Was I neglected as a child?

Signs of Childhood Emotional Neglect Low self-esteem. Difficulty regulating emotions. Inability to ask for or accept help or support from others. Heightened sensitivity to rejection.

choosingtherapy.com - Childhood Emotional Neglect: Signs, Lasting Effects, & Treatments

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What Is Emotional Neglect?

While physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse are behaviors that parents or other caregivers enact upon or toward a child, emotional neglect is the absence of necessary emotional interactions such as nurture, connection, and adequate responses to distress. Because it is the lack of emotional care, it is harder to identify, even for those who have experienced it. Emotional neglect does not occur because a parent is occasionally distracted, but instead is an ongoing pattern of behaviors that fail to meet the emotional needs of a child. An example of emotional neglect would be a parent who consistently ignores or dismisses their child’s distress or feelings. Demeaning a child for their emotions with phrases like “crybaby,” and refusing to ever listen to a child’s feelings (“stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”) will teach a child that their emotions are wrong and unimportant. Emotional neglect is traumatic for a child in that over time it becomes overwhelming to a child’s developing emotional system. This can lead to some children or adults developing symptoms of Complex Trauma or Complex PTSD.

Signs of Childhood Emotional Neglect

People who experienced emotional neglect as children can struggle with relationships throughout life, sometimes feeling chronically disconnected and misunderstood. Because children learn how to manage their feelings through relationships with their primary caregivers, other common struggles include emotional reactivity and shutting down emotionally or dissociating.

Signs that you or a loved one have experienced childhood neglect include:

Low self-esteem

Difficulty regulating emotions

Inability to ask for or accept help or support from others

Heightened sensitivity to rejection

Lack of language for describing feelings

Dissociative tendencies

Shame or guilt around emotions

Emotional Neglect Statistics

Emotional neglect has not been studied as much as other types of childhood abuse or maltreatment, so the statistics are somewhat limited at this time. One meta-study suggests more than 18% of children suffer from emotional neglect, with a prevalence of 184 out of 1000 cases. 9 Emotional neglect in childhood leads to higher risk of anxiety disorders in adolescence and adulthood. 10 Youth that experienced psychological maltreatment (including emotional neglect and emotional abuse) were shown to have worse symptoms than peers who had history of both physical and sexual abuse.11

How Emotional Neglect Affects Children

Attachment theory teaches us that we learn how to interact with the world through relationship with our early primary caregivers. Those early connections form a template for how we see the world and how we relate to others in it. Without a template for secure connection, emotionally neglected children struggle to form healthy relationships.1

Emotional neglect affects children in the following ways:

Children learn that their emotions are not okay

Shutting down becomes an adaptive behavior

Lashing out can become a way to try to be heard or noticed

Difficulty in connecting with peers can be persistent

Inability to ask for help (in school or otherwise)

Emotional distress may present through somatic complaints — headaches, stomach problems, etc.

The Lasting Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect

Emotional neglect in childhood disrupts a child’s ability to feel secure in relationships and in the world. Because our early childhood experiences form the way we interact as adults, untreated childhood emotional neglect can cause long term deficiencies in our ability to understand our emotions, manage our emotions, and be in healthy relationships.

The lasting effects of childhood emotional neglect include:

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Difficulty maintaining relationships

Relationships that are distant or disconnected

Distrust of others

Inability to ask for help

Persistent feelings of loneliness, guilt, or shame

Inability to deal with emotions of self or others

Dissociative or shutting-down behaviors 2

Sabotaging relationships or opportunities in order to avoid rejection

Heightened risk of anxiety disorders and depressive disorders 3

Emotional reactivity

Causes of Childhood Emotional Neglect

Parents who are not outwardly abusive but neglect their children emotionally are often people in deep struggle themselves. In times of turmoil, the ability to connect with others becomes extremely difficult and parents can find themselves unable to form secure bonds with their children. Parents may be unaware that they are neglecting their children emotionally especially when they are themselves struggling with mental illness, extreme stress or external pressures such as work, spousal abuse, poverty, or military service.

Parents may neglect their children emotionally for the following reasons:

Parents may have been neglected or abused themselves and may not understand how to be nurturing to a child. Work, military service, or incarceration may keep a parent from being present in the home. Extreme stress and/or violence in the home can disturb the bonds between parent and child. Death of a parent or any traumatic death in the family may cause overwhelming grief in the family system.

Diagnosing Emotional Neglect

Emotional neglect can be difficult to identify because children who are emotionally neglected can present as healthy children, with their physical needs being met and sometimes even exceeded. Observing the interaction between parent and child as well as the way a child interacts with other children can give insight into whether a child is being emotionally neglected. Infants and very young children may show symptoms of failure to thrive. School aged children and adolescents may be more shut down and less likely to ask for help or draw attention to themselves in school. They may appear independent and self-sufficient but may also struggle to relate to peers and may not have many close friends. Somatic complaints that have no organic cause can also be a sign of emotional distress in children. In adulthood, people may have consistent struggles with relationships, sometimes even finding themselves drawn into abusive or neglectful romantic relationships. Adults who experienced childhood emotional neglect can struggle with emotions from others as well as their own emotions. They may struggle to connect and may feel a pervasive sense of loneliness and be prone to shutting down.2 Anxiety disorders and mood disorders can be indicative of emotional neglect.4

Treatment of Childhood Emotional Neglect

Because emotional neglect in childhood creates difficulty in understanding emotions and relationships, effectively healing from childhood trauma should include actions like building emotional intelligence, developing appropriate regulation skills, and forming healthy relationships. Medication prescribed by a psychiatric provider may be able to help alleviate certain symptoms, but healing from neglect requires further work.

Individual Therapy

Finding a therapist who is familiar with attachment, trauma and neglect is one of the best ways to treat the effects of childhood emotional neglect. Individual therapy will provide both coping skills and regulation skill-building to allow a person to manage the present symptoms they are experiencing related to childhood neglect. Effective therapy will also allow the client to dig into the past to uncover early neglect created patterns that may have been helpful at the time, such as a child who shuts down to avoid the pain of a parent rejecting their needs for attention or nurture. Therapy can show how the pattern of shutting down may have been helpful for a child, but for an adult becomes problematic, keeping a person from being able to connect with partners or even their own children. Individual therapy can also allow a safe environment for a person to learn and practice how to feel their emotions and how to regulate their responses.

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While different modalities in therapy exist, Component Based Psychotherapy (CBP) has been specifically designed to treat emotional abuse and neglect. CBP focuses on relationship, regulation, dissociation, and narrative as the main components of healing.5 Art therapy for children and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) show significant effectiveness in helping clients process traumatic events, including emotional neglect.6

Family Therapy

Family therapy, especially family therapy that is based on a family systems model, acknowledges that one person’s struggle in the family affects the entire family system. Therefore, healing comes by the entire family working together to grow and heal. Family therapy facilitates members listening to each other and working together to become a more healthy system. Family therapy also provides parents ways to heal the wounds from their own childhood while simultaneously adjusting their parenting to provide a new pattern of emotional health in the family. Family therapy can be done concurrently with individual therapy if needed.

Group Therapy/Support Groups

Seeking out support groups or group therapy can help to build connection and decrease loneliness. Group therapy provides participants the ability to identify and relate to each other in a safe environment. In the context of a group, skills are taught and group members have the opportunity to have their feelings acknowledged and affirmed. Realizing that their experience is not unique can have a profound effect on feelings of isolation and loneliness. If a person experienced emotional neglect due to addiction in the home, 12 step programs such as Adult Children of Alcoholics or Al Anon may provide a supportive atmosphere that could be helpful. Many therapists have issue-specific therapeutic groups available to their clients as well.

Parenting Classes

Parenting classes can be a wonderful way to help parents build skills needed to emotionally support their children. Parenting classes teach attendees about child development, healthy discipline, and ways to nurture and support children emotionally. Parents who were abused or neglected themselves may find parenting classes especially helpful. Parenting classes are found in most communities through government agencies, religious institutions and schools. There are also many parenting books and resources online.

choosingtherapy.com - Childhood Emotional Neglect: Signs, Lasting Effects, & Treatments

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