I love your phrase, “You do you.” It is the antithesis of Childhood Emotional Neglect. Thank you for your comment GWOR!

For 30 years I’ve known that I was emotionally neglected by my parents. What I struggle with now is that the people closest to me- husband, friends, supervisors also get angered when I express feelings or attempt to minimize them. I use “I feel” statements and phrases that state my needs, that are met by the other person attempting to place blame on me, and ultimately not taking responsibility for how they can improve the given situation. I seem to be a magnet for this and am exhausted by my relationships.Thank you for listening. ~ LU

Dear C, you are very good at conveying your own experience, both external and internal. I have no doubt your story will help many others realize they are not alone and that there are answers. Thank you so much for sharing!

I cannot tell you how much your book has shifted my entire being since reading it last year – I recognized for the first time that I have lived a life build on shells of identity meant to cover better and better my true self and smother at every corner its feeble voice. I started out in life with a clear and strong message that I am not worth really seeing or hearing. Invisibility and emotional detachment were the only things I felt would ensure my survival and hiding everything about myself slowly but surely, and very early on, became my default MO. My earliest memories are about wanting all of it to be over – although I was never suicidal, I escaped countless times in a fantasy of death and liberation. I did not want to live in all that pain.

Believe me, I spent all the years of my life trying to figure out why I am at the losing end all the time, why I am and feel so excruciatingly lonely, why I feel so empty, why I am so scarily unlovable, what is so inherently wrong with me and why all my efforts to do better, to be better, to be there for others, to imagine a future for myself and try to reach it, made me feel worse and worse. The work to connect, for the first time ever, to yourself is unbearably hard at times. I have vivid memories, as early as four, how I was deliberately trying to stop myself from crying and talk reasonably to my struggling mother and make her see how the fighting, she and my father engaged in daily, in full view of their two kids, is scary and that I cannot take it anymore… but I have no memories of who that little girl was, what she needed, what she dreamed of, what she felt other than fear, loneliness and darkness. All I know about that girl is that over the years I looked at her, in a corner there, and felt nothing but pity and shame and anger for its mysterious ugliness and gruesomeness. I can share from my personal journey that recognizing and observing for the first time ever the magnitude of one’s deep abyss of pain is hard to describe – the self-loathing, the everyday self abandonment and how hard I struggled just to take up a little bit of space, the enormous amount of shame I carried like a lead blanket all my life, is heart-breaking to say the least. There are days when I cannot but go back to some mind-numbing habits just because it is so hard to bear. I blamed myself for being alive, and I am ashamed of having been alive without actually living. I built a religion around my vast emptiness and loneliness but didn’t quite build anything else.

However, being here, in this exact spot, feels right – I look at my little fragile self, and I am glad to see that at least I cannot punish her anymore for being alive all this time and for just trying to be a human being. I cannot give her too much love or accept her all too much, I am learning day by day to take up space and to show up for myself. Now seeing her and hearing her, with the compassion she always deserved, well, is the scariest thing I have ever had to do.

(Everybody’s personal journey is different, it’s true, but I wanted to share how intensely I feel some aspects of my journey, in case somebody out there feels alone in their struggles. Please believe me you are not. Some days I marvel early in the morning how my resting default state is always so conflicted, how I am constantly and relentlessly on the lookout to find fault at every corner of my existence and in every single thing I do. I tried these first decades of my life to run and hide as far as I could from these flaws, this ugliness, this shame. I guess I just give up hiding and running. I heard some guy on a TED talk say that „It took an awful lot of time to sound like myself” and that’s exactly how it feels)

Good for you Ava! I hope you will continually rediscover the voice your parents needed to squelch. You need it in your life now.

Word choice and tone are both very important in expressing ourselves! The way we say something is more important than what we say. We all are responsible for “packaging” out truth to make it easier for others to take in.