Hi Tom of Finland. I am not trying to call attention to what most good therapists primarily focus on: what happened to their clients in childhood, like trauma and abuse. I’m trying to get therapists to pay more attention to the vital thing that failed to happen for the child: enough emotional responsiveness. It’s not that it’s a brand new concept; it’s that it gets overlooked far too often. Calling it CEN is a way to give this under-addressed, yet damaging experience a common name that we can all use to finally talk about it clearly with our clients and each other. All the best.

I read your book Running on empty with great interest since this issue has touched my life also. I’ve gone through a 3 year therapy. However, i’m a bit baffled by this question: this concept of yours, CEN, isn’t it just a new label for the thing that is the basic insight of psychology: how your parents & upbringing affect you and your relationship to your emotions? We talked about exactly these issues during my therapy, we just didn’t call it CEN.

So, instead of it being a new insight, isn’t it just a new label? And I dont mean to belittle your work, as i said I read your book with great interest!

Hi Silla, your questions are all excellent. I think that the feeling of emptiness can be similar between CEN and borderline, but the cause is somewhat different. It’s the difference between saying to a child, “Your feeling is wrong,” and simply not noticing or responding to the child’s emotion at all. It gets a bit complicated, because parents who do the former typically also do the latter. So the concept of CEN does apply to personality disorder, but there are vast quantities of people who didn’t get the former. Their emotional needs weren’t actively invalidated; they were simply ignored. These are the people who remember a “happy” childhood (because we don’t remember a parent’s failure to act), but who are struggling. These are the people my book is about because they fall between the cracks. I hope this answers your question! All the best.

Agree. It seems to me that this is the same in all families in the world. All parents need professional help, the only question is whether there are trained professionals who will help them and whether parents recognize that they need help.