Raised By Parents With Low Emotional Intelligence
Ten-year-old Jasmine lies alone on her bed, glad to be sequestered behind the closed doors of her room. “It could happen,” she whispers quietly to herself. In her mind she’s reliving the fantasy that’s helped her to get her through her life so far: her father answers the doorbell and a kind, well-dressed couple explains to him that Jasmine was accidentally sent home with the wrong family at birth and that she actually belongs to them. They then take her back to their home, where she feels loved, nurtured, and cared for…
Jasmine doesn’t know it, but this is only the beginning of her struggle. She will spend the next twenty years wishing that she had different parents, and feeling guilty about it.
After all, her parents are basically good people. They work hard, and Jasmine has a house, food, clothing, and toys. She goes to school every day and does her homework every afternoon. She has friends at school and plays soccer. By all accounts, she is a very lucky child.
But despite Jasmine’s luck, and even though her parents love her, even at age ten she knows, deep down, that she is alone in this world.
How could a ten-year-old know this? Why would she feel this way? The answer is as simple as it is complicated:
Jasmine is being raised by parents with low emotional intelligence. She is growing up with Childhood Emotional Neglect or CEN.
Emotional Intelligence: The ability to identify, assess and control one’s own emotions, the emotions of others, and those of groups (as described by Daniel Goleman).
Childhood Emotional Neglect: A parent’s failure to respond enough to the child’s emotional needs.
When you are raised by parents who lack emotional awareness and skills, you struggle for good reasons.
3 Effects of Being Raised By Parents With Low Emotional Intelligence
1. Since your parents don’t know how to identify their own emotions, they don’t speak the language of emotion in your childhood home.
So instead of saying, “You look upset Sweetie. Did something happen at school today?”, your parents absent-mindedly say, “So how was school?”
When your grandmother passes away, your family marches through the funeral acting like it’s no big deal.
When your prom date stands you up, your family shows their support by making an effort to never speak of it. Or they tease you about it relentlessly, never seeming to notice or care how very mortified you are.
The Result: You don’t learn how to be self-aware. You don’t learn that your feelings are real or important. You don’t learn how to feel, sit with, talk about or express emotions.
2. Since your parents are not good at managing and controlling their own emotions, they are not able to teach you how to manage and control your own.
So when you get in trouble at school for calling your teacher “a jerk,” your parents do not ask you what was going on or why you lost your temper that way. They don’t explain to you how you could have handled that situation differently. Instead, they ground you or they yell at you or they blame it on your teacher, letting you off the hook.
The Result: You don’t learn how to control or manage your feelings or how to manage difficult situations.
3. Since your parents don’t understand emotions, they give you many wrong messages about yourself and the world through their words and behavior.
So your parents act as if you’re lazy because they haven’t noticed that it’s your anxiety that holds you back from doing things.
Your siblings call you crybaby and treat you as if you’re weak because you cried for days after your beloved cat was run over by a car.
The Result: You go forward into adulthood with the wrong voices in your head. “You’re lazy,” “You’re weak,” say The Voices of Low Emotional Intelligence at every opportunity.
How it All Affects You
All of these results leave you struggling, baffled, and confused. You are out of touch with your true self (your emotional self), you see yourself through the eyes of people who never really knew you, and you have great difficulty handling situations that are stressful, conflictual, or difficult.
You are living the life of Childhood Emotional Neglect.
Is it too late for Jasmine? Is it too late for you? What can be done if you grew up this way?
Fortunately, it is not too late for Jasmine or for you. There are things that you can do:
- Learn everything you can about emotion. Start your own Emotion Training Program. Pay attention to what you feel, when, and why. Start observing others’ feelings and behavior. Listen to how other people express their emotions, and start practicing yourself. Think about who in your life right now can teach you. Your wife, your husband, your sibling, or your friend? Practice talking about your feelings with someone you trust.
- Talk back to those false messages in your head. When that “voice” from your childhood speaks, stop listening. Instead, take it on. Replace that voice with your own. The voice that knows you and has compassion for what you didn’t get from your parents. “I’m not lazy, I have anxiety and I’m trying my best to face it.” “I’m not weak. My emotions make me stronger.”
As an adult, Jasmine must stop fantasizing about a solution knocking on her door. The reality is, she must now learn these skills on her own.
Hopefully, she will see that she missed out on some vital building blocks, simply because her parents did not know. Hopefully, she will realize that she has emotions, and will learn how to value and hear and manage and speak them. Hopefully, she will start beating down those Voices of Low Emotional Intelligence.
Hopefully, she will learn who she really is. And dare to be it.
If you identify with Jasmine, see the book, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect for more information about how you may be affected by your parents’ low emotional intelligence and how to build your emotional skills.
Living Life on Autopilot? 3 Steps to Find Your Vitality
Do you feel bored in your life?
Do you enjoy happy occasions less than you should?
Do you sometimes feel emotionally numb?
Do other people seem to experience more intense joy, love or closeness than you do?
Do you sometimes question the purpose and value of your life?
Do you put others’ needs before your own?
If you answered “yes” to two or more of the questions above, it may be a sign that you’re on autopilot. What does this mean? It means that you do not have enough access to your true emotions.
In my work as a psychologist, I have heard many people express these concerns. Almost all have been fine, good-hearted people who are successful in many areas of their lives. But for them, something is missing. Some mysterious ingredient that makes life feel full, rich, and stimulating is simply not there for them.Continue reading
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
A Fresh View of Personality, Personality Disorder, Growth, and Change
People don’t change.
Or do they?
It has long been believed that personality, the ingrained set of traits that determine our behavior and decisions, is entrenched and virtually unchangeable.
In the late 1990s, psychologists identified five traits which are believed to form the basis of personality. They are:
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
The notion that personality is not changeable has been tremendously impactful upon the population at large. For example, people diagnosed with personality disorders have felt sentenced to a lifetime of discomfort. Introverts and extroverts have resigned themselves to the negatives that go with each style as permanent limitations.
But now a door has been opened to a new way of thinking. A way of thinking that may forever alter how we view personality, personality disorder, growth and change.Continue reading
Invisible You
This comment was posted on the Ask Dr. Webb Page of my website. It describes an experience that many can relate to: the feeling of being overlooked.
I have a question about invisibility. I was at a study group and afterwards everyone was chatting with each other except me. I had this overwhelming feeling of being invisible. It brought me almost to tears. Then, just this past Saturday I was standing with my husband and other men when a lady I knew came up, stood right next to me and asked where all the wives were. I said “I’m right here” and she replied “I didn’t see you.” I’m not sure what to make of this.
Are some people overlooked more than others? Yes.
Is it because they’re less interesting? Less important? Less vivid? No.Continue reading
Ten Steps to Learn Self-Discipline
Here’s a brief recap of last week’s article, Self-Discipline Season Has Begun:
- Struggling with self-discipline is not a sign of weakness or a character flaw
- Self-discipline is made up of two parts: making yourself do things you don’t want to do, and stopping yourself from doing things that you want to do.
- Each of these two parts is a skill, nothing more and nothing less.
- Since self-discipline is a skill, it can be learned!
- In the best-case scenario, we learn these skills from our parents, when they discipline us throughout childhood.
- Many parents, even those with the best intentions, fail to teach their children this skill well enough (an aspect of Childhood Emotional Neglect).
- If you did not internalize the Two Skills of Self-Discipline in childhood, you can teach them to yourself as an adult.
Meet Josie.
Josie is walking toward the dessert table at the office Holiday Party. “This party is boring,” she thinks, “but at least that double chocolate cake is here.” As Josie starts to put a second piece onto her plate, another little voice in her head says, “Wow, really? Can’t you exercise one little modicum of self-control? Has anyone else eaten two pieces? What is wrong with you?!” Continue reading
Self-Discipline Season has Begun
Almost everyone struggles with some aspect of self-discipline, but never more than during the holidays. After all, from Thanksgiving to mid-January, we see-saw back and forth between over-indulging in treats, and making resolutions to exercise in the New Year.
Then, when we fail to carry it all out as pledged, we kick ourselves when we’re down.
I think that most people see self-discipline as far more complicated than it actually is. When you boil it down, self-discipline is actually composed of only two ingredients:
- Stopping ourselves from doing things we want to do, but shouldn’t.
- Making ourselves do things we don’t want to do, but should.
Notice anything about those two ingredients? That’s right. They’re skills. Skills, and nothing more.Continue reading
Do You Have Emotional Integrity?
Here is the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of Integrity: The quality of being honest and fair; the state of being complete or whole; incorruptibility; soundness.
What, then, is Emotional Integrity? It’s knowing what you feel and why, and being able and willing to share it with others, even when it’s painful for you.
So general integrity involves being honest with others. Emotional Integrity involves being honest with yourself: facing uncomfortable or painful truths inside yourself so that they don’t harm the people you love. It’s more about your internal choices than your external ones. It’s the opposite of what we think of as denial. It’s the opposite of avoidance.
It is entirely possible to be a person of good integrity while also lacking Emotional Integrity. We human beings have a natural tendency to avoid difficult things, like painful feelings, conflict, problems, or our own weaknesses. It’s somewhat built into us to take the easier route. It’s not always clear to us that the easier route carries its own threat; a threat to our Emotional Integrity.Continue reading
9 Steps to Reach Your Emotionally Neglected Spouse
My husband says he loves me, but I don’t feel love from him.
My wife gets confused, overwhelmed or frustrated every time I try to talk to her about a problem.
My marriage feels flat. Some vital ingredient is missing.
These are complaints which I have heard many times. Almost always from folks who are in a relationship with someone who grew up with Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN).
CEN happens when your parents communicate this subtle but powerful message:
Your feelings don’t matter.
Children who live in such households naturally adapt by walling off their emotions so that they won’t bother their parents or themselves. Since these children’s emotions are squelched, they miss out on the opportunity to learn some vital life skills: how to identify, understand, tolerate, and express emotions.
If your spouse grew up with CEN, he may have difficulty tolerating conflict, expressing his needs, and emotionally connecting with you. No matter how much you love each other, you may feel a great chasm lies between you. No matter how long you’ve been together, you may feel inexplicably alone.Continue reading
How to Tell Emotional Neglect From Emotional Abuse in a Relationship
Let’s face it, relationships are complicated. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me, “Is this normal?” about their relationship.
One of the most confusing gray areas is the difference between emotional abuse and Emotional Neglect. Since neither is physical, both are difficult to perceive at all. Even more difficult is telling them apart. Even mental health professionals sometimes struggle to define the difference. And sometimes Emotional Neglect can be so severe that it crosses over the line, and becomes abuse.
How good are you at differentiating between them? Read about this interaction between Marcy and Jeremy below. Identify each option as emotional abuse, Emotional Neglect, or neither. Then read on to see if you got them right.
Marcy sits in the car outside Jeremy’s office, waiting for him. She is fighting off panicky feelings about attending her high school reunion. Marcy was bullied in high school and is anxious about facing the people from her past. She explained all of this to Jeremy last night and he had seemed sympathetic and understanding. “Why couldn’t he be on time just this once? He knows how upset I am about this reunion,” she says aloud to herself. Finally, after 45 minutes of anxious agony, Jeremy appears:
Option 1:
“Hi, Hon,” he says perkily, kissing her on the cheek. He hops behind the wheel and starts to drive as he talks about his day.
Option 2:
“Where were you?!” Marcy demands. “You know how nervous I am about this.” Jeremy explains that his boss kept a meeting going late. “We’ll drive fast,” he offers.
Option 3:
Jeremy sees the angry look on Marcy’s face before she says a word. “What’s your problem?” he says defensively.
First, let’s talk about Option 3. Whether Jeremy intends it or not, his behavior here is emotionally abusive. He is not only drastically out of touch with Marcy’s feelings and her need to be emotionally supported, he fails to take responsibility for the fact that he kept her waiting, and how it affected her. In addition, he turns it back upon her by starting out defensive and stating that the “problem” is hers. That is abuse.
Option 1: Here, Jeremy is not abusive, but he is emotionally neglectful. By acting perky and failing to notice Marcy’s feelings, considering the situation, he is showing a profound lack of emotional attunement and care for Marcy. A lack of consideration this profound can approach (even cross) the border, and become emotional abuse.
Option 2: This one is probably the most difficult to identify. In this scenario, Jeremy is not abusive. And he explains why he was late, which shows that he recognizes that he left Marcy in an uncomfortable situation. However, he is still emotionally neglectful. The Emotional Neglect is subtle, but it is there. It’s because Jeremy fails to acknowledge the reality of the situation. Marcy isn’t panicky about being late, she’s panicky about her high school bullying and facing the people. So when Jeremy fails to notice her panic and misattributes it, his “I’ll drive fast” is neither soothing nor helpful.
If you got all three correct, good for you!
If you missed one or more, it does not mean that there is something wrong with you. But it could be a sign that you grew up with some elements of emotional abuse or Emotional Neglect.
Now here is Option 4: Emotionally Attuned
Jeremy gets in the car, looks into Marcy’s eyes, and takes her hand firmly, immediately steadying her. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. It must have been hell for you. Are you okay?” he says. He listens to her response and lets her vent. Then he says, “Don’t worry, we’re going to have a good time tonight. And if anyone’s mean to you, I’ll give them an atomic wedgie they will never forget.” They both laugh, and Marcy feels reassured, and ready to face her past.
Here Jeremy practiced all Five Components of Emotional Attunement:
- Make eye contact
- Be accountable
- Acknowledge /validate
- Ask
- Listen
Sometimes the lines between emotional attunement, emotional abuse, and Emotional Neglect can be blurry. Many relationships contain all three, showing themselves at different times. But that doesn’t mean that it is okay.
Watch for signs of emotional abuse or neglect. When you see one, tell your partner. Take responsibility, and talk about what went wrong. Strive to follow the Five Components.
Make a decision together that the emotional abuse or neglect stops here. And you can rest assured that you will not deliver either to the person you love.
To learn more about Childhood Emotional Neglect, watch my Free CEN Breakthrough Video Series on YouTube!
To learn more about emotions, emotional needs, and Childhood Emotional Neglect, Take The CEN Questionnaire. It’s free.
This article was originally published on Psychcentral.com and has been republished here with the permission of the author and PsychCentral