Because it’s mostly silent and invisible, childhood emotional neglect is largely an overlooked phenomenon in psychology. Unlike physical neglect or abuse, where there are signs such as bruises or children coming to school underfed, emotional neglect is difficult to identify as there are frequently no observable signs. More importantly, emotional neglect is generally unrecognized by the child until symptoms begin to appear in adulthood.

Emotional neglect can take many forms, from a parent having unrealistically high expectations or not listening attentively, to invalidating a child’s emotional experiences to the point he or she begins to feel self-doubt. When a parent is not emotionally attuned to a child, there is no mirror held up, no positive reflection being shared with the child. Developing a positive sense of self, then, becomes more challenging for the child.

Symptoms of Emotional Neglect

As outlined in Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Dr. Jonice Webb, symptoms of childhood emotional neglect that show up in adults may include (but are not limited to):

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• “Numbing out” or being cut off from one’s feelings
• Feeling like there’s something missing, but not being sure what it is
• Feeling hollow inside
• Being easily overwhelmed or discouraged
• Low self-esteem
• Perfectionism
• Pronounced sensitivity to rejection
• Lack of clarity regarding others’ expectations and your own expectations for yourself

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While having these symptoms doesn’t necessarily mean you were emotionally neglected, if you identify with more than one symptom, it may be worthwhile to talk with a therapist about the possibility.

What Kinds of Parents Tend to Emotionally Neglect Their Children?

First, let me say most parents are well-intentioned and well-meaning and generally do the best they can. Some may have experienced emotional neglect themselves as children, and therefore may not have a lot to give emotionally. However, there are some parenting styles and characteristics that lend themselves to emotional neglect.

Authoritarian parents want their children to follow the rules, and have little time or inclination for listening to a child’s feelings and needs. As adults, children raised by an authoritative parent may either rebel against authority or perhaps become submissive.

Permissive parents have a laissez-faire attitude about child rearing and may let children pretty much fend for themselves. Children raised by permissive parents may have a tough time setting boundaries and limits for themselves in adulthood.

Parents with narcissistic qualities feel the world revolves around them. It’s typically all about the parent’s needs instead of the child’s. As adults, these children may have difficulty identifying their needs and ensuring that they’re met. They may even feel that they don’t deserve to have their needs met.

Perfectionistic parents tend to believe their children can always do more or better. These are the parents who may complain when a child brings home a report card with all A’s and one B. Children of such parents may grow up to be perfectionists, and set unrealistically high expectations for themselves, resulting in anxiety around feelings of never being good enough.

Absent parents can be removed from a child’s life for a variety of reasons, such as death, illness, divorce, working long hours, or frequent travel for work. Children of absent parents end up raising themselves to a large extent, and if they are the oldest child may also raise their younger siblings. These children tend to be overly responsible, which may carry over to adult life. As children, they seem like little adults, overburdened with worry about their families.

Tips for Recovering from Emotional Neglect

So what can you do if you think you may have been emotionally neglected as a child? Here are some tips:

1. Learn to be aware of positive and negative emotions when you’re experiencing them.

If you’ve spent your adult life being disconnected from your feelings, the first step is to learn to identify positive and negative emotion. It’s important to acknowledge just good and uncomfortable feelings to begin with.

Once you have that down, you can focus on noting subtler nuances of feelings. You may not even have words for how you feel, which is perfectly normal if you didn’t grow up in a home where people talked about their feelings.

2. Identify your needs, and take steps to meet them.

Many adults who experienced emotional neglect as children are often unaware of what they need and typically don’t feel deserving of getting their needs met. Develop your emotional vocabulary by researching emotions and needs online or at the library. Once you know what you need, it’s time to take action.

3. If you believe you don’t deserve to have your needs met, acknowledge the belief and see it as just that—a belief, not a fact.

It can be helpful to begin to deconstruct old beliefs you’ve held for a long time that may no longer hold true. Like everyone else on the planet, you have emotional needs that you deserve to have met, no matter what you experienced in childhood.

4. Be gentle with and take good care of yourself, starting with small steps.

Adults who experienced emotional neglect as children often have difficulty with self-care. Unaware of their feelings and needs, they frequently don’t know where to start. Try treating yourself with the same care and gentleness you would give a child who wasn’t able to take care of themselves. Be tender and compassionate with yourself, especially if you tend to be self-critical or judgmental.

And remember: Rome wasn’t built in a day! This is a process. When you skin your knee, you need to clean out the wound and expose it to the light of day; the same holds true for emotional wounds. Dare to bring the wound out of hiding, give it some light and air, and you’ll be on the road to healing.

Reference:

Webb, J. (2012). Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. New York, NY: Morgan James Publishing.

I define an emotional affair as a relationship in which one or both parties are involved in another significant relationship where there is emotional intimacy, sexual chemistry, and romantic feelings, without the relationship having been consummated.

Frequently in emotional affairs, the partner who didn’t have the affair experiences the same degree of betrayal and breach of trust as he or she would if a spouse had a physical affair. At times, an emotional affair can feel even more damaging because someone else has met the partner’s emotional needs.

If you or your partner has had an emotional affair, your relationship can most certainly survive and perhaps even become even closer than it was before the affair.

Here are some tips to get you back on track:

Tip 1: Be willing to look at the affair in the context of your relationship.

Emotional affairs don’t occur in a vacuum. If one person is looking outside the relationship to get emotional needs met, it may be likely that person’s needs aren’t being met within the primary relationship. Be willing to honestly consider what had been going on in your significant relationship prior to the beginning of the affair.

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“Joanne” and “Jeff,” both teachers at an international school, recently came to see me for therapy because Jeff had an emotional affair with Eileen, another teacher at the school. When Eileen was in the process of separating from her husband, Jeff had become her confidant, and the relationship deepened from there.

When Joanne found out about the affair, she was furious, hurt, and felt out of control. She made going to therapy a condition of continuing the relationship. As we began to work together, it was revealed that Joanne had given birth to the couple’s first child a year ago. Since that time, Jeff reported feeling left out and uncared for as Joanne had been preoccupied with the baby’s needs. He was missing the easy companionship and enjoyable sex they had before. However, he never told this to Joanne, and she had no way of knowing how Jeff was feeling.

Here, the context of the relationship was the birth of the couple’s first child and Jeff’s feelings of isolation and exclusion when Joanne’s attention was diverted to their baby. Because he didn’t share this with Joanne, his emotional needs went unmet within their relationship. Once this came out in therapy, Joanne was able to acknowledge Jeff’s feelings, and together they came up with strategies for Joanne to meet Jeff’s emotional needs and vice versa.

Tip 2: Talk about your feelings and needs with your partner without judgment or blame.

This is often easier said than done when strong feelings are present. Accusations can be flung, which rarely help couples resolve anything.

When I work with couples, I teach a communication model called nonviolent communication (NVC), or compassionate communication as I prefer to call it. Using this model, couples learn how to identify and express their feelings and needs to each other without blame, then to make a request of their partner, which can be answered yes or no. I find when people take responsibility for their own feelings and needs and communicate them directly to their partners, they can be heard in a non-defensive way because there is no judgment involved.

It is a very simple model that looks like this:

1. Observation: I make an observation about what I heard or saw the other person say or do, like a video camera recording the action. A video camera has no judgment or blame; it’s simply recording. The statement starts with, “When you do or say ________ …”

2. Feelings: I name the feeling I experienced as a result of the observation. An example would be, “When you say I don’t care about you, I feel hurt and misunderstood.”

3. Needs: This refers to common human needs that we all experience. Examples are needs for acceptance, love, understanding, collaboration, harmony, happiness, peace, etc. Now the model looks like, “When you say I don’t care about you, I feel hurt because I have a need for respect and understanding.”

4. Request: I then make a request of the other person that can be answered yes or no, using the phrase, “Would you be willing to ________?”

In Jeff and Joanne’s case, after the sentence in the third category of the model (needs), I would ask, “Would you be willing to talk with me more about this without blaming me so I can better understand what you mean?” This puts the whole conversation in a different light and can elicit a very different response than when I’m simply told, “You don’t care about me.”

When an emotional affair has occurred in a relationship, it’s essential that both partners learn to express delicate and vulnerable feelings without judgment so they can get past the accusation phase and arrive at some solutions.

Tip 3: Be open to coming up with new strategies to solve the underlying problem.

In Joanne and Jeff’s case, the underlying problem was that, since the birth of their son, Jeff had felt excluded and hurt by what he perceived to be Joanne’s inattentiveness. Because Jeff didn’t want to feel more vulnerable, he didn’t express his feelings to Joanne. They first needed to identify the problem and then communicate their feelings and needs to each other.

I find when people take responsibility for their own feelings and needs and communicate them directly to their partners, they can be heard in a non-defensive way because there is no judgment involved.This paved the way for them to strategize about effective solutions. Jeff might have said, “When I come home from work and tell you about my day and you don’t listen, I feel hurt and dismissed because I have a need to be heard. Would you be willing to tell me when would be a good time for us to talk if you’re busy with the baby?”

Joanne, for her part, would have heard it was important to Jeff to talk about his day, and she may have been willing to make another time. When Jeff swallowed his feelings instead of expressing them, there was no way for Joanne to know there was a problem, so of course no solution could be reached.

Indeed, a relationship can survive an emotional affair if both partners are committed to finding a way past it. If you find this too difficult to do on your own, often just a few sessions of couples therapy can kick-start the process.

Note: To protect privacy, names in the preceding article have been changed and the dialogues described are a composite.

Reference:

Rosenberg, M. (2003). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. Encinitas, CA: Puddle Dancer.