The Painful Secret Many People Live With: The Fatal Flaw

Legions of good people live through decades of their lives harboring a painful secret. They guard it as if their life depends on it, not realizing it’s not even real.

It’s a secret that is buried deep inside them, surrounded and protected by a shield of shame. A secret that harms no one, but does great damage to themselves. A secret with immense power and endurance.

It’s their Fatal Flaw.

A Fatal Flaw is a deep-seated, entrenched feeling/belief that you are somehow different from other people; that something is wrong with you.

Your Fatal Flaw resides beneath the surface of your conscious mind. Outside of your awareness, it drives you to do things you don’t want to do and it also stops you from doing things you should do.

Rooted in your childhood, it’s like a weed. Over time it grows. Bit by bit, drop by drop, it quietly, invisibly erodes away your happiness and well-being. All the while you are unaware.

The power of your Fatal Flaw comes partially from the fact that it is unknown to you. You have likely never purposely put yours into words in your own mind. But if you listen, from time to time you may hear yourself expressing your Fatal Flaw internally to yourself or out loud to someone else.

I’m not as fun as other people.

I don’t have anything interesting to say.

When people get to know me they don’t like me.

I know that I’m not attractive.

No one wants to hear what I have to say.

I’m not worthy.

I’m not lovable.

Your Fatal Flaw could be anything. And your Fatal Flaw is unique to you.

Where did your Fatal Flaw come from, and why do you have it? Its seed was planted by some messages your family conveyed to you, most likely in invisible and unspoken ways.

The Flaw                                                             The Roots

The Good News

Yes, there is some good news. Your Fatal Flaw is a belief, not a fact. A fact cannot be changed, but a belief most certainly can.

How to Defeat Your Fatal Flaw

1. Recognize that you have it and that it’s not a real flaw. It’s just a belief/feeling.
2. Find the words to express your own unique version of “something is wrong with me.”
3. Identify its specific cause in your childhood. What happened, or didn’t happen, in your childhood to plant the seeds of your fatal flaw?
4. Share your Fatal Flaw with another person; your spouse, a trusted friend, a family member, or a therapist. Describe your belief, and talk about it. 
5. Watch for evidence that contradicts your Fatal Flaw. I assure you it has been there all along. But you have been blinded to it by your Fatal Flaw.
6. Track your Fatal Flaw. Pay attention, and take note of when it “speaks” to you.
7. Start talking back to your Fatal Flaw.

I am fun to be with. I am interesting. People like me more as they get to know me. I am attractive, and I have important things to say. I am just as lovable as anyone else.

Your Fatal Flaw is actually neither fatal nor a flaw. It’s not even real.

It’s powered only by your supercharged belief that it is both.

To learn much more about Fatal Flaws, how they happen, and how to defeat yours, see the book, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

A version of this article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author.

Childhood Emotional Neglect: How to Stop Your Fatal Flaw in its Tracks

The Fatal Flaw: A deep-seated feeling that something is wrong with you. You are missing something that other people have. You are living life on the outside, looking in. You don’t quite fit in anywhere.

If you grew up with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), chances are, The Fatal Flaw is at work in your life.

If you pushed your feelings away as a child, you now lack access to them as an adult. You sense deep down that something is missing (it’s your emotions).  And your life lacks the richness, connection and meaning that your feelings should be bringing to your life. This is the basic cause of the Fatal Flaw. Most people who have it are not aware of it, and this gives it incredible power.

The 7 Key Effects of Your Fatal Flaw

1. You are not in touch with your gut feelings, so you don’t trust your gut (even though for the majority of CEN folks, their gut is most often right).
2. It undermines your confidence to take risks.
3. It makes you uncomfortable in social situations.
4. It keeps many of your relationships at a surface level.
5. It makes you question the meaning and purpose of your life.
6. It makes you fear that if people get to know you well, they won’t like what they see.
7. Therefore you are quite fearful of rejection.

6 Ways to Take Control of Your Fatal Flaw

1. Become aware of your Fatal Flaw: This will take away its power.
2. Understand that your Fatal Flaw is not a real flaw. It’s only a feeling.
3. A feeling can be managed, so start to manage it. Pay attention to when you feel it, and how it affects you.
4. Put it into words and tell someone about it.
5. Override it every time that you possibly can. Do the opposite of everything your Fatal Flaw tells you to do.
6. Start breaking down the wall between you and your feelings. Welcome them as the vital source of information, guidance, and richness that they are (even the painful ones).

Yes, your Fatal Flaw is powerful. But so are you. You have a great deal of personal power that is being drained by your Fatal Flaw.

So today’s the day. Declare war on your Fatal Flaw, and start using your weapons of awareness, your emotions, your intellect, and your words.

This is a battle that you can win. I promise.

To learn more about the Fatal Flaw, what caused it and how to overcome it, see the book Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

A version of this article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author.

This Pandemic is a Good Time to Face Your Social Anxiety

Are you secretly relieved that social distancing is giving you a built-in excuse? Few social demands, fewer social gatherings, canceled group activities?

Remember how you used to feel when you were invited somewhere? All kinds of things went through your head as your discomfort grew:

How many people will be there?

I prefer one-on-one.

I’d rather be alone.

I don’t like being in a group.

I don’t want to go.

Continue reading

Treating CEN

Childhood Emotional Neglect is often subtle, invisible and unmemorable.

Why?

Because it’s not something a parent does to a child.
It’s something the parent fails to do for the child.

Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN):

A parent’s failure to respond enough to the child’s emotional needs.

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It’s a parent’s failure to notice, respond to and validate a child’s feelings.

Notice that nothing traumatic has to happen… nothing dramatic has to happen.

The parent fails to notice… fails to ask… fails to name the child’s feelings.

That’s all it takes.

This subtle form of CEN has been overlooked in a very big way.

And by the time a person with CEN has become a client, it can be difficult to get through to them and help them.

Why?

Because they are so disconnected they have a very hard time identifying their emotions. They tend to value the opinions others have of them much more than their own. And it’s challenging for them to put themselves first, unable to let go of self-criticism and belief that they are damaged goods.

Some of them have such a shell around them, it’s hard to crack.

And quite often they don’t recognize themselves as suffering from CEN.

This can make therapy difficult…

They believe they should be “fine” because they had a roof over their head and their parents didn’t abuse them - downplaying CEN and its consequences as if only severe physical or sexual abuse counts.

Or they can’t accept that CEN has occurred without it being “damning” of their parents. Maybe they feel too much conflict between their anger towards their parents and their loyalty and love for their parents…

So they get overwhelmed and leave therapy when you can see that they are not ready…

And even if they do acknowledge their CEN, it’s hard to keep them long enough to help them through the process of healing….

Helping them overcome their fear of accessing and feeling their emotions and helping them through the “messy” process of learning how to express them…

Seeing the amount of work or time it may take, they can get discouraged and leave too soon.

It can be hard to help them stay motivated to change beyond the initial symptom relief.

That’s why I created…

Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect: An Overview

This 2-hour online training course will help you make the concept of Childhood Emotional Neglect understandable and nameable for your clients.

In this training you’ll discover how to:

• Identify CEN in your clients and help them name the one thing they have felt was wrong with them their entire lives.
• Help your clients see the particular ways in which their parents failed to emotionally validate them (in a way that is free from blame).
• Guide your clients through the 5 Stages of CEN Recovery, including breaking through the wall that blocks off their emotions, and identifying and feeling their feelings.
• Help them put themselves first, even if they have low self-worth and difficulty connecting with their emotions.
• Help them remain motivated to heal beyond initial symptom relief.

The goal of CEN Therapy is to help clients value their own feelings, learn how to listen to them and use them, genuinely feel and believe that their needs and feelings matter, and accept that they are worth the effort of care. This gives them the ability to balance their relationships and feel closer to their loved ones, feeling more grounded, supported and connected in their own lives.

Do you have clients that:

• Appear high functioning from the outside but they have a vague feeling of dissatisfaction or disconnection on the inside?
• Are thoughtful, but not emotional or insightful?
• Are depressed?
• Have a hard time accessing or talking about their feelings?
• Have a presenting problem, but you feel something more is wrong deep down inside?
• Claim to have had a great childhood yet they are struggling as an adult?
• Feel hard to reach or are well defended? Maybe you even feel bored when you sit with them because you can’t connect?
• Are anxious?
• Want to stop treatment as soon as they get a bit of relief from the initial symptom?
• Have been to therapy before, claiming it helped, but didn’t fully address what was wrong with them?
• Are highly self-critical?
• Are out of touch with their own wants and needs?

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These are all signs that you are working with a CEN client.

After practicing psychology for over 20 years and as the bestselling author of the first 2 books on the subject of CEN, I’ve found that those are the most common problems that CEN clients present in therapy.

After taking this training…

You will be able to offer answers to many of your clients who have suffered their entire adult lives looking back on a childhood, thinking “nothing went wrong, I had a fine childhood. I don’t know what’s wrong with me” and blaming themselves for their problems.

You’ll be able to help them take the blame and the weight of guilt off of them for being “flawed” and give them answers.

You will have a shared vocabulary to talk with your clients about what didn’t happen in their childhood.

And you’ll be able to make the concept of childhood emotional neglect understandable and nameable for your clients, especially if they are parents and worried about passing CEN on to their children.

Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect: An Overview

This training will help you view Childhood Emotional Neglect through a fresh lens.

In this training we will cover:

• How to identify CEN in your clients even if they can’t recall it.
• The 5 stages of CEN treatment and how to apply it in your practice.
• How treating CEN allows you to target the roots of many disorders, diagnoses and presenting problems such as depression and anxiety.

CEN is the Root Cause of Many Disorders

I have observed that CEN is the root cause of many presenting problems such as depression and anxiety.

As we all know, people with CEN are not in touch with their feelings. In fact, they are walled off from their feelings and those feelings get pooled up on the other side of their wall – un-felt, un-managed, un-processed, un-worked-through, and even un-named. And those feelings turn into a soup of emotion that drives them.

I have seen that if those feelings are more of sadness or anger, they are more likely to become depressed. If they have to do with fear, then they are more likely to become anxious.

Helping your clients access those feelings on the other side of the wall – to name them and feel them – you are taking that pool of emotions away, lightening their load, and giving them the skills to start paying attention to themselves and their feelings more. By listening to their emotions and processing them, clients can prevent that emotional build up that is out of their control, leading to anxiety and depression.

And you can learn how to do that in this course.

Imagine being able to help your clients name the one thing they have felt was wrong with them their entire lives. Imagine giving them that turning point, that ability to name their CEN. Because once they know what’s wrong, you can give them the ability to fix it.

CEN Clients learned as children that emotional expression is bad. Imagine helping them understand that emotional expression is what connects people and keeps relationships healthy and strong.

Imagine helping your clients to take up more space in the world and feel good about that. Starting to see who they are, feel who they are, love and accept who they are and be who they really are in the world. Helping your clients share more, talk more, be more themselves when they are with the people in their lives. And help them let go of any exploitative relationships.

This course is approved for 2 CE credits
Click here for more information

Licensed or certified graduates of the Treatment of Childhood Emotional Neglect Overview course can be featured as a referral source on our website for people seeking a CEN therapist in their area. This serves as a great marketing and networking tool for therapists as well as a referral resource for CEN clients.

Supporting You After the Course

I also want to give you further support as you work with CEN Clients. My goal is to give you everything you need to start helping clients with their CEN.

Bonus #1
CEN Worksheets

I have received a lot of requests from therapists asking me to provide worksheets that they can use to help them with their CEN clients.

So, to fulfill that request, I have put together several worksheets. These worksheets will make it easier for you to use what you have learned in the Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect Course. Some are worksheets you can give directly to your clients to help them access their feelings and find the words to talk about them. Other worksheets will walk you through exercises you can give your clients to work through the various steps of healing CEN.

Bonus #2
Course Transcripts

After you have taken the course and you are working with your CEN clients, you may have flash-backs about what was said about the different stages of healing CEN and think to yourself: “Now how did Dr. Webb put that exactly?”. Or maybe you learn better through reading or taking notes.

That’s why I have had the course transcribed. This way, you don’t have to look through all the videos to find that one piece of information.

Bonus #3
How to challenge and overcome the natural defense system built into CEN

There are 7 types of blocks or defenses that will stand between you and your CEN client, making it difficult to move them forward or even keep them in treatment.

They are:

• The fatal flaw: fear of being seen and known
• Refusal to see parents’ failure
• Counter-dependence
• Difficulty acknowledging and owning the true impact of their parents' failure to validate their emotions
• Challenges with self-discipline and motivation
• Fear of what’s on the other side of their wall
• The ultimate connector: experiencing a feeling together

I’ll walk you through each one and give you strategies you can use to challenge and work through those defenses.

Once again, here is what is included:

• The 5 stages of CEN treatment and how to apply it in your practice: [Value $600]
• 2 Continuing Education Credits (by taking a separate test)
• Eligible to be featured as a CEN Therapist referral source (and receive referrals from me) [Value $100+]
• Bonus #1: CEN Worksheets [Value $100]
• Bonus #2: Course Transcripts [Value $120]
• Bonus #2: How to challenge and overcome the natural defense system built into CEN [Value $150]

That makes the total value of this course $1,070.

However, I want to help as many therapists, coaches, and other practitioners who work with CEN clients as possible.

So I have made this program available for just $137.

Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect: An Overview

One Payment 
$137

Register Now!

100% satisfaction guarantee

I’m confident you’ll be happy with the Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect Training.

However, if you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase, simply contact us a support@drjonicewebb.com within 30 days and we’ll give you a full refund. No questions asked.

Thank you,
Dr. Jonice Webb

Here’s what people are saying

“I found the training extremely helpful and informative. Dr. Webb is an excellent speaker who gives extremely detailed step-by-step guidance on how to help break through the CEN client’s resistance to acknowledging their difficulty and to admitting that their parents did not offer them emotional nurturing, listening or validation. This training gives you the tools you need to treat and diagnose CEN clients. And Dr. Webb even offers her handouts for use with the clients. It is the kind of training all practitioners hope for but rarely get as it provides practical tips for treating CENs.” - Elaine Krieger

“I learned much more about CEN then I expected too, and was pleased at the specifics for working with clients with CEN.” - Stephanie Claus

“How to explain CEN was very helpful as it is so hard to explain without sounding blaming.” - Diane Gibson

“I really liked that it was organized. It allows me to remember the information. I also especially loved that Dr. Webb gave clear ideas about the psychotherapeutic tasks, such as helping the client learn about their CEN and how it developed. Giving me the actual words to say helped me understand what we're trying to accomplish. For example, saying ‘Did your parents know you were going through this at the time?’" - Michael Schlein

“The training was incisive and in-depth, a very clear portrait of the CEN client, the stages of treatment and therapeutic tools. I especially loved the specificity of suggestions and questions to ask at each stage--how to creatively approach the Wall, how to encourage emotions during sessions, mirroring. I liked that it was free of jargon and clearly and logically presented. The other thing that deserves mention is Dr. Webb’s voice modulation and ability to speak at a comfortable rate. The value for me was that it was a deeper and more detailed treatment model.” - Geri Gourley

“Up until now, I have worked with about 60 core feelings. Your exhaustive breakdown of the core feelings is extremely helpful. I have always worked with a ‘Here and now I Feel’ concept to urge clients toward owning their feelings and becoming mindful. The introduction of meditation is something I have not used in my sessions but, use personally. I intend to try this technique. I found that addressing smiling is an approach I never used. I've always addressed it as a co- dependent reaction and never looked behind it.” - Robert Rozsay

“The training provided very specific language to use when explaining concepts to our clients. As always, your concepts and ideas are explained and presented very well and easy to relate to.” - Monika Yen

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The 3 Most Tragic Childhood Emotional Neglect Symptoms In Adults

Why does it matter if you grew up with your feelings ignored (Childhood Emotional Neglect)? To you, it may not seem to be all that important. So let’s talk about the 3 most tragic Childhood Emotional Neglect symptoms in adults.

Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN): A subtle, often invisible childhood experience that happens when your parents fail to notice or respond to your feelings enough.

In all of my years as a psychologist, I have never seen anything so seemingly innocuous, yet so powerfully damaging as the simple failure of your parents to notice or respond to what you are feeling as they are raising you. It’s a “simple failure” that becomes a part of your everyday life forever.

Growing up with your emotions disregarded automatically communicates a silent, but powerfully effective, message to your deepest self: as a child, you accept, on a very deep level, that in your childhood home, your feelings do not matter. As a child, you must wall off your own feelings so that you will never appear sad, hurt, needy or emotional to your parents.

Going through life ignoring and undervaluing your emotions has some very predictable effects on your life as an adult. I have seen the pattern play out in the lives of countless lovely, otherwise healthy people. Always the same silent struggles, the same unanswered questions, the same deep sense of being different from everyone else.

When you grow up with Childhood Emotional Neglect, you end up experiencing the worst of two worlds. First, you are disconnected from your feelings, which should be stimulating and guiding you. You are living without enough access to this marvelous, powerful, energizing feedback system: your emotions.

Second, your walled off emotions remain unaddressed and unmanaged. Those blocked emotions just sit there, unattended, roiling and waiting, perhaps emerging at times which seem to make little sense to you. Or maybe seldom emerging at all, but instead causing you to make poor decisions or develop health problems, like headaches or back pains, or worse.

In the book Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect I identified 10 struggles of the emotionally neglected adult. They are feelings of emptiness, counter-dependence, unrealistic self-appraisal, poor self-compassion, guilt and shame, self-directed anger/self-blame, the Fatal Flaw, difficulty nurturing self and others, poor self-discipline and alexithymia.

If left unaddressed, all these silent struggles work together to cause some powerful effects on your life.

The 3 Most Tragic Childhood Emotional Neglect Symptoms In Adults

1. You will never get what you want unless it’s by chance

Not knowing what you feel makes it hard to know what you want. That’s because “want” is a feeling, not a thought. I have watched scores of talented, capable people drift in their lives, making decisions that are not quite right for them, or going where the tide takes them. Sometimes they get what they want, but it’s often a matter of chance, not choice.

2. You never get to know yourself

When you are disconnected from your own feelings, you are blocked from the most deeply personal part of who you are. You are probably good at noticing and attending to other people, but you are not paying attention to yourself.

In fact, you continue to squelch your true self in exactly the way your parents, maybe unintentionally, squelched you as a child. You have hurts and triumphs, loss and accomplishment, pains and love, anger and pleasure, sadness and joy, all inside you. If you would listen, you would learn who you really are.

3. You hide your light

Of the 3 most tragic Childhood Emotional Neglect symptoms, this is the one that makes me the most sad.

Other people catch glimpses of your light, although you probably have no idea that you have it. You have caught glances of it in the past, when you have surprised yourself by doing something you thought impossible for you to do, faced a fear, felt a warm glow of connection from someone important to you, or been vulnerable in a brave way. If you think deeply about this you will remember.

Your light is special because it is uniquely you. It is a product of your genes, your emotions, and your life experiences. Other people see it, even though you hide it. Putting yourself on the sidelines or trying to stay invisible; avoiding conflict and being afraid to “rock the boat” are all ways to hide your light.

Sadly, as you continue to squelch your light, you are holding yourself back from being your best and true self. What feels “safe” is actually “dark.”

You deserve better. And you can allow yourself to have it.

The Good News — The Answer To The 3 Most Tragic Childhood Emotional Neglect Symptoms

Just as the cause of all of these struggles seems simple — your parents didn’t respond enough to your emotions as they raised you — so also seems the solution.

You grew up with your feelings ignored, and now you must do the exact opposite. You can start right away simply paying attention to your feelings.

Take the time to notice when you are feeling something, learn how to name what you are feeling, and begin to learn how to use your feelings to inform, direct, motivate and guide you.

When you do the work, you get to reap the rewards. You will gradually start to know yourself, get what you want, and let your light shine.

And all that’s actually happening is that you are becoming more authentically your true self, and that is everything.

To find out if you grew up with Emotional Neglect, Take The Emotional Neglect Test. It’s free.

To learn much more about how Emotional Neglect happens and how to heal it, see the book, Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

To find out how Childhood Emotional Neglect holds your relationships back and how you can solve it, see the book Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships With Your Partner, Your Parents & Your Children.

A Secret Cause & Cure For Social Anxiety

The Fatal Flaw: A deeply buried, un-nameable sense that:

Something is wrong with me. I am missing some vital ingredient that other people have. I am set apart, different. I don’t quite fit in anywhere.

Fortunately, the Fatal Flaw is not as bad as it sounds, because it’s not a real flaw. Instead, it’s something far more powerful than a flaw. It’s a feeling.

Legions of people walk this earth held back by something which they cannot understand, and for which they have no words. It’s a feeling with the power to hold brilliant men back from achieving their full potential and powerful women back from becoming presidents of companies. It’s a feeling that will not break you, but it will dog you. It will keep you standing alone at the PTA meeting, or sitting pretending to work while others chat freely at a conference. Unaddressed, it can set you apart so that you feel alone, and gradually wear away your connection to the world.Continue reading

Man vs. Woman: The Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect

Do boys and girls respond differently to the same childhood experiences? How do those differences play out as the boy becomes a man, and the girl grows into a woman?

In my work as a psychologist, I have seen remarkable gender differences in the effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN). First, a quick review.

CEN in a nutshell:

When children’s emotions are not validated enough by their parents, they minimize and push down their feelings in order to get along in their family. As adults, they lack enough access to their own emotions. Since emotions are a primary source of connection and richness in life, these folks end up going through their lives feeling vaguely empty or numb,  disconnected, and confused about what is wrong with them. You can see other results of CEN in the table below. (To learn more about CEN, visit EmotionalNeglect.com).

When boys and girls grow up this way, are they affected differently? Does a CEN man feel differently than a CEN woman? The answer is yes.

First, two caveats: The masculine effects often appear in women and vice-versa, so please do not take these differences as absolute. Second, these observations are based upon my own clinical experience and have not been specifically researched.Continue reading

Resources For Therapists

Therapist Resources and Tools

Thanks for visiting the CEN Resource Center For Therapists. I appreciate your interest in the topic of Childhood Emotional Neglect, or CEN. Realizing the weight of CEN in the therapy room has literally changed the way I practice psychology, and I believe it will do the same for you.

Childhood Emotional Neglect: A parent’s failure to respond enough to the child’s emotional needs.

Children whose parents ignore their emotions receive a powerful, subliminal message:

Your feelings don’t matter.

So they push their emotions far away, walling them off so they will not burden anyone. This coping mechanism may get them through their childhood, but it leaves them entering adulthood, and possibly spending decades disconnected from the most deeply personal, biological expression of who they are: their emotions.

I have identified a particular pattern of characteristics in adults who experienced CEN as a child. They include, among others, struggles with emotional awareness; self-blame;  feelings of emptiness; problems with self-discipline;  and a deep-seated feeling that “something is wrong with me,” which I call the Fatal Flaw.

I have found that keeping Emotional Neglect in the forefront of my mind, and talking about it specifically with patients has made me a far more effective therapist.  I feel that for years, I was like the proverbial blind man, treating parts of the elephant – unaware that there was a whole elephant to which I should be attending.

• I now have a way of understanding why clients who recall having had a fine childhood are struggling with self-discipline, emptiness, or even suicidal thoughts.
• I now know how to understand and work with a patient who is counter-dependent, or has low emotional intelligence, self-directed anger or self-blame.
• I can address suicidal thoughts and feelings on a whole new level.
• I have the words to talk directly to people about what’s really wrong.

Fill out the form below to join my Therapist Newsletter, and if you are licensed and have read Running on Empty or taken one of my trainings, I will add you to my Find A Therapist List to receive referrals from me.

SIGN UP TO JOIN MY CEN NEWSLETTER OR THERAPIST REFERRAL LIST

Learn About CEN While Earning Continuing Education Credits

May/June of 2019 - Announcing Three New Online Therapist Trainings.

• The Fuel Up For Life Program: Heal your own Childhood Emotional Neglect while learning in a deep way how to help your clients! (12 Continuing Ed credits available).
• The Fuel Up For Life For Therapists Program: Take the Fuel UP For Life Program but without the online support forum or Q&A Calls. Deep learning about how to treat CEN without the personal support aspect of the program. (12 CE credits available).
• Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect: An Overview. This 2-hr. training is a perfect introduction to treating CEN in your office. How do you identify it in your clients? How do you help your clients see it? How do you challenge their defenses? This overview covers it all. (2 CE credits available).

October 21-23, 2022 The Art of Living Retreat Center - CEN Recovery Retreat for laypeople and therapists (sorry, no CE for therapists) among the Blue Ridge Mountains in Boone, NC October 21-23, 2022. Fuel Up Your Feelings.

2019 - 1440 Multiversity in Scotts Valley, CA - August 23-25, 2019. Two-day retreat and therapist training, Childhood Emotional Neglect Recovery Retreat, Feeling As Fuel: Using Inner Resources For Healing & Happiness. It was for laypeople and therapists. Approved for licensed psychologists for 8 CE credits and for licensed social workers for 9 CEU credits. 

2019 - Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts - May 3-5, 2019 Two-day, Childhood Emotional Neglect Recovery Retreat, Fuel Up With Feeling: Reclaim Your Inner Resources For Healing & Happiness for laypeople and therapists. Licensed psychologists earned 8 CE credits. Licensed social workers earned 8 CEU credits. Many Mental Health Counselors able to receive credits via the APA - check with your local Licensing Board.

2017 - Goodtherapy.org Online CEN Training - If you are a member of Goodtherapy.org  you can take my CE training program for therapists, Identifying and Treating Childhood Emotional Neglect in Adults online free!  You will earn 2 free CE/CEU’s. Email me your CE certificate, and you will receive special designation on my list of CEN providers.

Articles For Therapists

The Story Of Childhood Emotional Neglect

Childhood Emotional Neglect: Stage 1 Recovery Worksheet For Therapists and Clients

Emotional Neglect and Emotional Deprivation Are Not The Same

How to Identify Childhood Emotional Neglect In Your Clients

About Childhood Emotional Neglect: For Mental Health Professionals

Attention Therapists: Sign Up To Join MY CEN Referral List

How To Find A Therapist For Childhood Emotional Neglect

The Fuel Up For Life Program

If you would like to help your patient further, click here to learn more about my Fuel Up for Life program. I designed it to be a perfect adjunct to therapy. It will guide you and your CEN clients through the steps of recovery.

The CEN Questionnaire

As you become more aware of CEN in your clients, you’ll probably find yourself wondering if particular clients have CEN. Or, you may want your client to get confirmation of his or her Childhood Emotional Neglect. This is why I created The CEN Questionnaire (linked below). It takes less than 3 minutes to take it, and many clients find it validating of their experience. I invite you to take the questionnaire yourself. And feel free to have your clients visit my website to take the questionnaire as needed.

Just click on the link below to take the CEN Questionnaire.

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Since the publication of Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, many thousands of people have learned that invisible Childhood Emotional Neglect, or CEN, has been weighing on them their entire lives, and are now in the process of recovery. Running on Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships takes the concept o Childhood Emotional Neglect further into life-changing possibilities.

How do you reach out to your distant spouse? How do you make sure you don't emotionally neglect your own children? How do you emotionally validate your young child, your teenager or your adult child? How do you raise your kids with emotional intelligence? How do you interact with the parents who emotionally neglected you? Can you and should you talk with your loved ones about the Emotional Neglect that saps the depth and richness from your relationship with them?

In Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships With Your Partner, Your Parents and Your Children, you will learn even more solutions for the effects of CEN on your life: how to talk about CEN, and heal it, in relationships with the people you love the most.

>> Buy the Book <<

Running on Empty is the first self-help book about Emotional Neglect: an invisible force from your childhood which you can’t see, but may be affecting you profoundly to this day. It is about what didn’t happen in your childhood, what wasn’t said, and what cannot be remembered.

Do you sometimes feel as if you’re just going through the motions in life? Are you good at looking and acting as if you’re fine, but secretly feel lonely and disconnected? Perhaps you have a fine life and are good at your work, but somehow it’s just not enough to make you happy.

If so, you are not alone. The world is full of people who have an innate sense that something is wrong with them. Who feel they live on the outside looking in, but have no explanation for their feeling and no way to put it into words. Who blame themselves for not being happier.

If you are one of these people, you may fear that you are not connected enough to your spouse, or that you don’t feel pleasure or love as profoundly as others do. Perhaps when you do experience strong emotions, you have difficulty understanding or tolerating them. You may drink too much, or eat too much, or risk too much, in an attempt to feel something good.

In over twenty years of practicing psychology, many people have arrived in Jonice Webb’s office, driven by the threat of divorce or the onset of depression, or by loneliness, and said, “”Something is missing in me.””

Running on Empty will give you clear strategies for how to heal, and offers a special chapter for mental health professionals. In the world of human suffering, this book is an Emotional Smart Bomb meant to eradicate the effects of an invisible enemy.

>> Buy the Book <<

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Attention Therapists: Sign Up to Join My CEN Referral List

Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN): A parent’s failure to respond enough to the child’s emotional needs.

As a mental health professional, how often have you heard the term Childhood Emotional Neglect used on its own; that is, not followed by the words “and abuse.”  I scoured the databases of the APA, and used google and other search methods. I talked with colleagues, and looked through every self-help book that looked promising. Virtually every time the term “emotional neglect” is used, it is either mixed with, or used as a misnomer for, some type of physical neglect or some type of emotional abuse. This was the final factor which drove me to write a book about it. This is the driving force which has had me speaking and writing about Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) for the past three years.

During twenty years of practicing psychology, I gradually became aware that CEN, a tremendously powerful childhood factor, is being overlooked. Why? Because CEN hides. It dwells in the sins of parental omission, rather than commission. It’s the white space in the clinical picture, rather than the picture itself. It’s what was not said or observed or remembered from our patients’ childhoods, rather than what was.

**SPECIAL NOTE TO LICENSED THERAPISTS: If you have read Running on Empty or have taken my Fuel Up for Life online CEN program and would like to receive referrals from me to treat folks who are looking for a CEN specialist, please fill out the quick google form linked here:

SIGN UP TO JOIN MY CEN THERAPIST REFERRAL LIST

We therapists know that emotion is important, and that if it is not handled well by our clients’ parents in childhood, there will be clear and direct results years later, when our clients are adults. When we screen and evaluate our patients, we ask them about everything that they can see, hear, touch and remember about their childhoods: major events, including emotional, physical, verbal abuse, or any type of trauma, for example. We look for all of these types of memories, as we know that any of these experiences, in even subtle forms in childhood, can play out over a lifetime. We also know about emotional neglect and parental failures. But these are so invisible and unmemorable that it’s difficult to grab onto and difficult to talk about. How do we help our clients become aware of the full impact of what didn’t happen for them?

It took me years of encountering patients who were difficult to understand based upon all of the usual factors to realize that, in some cases, I was asking the wrong questions and looking in the wrong places. Childhood Emotional Neglect is invisible, intangible, and unmemorable. It’s not something that a parent does to a child. Instead, it’s something that a parent fails to do for a child. Since it’s not an act, but a parent’s failure to act, it’s not noted or remembered by parent, child or onlooker. Yet it has a profound effect upon how that child will feel and function as an adult.

Some people can be profoundly affected by one incident of extreme Emotional Neglect, and some may experience a childhood filled with mild incidents. Others experience a childhood that is so riddled with CEN that they grow up defined by it. In my own clinical experience, I have found that few, if any, of these people remember or report any of it. In fact, many of them report (and had) loving, caring parents who had no idea that they were failing their child. This is what makes CEN so pernicious, so difficult to see, and so easy to overlook by clients and their therapists.

I have identified a particular pattern of characteristics in adults who experienced CEN as a child. They include, among others, struggles with emotional awareness; self-blame;  feelings of emptiness; problems with self-discipline;  and a deep-seated feeling that “something is wrong with me,” which I call the Fatal Flaw.

I have found that keeping Emotional Neglect in the forefront of my mind, and talking about it specifically with patients has made me a far more effective therapist.  I feel that for years, I was like the proverbial blind man, treating parts of the elephant – unaware that there was a whole elephant to which I should be attending.

• I now have a way of understanding why patients who recall having had a fine childhood are struggling with self-discipline, emptiness, or even suicidal thoughts.
• I now know how to understand and work with a patient who is counter-dependent, or has low emotional intelligence, self-directed anger or self-blame.
• I can address suicidal thoughts and feelings on a whole new level.
• I have the words to talk directly to people about what’s really wrong.

Visit my Readers’ Comments Page to see what readers are saying about CEN.

In writing my self-help book, Running on Empty: Overcome your Childhood Emotional Neglect, I have two goals which I am passionate about:

1.  I want to make Childhood Emotional Neglect a household term. I want to make as many people as possible aware of the power of this largely overlooked, invisible factor. I want people to know how it affects us when our emotions are not validated; first by our parents in childhood, and later by ourselves in adulthood. I want to take a childhood non-event, which typically goes unseen and unnoticed, and give it equal recognition and respect to the events that we talk about with our patients every day. I want to offer a specific, shared language for us all to talk about this parental failure to act with our patients, and a framework to treat it.

2. I want to ask you, my fellow mental health professionals, to help bring this concept to more people.  I’m interested in opening up a sharing of thoughts and experiences among mental health professionals. I want to know if it resonates with you in your clinical work. I want to find out if you will have the same feeling of understanding and success in being able to reach more patients, offer them answers, and move them forward.

I hope you will find Running on Empty: Overcome your Childhood Emotional Neglect a helpful resource. With a special chapter for parents and another for mental health professionals, I hope it will help you open new doors with stuck patients.

Fill out the form below to join my Therapist Newsletter, and if you are licensed and have read Running on Empty or taken one of my trainings, I will add you to my Find A Therapist List to receive referrals from .

SIGN UP TO JOIN MY CEN THERAPIST REFERRAL LIST

And if you would like to help your patient further, click here to learn more about my Fuel Up for Life program.

To learn more about Childhood Emotional Neglect, see my first book Running on Empty. 

3 Surprising Reasons People Feel Lonely on Valentine’s Day

Do you have a stereotypical picture of a person who feels lonely on Valentine’s Day?  You might imagine someone who wishes to be in a relationship and is sitting alone feeling sad.

In truth, most of us know how this stereotypical picture feels since we have been there ourselves at some point. Navigating the complicated world of relationships is not easy, so it’s likely that you have spent one or more Valentine’s Days alone, or perhaps for you, this year is this one.

Surprisingly, however, this image of loneliness is often highly inaccurate. A 2010 study by John Cacioppo published in the journal Social Science and Medicine found that feelings of loneliness were unrelated to marital status or the number of relatives and friends nearby.

It’s not only possible but common, to feel lonely when you’re not alone. And to be alone, but to not feel lonely. It’s because loneliness is not a state, it’s a state of mind. Loneliness is not a situation, it’s a feeling.

Yes, indeed, scores of people feel lonely on Valentine’s Day, and many are in relationships or surrounded by people. Many have no idea why they feel alone.

Whether you are actually alone this holiday or not, it is possible for you to change how you feel this Valentine’s Day. Start by understanding where your alone feelings originate.

3 Reasons You Might Feel Lonely on Valentine’s Day

1. You are afraid to let people know the real you: I have seen this fear in many, many people who are actually quite likable and lovable. I call this fear the Fatal Flaw because it stems from a belief that something is inherently wrong with you. The Fatal Flaw can fester under the surface of your life, preventing you from letting anyone get close. “If they get to know me they won’t like me,” says the voice of your Fatal Flaw. You can be married, or you can be surrounded by people, but it does not help you feel less alone because none of those people truly knows or feels who you are. You have not let them.
2. Counter-Dependence: Counter-dependence is a fear of needing or depending on someone. You are afraid to seek love because, to you, seeking love makes you feel, or appear weak. Counter-dependence has great power to influence your life. It can make you feel ashamed for wanting a partner. It can make you feel weak for having emotional needs. This leads to self-imposed isolation, of which you may not be aware. Even though you are the one preventing yourself from closeness, you may perceive it the opposite way; that others are keeping you at bay.
3. You are holding yourself back from true emotional connections: For some people, emotional intimacy feels threatening. Whether you’re in a relationship or not, you hold your emotions separate, fearful of using your feelings as they were intended: to connect you with people. So when you have an emotional connection, you feel vulnerable, and when you don’t have it, you feel safe. But along with “safe” comes “lonely.” True love requires a true emotional connection. Emotional connection requires vulnerability. You cannot have one without the other.

3 Ways to Stop Feeling Lonely

Did you notice the one common element that unites these three factors that lead to loneliness? It’s fear. Fear of being known, fear of having needs, and fear of being vulnerable.

These fears are powerful and can do great damage to your quality of life. If you want to stop feeling lonely, you must battle your fear. The good news is, you can!

1. Let someone in. You’ve been living your life closed off, because of your fear. Choose one person, and take a risk. Start trying to let someone know what you want, what you need, and most importantly what you feel. This may seem like a risk to you, but in reality, there is very little risk involved. Choose a trustworthy person and make a conscious effort to open up to her or him. You will be pleasantly surprised.
2. Accept that there is no shame in needing someone. Wanting a relationship is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Needing to feel close, wanting to rely on someone is a normal, healthy sign of your humanity. Being able to develop a relationship is a sign of confidence in yourself, not weakness.
3. Make emotional connection your goal. Adjust your view of emotional connection from negative to positive. This is the ultimate way to face your fears. Next time you have a conflict with someone, make an effort to talk about it with that individual. Start paying attention to what other people are feeling, and see if you can respond to their feelings. Becoming more aware of emotions in yourself and others is an excellent way to move toward emotional connection.

The Takeaway

Once you realize why you feel lonely, an opportunity automatically presents itself. You realize that fixing your loneliness has nothing to do with anyone else, and everything to do with you.

Whether you find yourself on your own, a part of a couple, or surrounded by friends this Valentine’s Day, you can face your fears and see that there is no need to feel lonely.

Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) is invisible and is often the root cause of these kinds of fears. To learn more about it, see the book, Running on Empty. To learn how CEN prevents deep emotional connections in adulthood see Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships.

Since CEN is so subtle and invisible, it can be hard to know if you have it. Take the Childhood Emotional Neglect Test. It’s free.