continuing Education Trainings. And if there are none located in your area, many of the therapists on the list do Skype treatment.

Want Your Therapist to Learn About CEN?

If you are in treatment with a therapist who is not trained in treating Childhood Emotional Neglect, you can share this article with your therapist as a way to introduce him or her to the CEN concept and the kind of work you would like to do together.

About Childhood Emotional Neglect — For Therapists

• Your client may have read self-help books, or even seen other therapists in the past. Nevertheless, he/she has found the awareness of Childhood Emotional Neglect deeply validating, and offering answers not found before.
• If you can join your client in this conceptualization of what is wrong, I believe you will find that the CEN concept also offers you both a meaningful path forward in your work together.
• The primary problem is this: Your client grew up in a non-emotionally-aware family. Even though you are quite likely already aware of this, it is important to acknowledge it as the center of what’s wrong for your client now.
• As a child, your client had to wall off their emotions in order to get by in their emotionally empty home.
• Now, as an adult, your client’s emotions remain walled off. CEN adults do not have enough access to the emotions that should be stimulating, connecting, guiding and enriching them through adulthood. They know that something is not right, but they do not know what it is until they find the explanation of CEN.
• CEN adults struggle with a particular pattern of symptoms: emptiness or numbness, a feeling of separateness, a deep sense of being fundamentally flawed, lack of self-knowledge, and low emotional intelligence.

Free Resources For Therapists

Become a CEN Specialist: You can find many more Resources and Tools For CEN Therapists on the For Therapists Page.

Fill out this Brief Form to apply to become a CEN Specialist and get listed on the Find A CEN Therapist Page.

The 4 Steps of Childhood Emotional Neglect Treatment

The treatment of Childhood Emotional Neglect is a process of 4 steps, all of which build upon each other. When you are aware of the natural progression of these steps you will be able to guide your client through them in a meaningful way.

1. Help your client become aware of the exact way that Emotional Neglect happened in her childhood home. The goal is for your client to understand, on a deep level, what she did not get in her childhood (emotional validation, awareness, and skills), and how it has affected her in her adult life.
2. Break down the wall blocking your client’s emotions so that he can begin to have more feelings. Helping your client break down his wall involves exercises of emotional awareness, plus meditation/mindfulness and monitoring practices that consciously attempt to reach and identify emotions, as well as building the client’s emotional vocabulary.
3. Teach your client how to name, tolerate, manage, express, and use her feelings. As your client’s wall begins to break down, he will begin to feel more variety, complexity, and depth of emotions. This is your opportunity to begin to fill in the emotion skills that he wasn’t able to learn in his childhood home. If your client has read the book, Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, he will be aware of the special structured exercises to help guide him through this. He will need you to learn about them so you can guide him through this process of learning what to do with feelings.
4. Help your client start applying her newfound emotions to strengthen and deepen her relationships. Since your client has lived without enough access to her emotions, her friendships and relationships are likely either too few, lacking in depth, or both. You can now guide your client into the process of inserting her feelings into her relationships and beginning to change them into something more meaningful and resilient.

For Therapists & Clients

CEN Resources To Assist Your Work Together

• • Take the free Emotional Neglect Test to help you identify or confirm CEN.
  • Attend one of my CEN Recovery Retreats. I will walk you through the exercises to break down your wall and feel your emotions, plus teach you the skills you need to recover. My next Retreat is 8/23/19 at the 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley, CA. Sign up soon because space is limited!
  • Download the CEN treatment exercises and the Feeling Word List from the book Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.
  • Download the Worksheets For emotion skills and relationship-building from the book Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships With Your Partner, Your Parents & Your Children.
  • Join the intensive CEN Recovery Program Fuel Up For Life. I designed this intensive program to provide the structure, tools, and information that therapists and clients can use in their work together.
  • Special Note for therapists: I have created a 2 CE Credit CEN Training Overview and a special version of Fuel Up For Life for therapists. Join my CEN Therapists Newsletter to learn how to sign up for them.

CEN Therapist List: Clients can find a CEN trained therapist near them. If you are a therapist, you can request to be added to the list to receive more referrals of CEN folks, which I am sure you will find to be some of the most rewarding people to work with.

Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect: This book presents the concept of CEN in depth to readers, how it happens, why it can be so unmemorable, and how it affects the child, plus many aspects of the recovery process. It also has a special chapter for therapists.

Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships With Your Partner, Your Parent & Your Children: This book is all about how to identify and heal the effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect in couples and families. It also offers lots of specific information for parents on exactly how to emotionally validate and respond to their children. I wrote this book to use as a guide for clients and therapists to go through together. It is especially helpful for Treatment Step 4.

Whether you are a CEN sufferer looking for a therapist who understands you in this deep and meaningful way or a therapist who wants to learn about Childhood Emotional Neglect and how to walk your clients through the 4 Stages of Recovery, there are many answers and resources for you.

One of my biggest goals is to provide a well-trained therapist who is passionate about treating Childhood Emotional Neglect to every man, woman and child everywhere in the world who needs one.