Comments on: How to Know if You Were an Overly Needy Child (Spoiler Alert: You Weren’t)

By: Gabi

Gabi — Mon, 24 May 2021 00:30:55 +0000

I was relieved to find out that there was label (CEN) for my ‘social weirdness’. Finally a lid on the pot that fit.
And finally I can really work on it with satisfying results- prior therapies where helpful but never long lasting or simply too exhausting to integrate into life and apply. it always felt like I am applying a tool but its not quite the proper one.
But I wanted to share a situation when I first was confronted with the observing a feeling that was totally foreign to me then.
Since age 10 I suffered from ‘not being loved’ by my parents and once even dared to say it to my mother when we visited her sister who was my godmother. Both of them blamed me for being not thankful for what my patents do for me – that made me promise to myself to never share this thought again.
But back to the foreign feeling: when I was 14, I had ‘adopted’ my best friend’s family as a surrogate family and spent most of my free time with them. One day my friend’s much older brother visited them and we all went for a walk and my friend walked along with her dad hugging, cheek kissing, holding hands – back then for my experience a totally foreign thing between a parent and child – and I discovered myself standing with my mouth open and taking it in and wondering at the same time ‘ you can do that with your dad?’. My own father would not once say thank you for anything coming from us kids rather he would bark at us ‘cannot use that’.
So my friend’s older brother gently guided me away saying we need not to watch them cuddling – that woke me up and it was the eye opener that it was not out- of -this -world to feel unloved by my parents, but i obviously wasn’t.

By: Jonice

Jonice — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 19:56:45 +0000

In reply to Derek. Thank you for sharing your experience Derek. I'm thinking perhaps you did not see a CEN-trained therapist before. I hope you will do so now. It makes a difference.

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 15:20:09 +0000

Even though I’ve come to understand this was true for me long before I found this, reading it is validating. The problem really belongs to other people, but one thing I’ve learned is that the vast majority of others on the planet are incapable of seeing the byproducts of CEN, people would rather blame and shame you for this “flaw”. I heard all of this kind of stuff for years in my family, until it hit me how truly horrible my family were in neglecting my emotional needs. I got 17/20 on your quiz. My mother, father and sister, incapable and unwilling to meet the most basic of my emotional needs, full stop. Given how my own family taught me to view myself as completely and utterly without value it makes perfect sense how this set me up for similar future relationships – friends who didn’t give a whit about me who would only use me for what they could take, a wife who demanded attention and affection from me but who openly and dismissively refused giving me the same, a job – in child protection social work no less – crammed to the brim with fraudulent, fake people, people who want to be seen as caring but underneath the carefully manicured paper thin exterior were driven to fill their own narcissistic needs that do not care about others on a heart level at all, and certainly not a whit about me, and Psychologist after Psychologist who sought to pathologize me, jam me into a dsm category I didn’t fit into, and ignore what I was telling them about myself and tell me I was something else when they weren’t subtly shaming me for struggling in the ways I was. i havent found a psychologist who understands this issue, they try to jam me into some other wild goose chase type category, I’ve given up with these people. What you say Jonice about psychologists from my experience is just not true – they may very well care about others feelings but not about mine and I’m done kissing that frog, there’s no prince or princess in there. It’s just been an absolutely awful experience dealing with this issue – needing emotional validation and support from others and being denied it at almost every turn. I dont blame myself for struggling anymore as who would find this easy? Finding someone who cares about my feelings even when im prepared to pay them $180 / hr has been beyond difficult. But how can I heal any other way? For me, acknowledging the serious, destructive character flaws in what seems to be most of humanity has helped alot as at the end of the day i know this isn’t my fault. But its just so hard to get past all the destruction it has caused. It’s like being born with the skill to be a masterful baseball player and everyone around you seemingly conspiring to keep you from ever playing the game. The only reasonable explanation i can come up with that takes the edge off all the pain brought into my life by these people is that there is evil in the world and this type of stuff goes beyond ignorance or a whoops type mistake that’s easily righted, it is the result of deep seated and irreversible character flaws in these people’s hearts, minds and souls. They are the real failures as human beings, not me. I can be grateful that now that i can identify them I can keep them as far away from me as possible. As i work thru the pain now that i am no longer in denial about it – no wonder i used this as my primary coping mechanism for 40 years, who wants to look at something so astoundingly ugly? – and come to terms with the destruction others behavior has caused I still struggle with the lack of justice piece, that there will be no recompense from those who have harmed me either intentionally or via their own cluelessness/stupidity. I’ve gotten a lot better coming to terms with my anger about it, but that’s no thanks to anyone but me – i dont talk about anger with others because I’ve been pathologized and judged way too many times, it’s just not safe to talk about it – but it’s still there, I’m not sure it will ever completely go away. Anyways thanks for listening to us and understanding our issues, you are a real gem. Thanks!

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 14:06:21 +0000

In reply to Catherine. Catherine twenty years ago a friend who understood the dynamic better than I did described what my parents did to me in the exact manner you are talking about as "giving you the drug and blaming you for getting hooked on it". It took me years to understand what he meant but he was talking about the very dynamic you speak of. In many of our cases parental narcissism is a factor in creating CEN, and this is part of the extraordinarily disordered dynamic going on in families like ours.

By: Jonice

Jonice — Sun, 07 Jul 2019 20:40:38 +0000

In reply to Cynthia. Dear Cynthia, you can access a therapist at a local hospital or community health center. Please make sure you find someone. Or see your primary care doctor to be evaluated for depression. It's important to keep trying, no matter what!

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 01:25:55 +0000

I am so tired of feeling unloved and unwanted. I just don’t know what to do anymore. Tonight I sit here alone crying because of the horrible things happening at work. No friends or family to talk to. No one cares. I so badly want someone to care about me but there’s no one. I don’t have money to pay for a therapist to listen to me whine. I feel really hopeless right now.

By: Deana

Deana — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 02:56:24 +0000

In reply to Coco.

Coco,
I can relate to the relationship you had with your Grandmother. My Grandmother was more of a mother to me than my mother was.

As a child I was neither seen or heard and I was a very lonely child. My younger brother, the golden child, loved to torment me and we frequently fought. Mother could not deal with this, her way of dealing with the problem was to scream SHUT UP! My Grandmother was the only one to notice the abuse I was dealing with and she always gave me extra love and attention. I loved her dearly.

I am now in my 60’s and still dealing with the abuse from a narcissistic family. I have been scapegoated all my life and recently went no contact with my immediate family of origin. The disrespectful treatment became more than I could tolerate and I had to separate from family to save myself.

It has been a tough road as I was brainwashed for many many years to never voice an opinion or complain. I have come a long way in these last 9 months, but I still have cognitive dissonance as a result of the brainwashing.

I miss my Grandmother so much. She made me feel loved and OK. We can be thankful for our Grandmas

Love yourself, you deserve it.

By: arlene

arlene — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:49:29 +0000

every word has been my entire life i am 54 and only recently found out what has been happening to me, what is being done to me. resident901@gmail.com if you would like to talk and maybe get some added help in understanding contact me. dr. Webb i would love to talk to you.

By: Jonice

Jonice — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:18:27 +0000

In reply to Lori. Dear Lori, I'm sure this is a lesson you learned in your childhood home. I'm glad you can see how it really is, once you wrote it.

By: Jonice

Jonice — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:16:45 +0000

In reply to Coco. Dear Coco, you deserve to feel held and loved and warmed by someone who cares. Perhaps you don't have to settle for so much less. Please do think about it, and thanks for sharing.