11 Signs You Experienced Childhood Emotional Neglect

In this episode, you will learn about '11 not-so-obvious signs that you experienced childhood emotional neglect'. This neglect can have a profound impact on our lives and relationships. We can live an entire lifetime and never recognize how our childhoods may have impacted our adult lives.
Childhood emotional neglect is a type of trauma that occurs when caregivers do not meet a child's emotional needs. Emotional neglect can take many forms, including ignoring a child's emotional needs, failing to provide emotional support, or failing to validate a child's feelings. Emotional neglect can be intentional or unintentional.
Children who experience emotional neglect may grow up struggling to identify and express their feelings. They may also have difficulty forming close relationships, setting boundaries, and trusting others. Emotional neglect can have long-lasting effects on a person's mental health, impacting their ability to function in their personal and professional lives.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about 11 signs that indicate that you were raised by an emotionally neglectful parent.

The reason I wanted to create this session is because we don't heal until we can identify the problem.

Think about it.

How do you fix something that's wrong with your car before first diagnosing the problem?

So if you're here,

If you're scouring the internet,

If you're trying to figure out what's wrong,

Why do you feel stuck?

Why don't your relationships work?

Why do you feel anxious all the time?

Why are you always rushing?

Why do you feel such guilt and shame?

Why is it that you're always waiting for the next shoe to drop?

Why can't you just relax?

These are some of the questions that I had to face in my life,

And it wasn't until my life completely imploded.

It wasn't until my life was hanging by a string because I had so many health issues spiraling all at one time.

It wasn't until a doctor said to me,

You better listen to your body because your body is listening to you,

That I got a clue that something was wrong.

And it wasn't outside of me.

It had now happened inside of me.

So the problem with childhood emotional neglect is that it happens at a time in our life when we are subconscious,

When we are in theta brainwave states a lot of the time,

From zero to seven,

When our brains are growing rapidly,

When our brains are trying to figure out is planet Earth a hostile place or it is a safe place?

If planet Earth is a safe place and all of your needs are met,

Then you grow into an adult that has emotional resiliency.

You grow into an adult that can set boundaries.

You grow into an adult that can face a challenge and get up and move forward and not feel full of shame or not be so afraid when a challenge comes.

If you were fortunate enough to have parents who hit all of those milestones for you,

Made you feel safe,

Made you feel worthy,

Made you feel nurtured,

Encouraged you when you fell,

Didn't make fun of you,

Didn't explode.

If you had parents who could emotionally regulate and didn't make you feel worse when you made a mistake,

Then chances are that you're having a pretty wonderful life and that you can get along with people and you're not afraid of people.

But unfortunately for those of us who experience childhood emotional neglect,

Our amygdala,

The area of our brain that really is responsible for the fight-or-flight system,

Is larger than those who came from homes that were more balanced.

And our hippocampal volume,

Unfortunately,

Is oftentimes smaller,

Which means our memory gets affected.

We are unable to recall things as quickly as someone who came from a healthy normal family.

It is more difficult for us to learn.

Think about it.

If you're a child full of anxiety,

If you don't feel good enough,

If your family exploded the night before and you're not sure what mommy you're going to go home to or what daddy you're going to go home to or whether or not your sister or brother are going to be carted off to jail,

Let's say.

If you are a little person going to school with that type of stress,

How do you learn?

We have these delayed responses to our emotions because when something chaotic is happening,

We dissociate,

We shut down.

And oftentimes we don't feel the trauma of it until we are out of that stressful situation.

So we have these delayed responses to our emotions and to things that have happened,

But we're always in our head.

We're never in our bodies or very rarely are we in our bodies because we don't feel safe in the now.

So we flee to our minds and we develop magical thinking.

We develop scenarios that float us away.

I was a big magical thinker as a little girl and I started writing when I was seven years old.

And my writing and my poetry was all about being rescued from this crazy hell I was in that I couldn't identify.

So when my life fell apart and a doctor said to me,

You better listen to your body because your body is listening to you,

It was the first time that I as an wounded adult child of two unrecovered adult children of alcoholics who had raised me in a very rigid,

Stoic,

Cold,

Aloof,

Uninterested childhood environment felt like I had the permission to speak to my inner child and say,

Hey,

What's up with you?

And it was transformational.

It was very painful,

But you cannot heal yourself if you first do not acknowledge the problem.

The problem that many of us will have is that,

Well,

Men and women have different problems,

I think,

But it all stems from the same thing.

Women have been raised to think that they're over-emotional,

They're very dramatic,

They are out for Academy Awards,

And that their emotions,

Expressing their emotions,

Is really an attempt to gain attention,

Like that's a bad thing.

So children who get enough attention generally don't act out or generally don't feel like their brains are on fire and generally don't feel like they are not good enough and that they are overwhelmed by even the simplest tasks outside of themselves.

So a child that is emotionally regulated by a parent who can emotionally regulate is not going to have the need to cry all the time in most cases.

Of course there are situations in which there is a true biological issue going on,

A chemical issue in the brain going on,

But in most cases when children get their needs met,

When they need to get those specific needs met,

They don't have these emotional outbursts,

They're not a mess all the time.

Boys,

On the other hand,

When they start to show emotional emotions,

They're shamed.

They're called a baby.

I was recently watching an episode from the New Jersey Housewives and one of the husbands of the Housewives shamed a little three-year-old boy and it happens that way and it's like innocuous.

Here this little boy was sitting at a table with three adults and the man in the group,

The man in the group says,

Were you a baby today?

Did you cling onto the side of the pool wall because you were afraid?

And so here it is,

There's a man shaming a little boy,

Basically sending him the message that it's bad to be afraid.

It's not bad to be afraid,

It's good to be afraid because fear keeps us safe.

That little boy clinging to the side of the wall was his way of staying safe and not drowning,

But here is a man,

A male figure in his life,

Shaming him as if that was something bad.

So I think historically men have been conditioned to think that their emotions are bad.

They've been conditioned to think that if they have sensitive emotions,

That means they're way too feminine and yet we're all male and we're all female.

We come from male and we come from female.

We come from male sperm,

We come from female egg.

So we really are on a quest to balance those energies within ourselves.

You know,

That's what the whole namaste,

Bringing our hands together,

Is it's joining the male and the female within ourselves so that we can be balanced and whole.

But I think traditionally men have been shamed to think that their feminine emotions,

If you will,

It's probably not the right term,

But their soft side or their soft emotions or their vulnerability,

Emotions that bring them to the brink of vulnerability,

Expressing their true emotions is a bad thing,

But for different reasons.

You have to toughen up.

You can't be expressive.

You're a sissy if you express these emotions.

What's wrong with you?

And oftentimes that message comes from toxic men in their lives.

So I think as adult children,

We have to see each other as expressions of one another or facets of one another.

As a woman,

It's helpful for me to understand what men have gone through throughout our history and I know that my husband and my sons,

My son-in-laws,

We have conversations like this and they're curious about how they have received downloads and information and messages from culture and the male role models in their life and they're also very willing to open up and understand what women have historically had to deal with in terms of expressing our true authentic selves and I have found,

At least in my own life at 58 years old,

I feel like I've found that balance between being able to protect myself forcefully,

If need be,

And also being able to vulnerably express myself.

I'm no longer afraid of being abandoned and I think that's one of the wonderful things that comes out of emotional recovery.

So let's get to some signs that you were raised by an emotionally neglectful parent.

Again,

This is not to cause you to dislike your parents or hate your parents or go no contact,

As much as it is the truth sets you free.

Because once you identify,

Ah,

I was raised by that type of a parent,

Maybe that's why I struggle with intimacy,

Maybe that's why I struggle with vulnerability,

Maybe that's why my relationships are a mess.

My relationship with myself,

I've internalized this feeling of shame and not being good enough for an emotionally neglectful parent and now I have an eating disorder or now I don't feel good enough or now I have an attachment issue,

Now I'm codependent,

Now I focus on others rather than myself.

On the other end of the spectrum,

We have when people externalize these messages from childhood,

They can express themselves against other people.

This is where narcissism can come into play,

Where rather than internalize the message like a codependent would,

A child from a home that is full of neglect might externalize these messages and exhibit it in externalizing behaviors like aggression,

Like rage,

Like blame,

Like acting out.

So we can see that we can go one of two ways or we can also exhibit internalized behavior or internalized messages externally.

So a woman who perhaps had a very neglectful mother who was struggling with an eating disorder can also be aggressive in a relationship.

So we can have this crossover.

At the end of the day,

Dear ones,

We have issues,

It's not our fault,

But if we are going to break free of the chains of the past,

If we are going to heal at the level of the subconscious mind,

We have to find the problem first.

Healing happens after you've accepted the problem and this is difficult because when you start to dig in,

That is when you start to,

I call them pockets of pain,

That's when we find these pockets of pain and that's when we have to learn how to process them.

Eleven signs of the emotionally neglectful parent.

They are cold to you,

Their tone is unfriendly.

So did you have a parent who spoke to you with a tone as if they were indifferent,

They just didn't care about you?

This showed up in my life where my mom wouldn't even look at me.

I'd try to talk to her and her tone was so cold,

She let me know I'm very disinterested and I don't care.

And this happened over and over and over in my life.

The way she spoke to me was very distant.

I got the feeling like she was indifferent to what I was feeling and you may have experienced that too.

They do not respond to your emotions.

So did you grow up with a mom who you were visibly upset or a dad where you were visibly upset?

Maybe you came home and maybe you were bullied at school and your parents showed zero interest at all.

It was like,

Pass the butter.

It's like,

Hey I need the salt.

Like nobody cared.

Like you could be visibly upset sitting at the kitchen table crying or you could be alone in your room for hours,

Maybe even days and no one comes to check on you.

Like no one is interested in what you're going through.

It's obvious that you're upset.

You might have been crying at the kitchen table.

My brother and my sisters,

We would try to hold back the tears.

We were so afraid of our parents disappointing them and having them criticize us or just getting angry that we would hold back the tears.

And every once in a while,

You know,

A tear would drop and my father would explode.

So our emotions upset our parents.

So if you had a parent like that,

That's a sign that you were emotionally neglected.

They spend little time with you.

So did you have a parent that spent like zero time with you?

And it doesn't matter.

Many of our defense strategies have us protecting our parent.

And usually what it is,

Is that we could experience neglect from both parents.

But what we generally tend to do is we idealize one of them.

And I personally think that this is our inner child's way of helping us feel not so unsafe.

Because if both parents don't love us,

Oh my god,

Lions and tigers and bears,

Oh my.

If our mothers were more outwardly aggressive,

They were more outwardly frustrated,

They were more outwardly verbal,

And like we could see that their energy was toxic,

Then we might identify mom as the problem,

Boy or girl.

And we might idealize dad who travels a lot because he's just not around.

We will take it out on the parent that is actually in the foxhole with us,

Who is at home with us,

Who has all these responsibilities of taking care of the home and rearing the children,

For example.

And literally idealize the parent that travels.

Or idealize the parent who is drunk and doesn't criticize us.

But that parent's checking out too.

That parent isn't here for us.

That parent is leaving us alone.

We might have a parent that abandons us to the stress of the parent who has to stay at home.

Maybe the parent that stays at home is overwhelmed and needs help.

But the parent who leaves the home,

Who comes back with the shiny toys,

In our mind,

In our magical thinking,

In our fantasy thinking,

This is the parent that loves us the most because they're the parent that spends less time with us.

They're the parent that doesn't yell at us and that the other parent is.

So by comparison,

The black-and-white thinking of a little child tells us that mommy's bad,

For instance,

And daddy's good.

Yet both are emotionally neglecting us.

That's hard to process because it means that we have to let go of the fantasy of the parent that wasn't there.

There is a lack in the child's life.

There's a lack of interest in the child's life.

So whatever you were doing,

Whether it was cheerleading,

Whether it was art class,

Whether you had homework to do,

Maybe you had a science project,

Nobody cared.

It was like you were on your own.

I always said this growing up,

Like I felt like I was born but I wasn't raised.

Like whatever science project that I had to do,

I had to figure out a way to get my supplies on my own because asking for a quarter or a dollar or this frustrated my mother.

And again,

In my situation,

Dad was off,

Dad was out working,

And mom was the one running his business,

Doing the laundry,

Doing the cooking,

And trying to manage three little kids all by herself.

And that was really hard for her.

However,

Dealing with her frustration,

She couldn't emotionally regulate.

She was also a wounded adult child,

So she couldn't show up for me.

But the point was that she had no interest in what was going on in my life,

And I could feel that.

So if you had a parent or two parents that lacked interest in your life,

Then that's a sign that they were emotionally neglectful.

They consistently find faults in you.

So this is a parent who doesn't compliment you.

This is a parent who criticizes you.

So really,

You could have the only conversations that you could have with your parent could be centered around what's wrong with you.

Why are you wearing that?

Did you look at yourself before you walked out of the house today?

I can't believe you said that.

I can't believe you dress like that.

I can't believe that's what your clothes look like.

I can't believe you're eating so much.

I can't believe you eat that.

I can't believe you said that.

So it's a lot of negativity coming your way.

Absolutely no attention,

No positive reinforcement,

And you feel like you are a piece of a specimen on a slide.

And mom or dad,

This critical parent,

Is a microscope,

And the only thing they see in you are flaws,

Or their perceived flaws.

So they don't see the good in you,

So you're not getting that you're a good enough person,

And you have a right to love yourself,

And you have the right to good in life.

You don't get that treatment.

It's just what's wrong with you.

There are parents who are very verbally abusive.

There are parents who criticize their children,

Who tease them until they cry.

So maybe you had a parent that used very harsh language.

Maybe they used name-calling.

Maybe they labeled you.

And these labels are very damaging because they stick.

They stick in our psyche,

And we wonder,

If this is what my parent thinks about me,

Maybe it's true.

And then the mind of a child develops cognitive distortions,

And we think that because we feel an emotion,

It must be true.

So I feel bad,

And daddy said I'm bad,

So I must be bad.

That's why I have no friends,

Or that's why I'll always be alone.

We make all of these deep-seated subconscious connections in the mind of the inner child,

And we're not taught to confront them because when we grow up and we become adults,

We're just acting out these childhood programs.

We're acting out these subconscious patterns.

The good news is we can correct them,

But we can't correct them without first identifying them.

The other sign that your parent was emotionally neglectful is that your parent does not encourage you when you fail.

Does your parent encourage you when you make a mistake?

Does your parent jump on your back?

Do they get triggered when you fail?

Do they encourage you,

Or do they make fun of you?

Do they make it worse?

You're having a really bad day.

Your girlfriend broke up with you,

And you're feeling at a loss,

And here comes your dad telling you,

Well,

I told you you should have treated her better,

Or I told you you should have worn cologne,

Or I told you she wasn't good enough for you,

Or I told you you shouldn't have trusted her.

You never listened to me.

So suddenly it's about your dad.

It's not about what you're experiencing,

And forget support.

Like parents who are emotionally neglectful,

Forget support.

They're just all about like pounding it on and pounding it on,

So you're having a bad day.

It triggers them,

And it's almost like you're a garbage can,

And emotionally they're searing this hole into you,

Onto the top of your head,

And they're just dumping all of their garbage into you.

So your life just feels so much worse.

It's like now it's like you're trying to roll a rock up the hill with cinder blocks on your back,

And so there's no emotional support when you have a bad day or when you fail.

Your parents were aloof or shut down.

Did you have a parent that was just couldn't reach them?

It was like there was a pane of glass between you and them.

This is very common when you have an alcoholic parent,

Because they're so caught up in their addiction.

They're so detached from themselves,

And they're so unaware of themselves.

That's why I connect alcoholism with narcissism,

Because when you have an alcoholic parent,

They have no clue how their drunkenness or how their addiction is affecting the family system.

They are in denial of how their actions are affecting the family system.

Like the fact that you can't bring your friends over because dad is drunk,

Or mom and dad are having another fight,

Or because the house is in shambles,

Or they turned off the electricity because nobody's working because of an addiction.

The parents in the home caught in that codependent addictive cycle are not aware of how the dynamics between them,

How the addiction to the alcohol,

And how they're showing up every day in life.

They're not aware of how those dynamics are affecting their children.

This is a very deep-rooted family of origin issue.

Again,

When you just grow up and you're not looking at the cause of why you're having a difficult time in your adult life,

Why it's hard for you to connect to your feelings and express yourself,

Why it is you keep attracting people with addiction issues,

Or why you can't say no,

Why you feel guilty and ashamed all the time.

When you're not stopping to ask yourself,

Why do I keep attracting narcissistic relationships?

Why can't I set a boundary?

When you're not asking why,

You just keep doing what you've always done.

Einstein says you can't solve a problem from the same level of intelligence that caused the problem.

We are adults in our inner child's mind,

So we're adults in a body,

We're an adult body,

But our inner child is running our lives,

And until we stop and look within,

We really can't heal.

So your parents were aloof,

They were shut down,

And they were uninterested in what was happening,

But you knew that they were shut down,

That there was something up,

You can't talk to them.

Another sign that you had emotionally neglectful parents is that they had an angry disposition,

So this taught you that,

Oh,

I have to stay away.

There was never an opportunity for you to feel like you can crawl up into your dad's lap and just say,

I had a really bad day,

And get the nurturing and the emotional support that you needed.

Or your mom was just always super busy and so always super frustrated,

And this happens when mothers and fathers have mother wounds that are unhealed.

We can get so caught up in raising our families,

And in stress,

And in paying bills,

And dealing with our own emotional issues with relationships,

That we can appear very angry and very busy to our children.

And so I think the healing process also has to include those of us who are looking within,

And we are unsung heroes.

What I mean by that is like,

Those of you who are looking to heal,

If you're a mom or dad and you're looking to heal,

I always say this,

No one's going to build a statue in your honor,

But they should,

Because you're changing the world by changing you.

You're dealing with these inner child issues.

You're dealing with this trauma.

You're processing these painful emotions.

You're trying to make the world a better place.

You're trying to make amends.

You're trying to heal your inner child.

And so part of that is acknowledging the gentle accountability that we need as parents when we recognize that we've hurt our children,

Too.

But for the sake of this session,

We're talking about the child who perceives their parent as angry or rushed.

That results in emotional neglect for the child,

Because they're perceiving their parent as unapproachable.

And so a little girl or a little boy will disown their own needs,

So not to upset mommy and daddy.

And this could be a single dad situation,

A single mom situation,

Where the children in the home are recognizing that mom and dad are stressed,

And so they deny their own needs,

Which means,

Dear one,

That your emotional needs went unmet.

And we have to see that if we're going to really heal.

The parents guilt the child.

They talk about how much they sacrificed for the children,

So you feel like a burden.

So if you had a parent who was highly narcissistic,

Stuck in their own drama,

Feeling sorry for themselves,

And sometimes it's very valid,

Right?

Like parents have a lot of stress to go through today.

However,

When it teeters into the narcissistic pool and the parent lacks empathy for the children and is so immature and so self-absorbed,

And they make the child feel guilty for being born.

So if you had a parent who guilted you and shamed you,

You never know how I had it.

You think your life is tough?

Tough?

You should have seen the way it was for me.

You're lucky you have me as a parent.

You know what I sacrificed for you?

You know what I gave up?

I gave up my beauty pageant career.

Look at my body.

Look what I look like because I gave birth to you.

Four kids.

I actually had a client who experienced that.

Her mother was so distraught that her body changed after giving birth to four children that she said,

I don't think there was ever a day that she didn't complain that having children destroyed her body.

What does that do?

The implication is that the child can't figure out.

They're not critical thinkers.

As children,

It's like we think,

We feel,

We believe.

And so if our parents shame us and tell us that it's our fault their bodies look this way,

For instance,

We believe it.

What is the consequence?

Shame?

Guilt?

We feel sorry for our parents.

We feel like it's our fault.

We feel like we hurt someone,

Which can develop into hypervigilance,

The inability to say no,

The fear of hurting someone,

And codependency,

Putting the needs of other people because we have so much shame about our own needs that we default to focusing on the needs of others to avoid this shame from childhood.

So if you went through that,

You had a parent who emotionally neglected you,

And that needs to be considered.

So those are the 11 signs that you had a parent that was emotionally neglectful.

In the next session that I will be releasing,

We're going to be talking about the ways in which this trauma is internalized,

How we internalize these feelings,

And also how we can externalize these feelings.

So we internalize these feelings with certain behaviors,

And we also externalize these feelings with certain behaviors.

And we're going to be diving into what it means to be a healthy adult.

So what would that look like for you?

What does it mean to be healthy?

It wasn't until I compared the life of a child that got what they needed to the life that I had as a child that I was able to break through these subconscious beliefs that resided at the level of the subconscious in my own mind.

I just want to encourage you to find the courage to be a little bit more objective about your childhood.

This doesn't mean that our parents were horrible people,

That they were monsters.

In some cases they are.

I mean,

We all read about those extreme cases in the newspaper.

But many adult children from dysfunctional homes are suffering in silence.

We are extremely loyal,

And we give and we give and we give until there's nothing left to give.

And that's a sign that you have emotional neglect,

Because you don't know how to love yourself.

You don't know how to set boundaries.

And unfortunately that doesn't make us very healthy role models for our children.

So I encourage you to be more objective about what's happened in your life.

You are enough.

I see you.

I hear you.

I validate you.

You have nothing to prove.

And the power that you seek,

The light that you seek,

Is within you.

Childhood trauma just eclipsed that light.

And you can have aha moments.

You can have breakthrough moments.

And little by little,

You can get there.

You can learn to love yourself.

It is absolutely wonderful and so healing and so peaceful on the other side of recovery.

So I encourage you to stay on this path and to keep looking for your divine authentic self.

It's in there.

It's in there.

Bye for now.

Reviews

Thank you, hit the nail on the head. Clarified a lot of childhood trauma. I had a lot that also came from my brother who was 6 yrs older than me & an uncle who teased me often till I cried. Dad was the classic binge alcoholic & mom was just trying to keep it together.

Yes I saw myself in a couple of the 11 things that neglectful parent do the children it seems as though I wasn’t really neglected but then as I hear your words, Lisa, I understand that that is where it came from because I am very codependent. Now I’m not able to say what I feel and I am my memory is terrible and I freeze at what I want to do in my sister is the same way. There’s two of us left out of nine children. My father is a recovering alcoholicand my mother is clinically depressed

Thank you, Lisa.

Thank you.

Thanks Lisa , Great insights into how I am the way I am!