Welcome back, my beautiful visitors. If you’re new here, I am Akash, and this is a platform where I share my guidance about everything from healing your traumas, building self-love, self-worth, confidence, and as a result of it, building your best life.
In today’s article, I really want to address a subject, and the majority of us have gone through it, yet we don’t discuss about it because there’s a lot of lack of awareness and education. That is exactly what I want to cover in our today’s article like how you can actually recognize that you have gone through emotional neglect growing up as a child and, as a result, experienced some kind of abandonment which often shows up in your adult life, and what are the signs of it.
Understanding Emotional Neglect
Now, the problem with going through emotional neglect is most of us do not even know that we have been neglected in our childhood because there is no feeling associated with being neglected.
Let’s say if you’re actually growing up in a chaotic household where your parents are also dealing with their own problems, their own traumas, as a result of which they do not know how to show up for you, give you the comfort, give you the validation, give you the love that you truly seek, and you don’t get that kind of emotional reassurance that you truly need. That is when you go through emotional neglect.
But if you’re growing up in a place where you have never even known what receiving love feels like, how would you even know that you were neglected in the first place?
When you have never received emotional validation growing up as a child, how would you even know that there is a scenario that exists where love is available to you? Growing up, we don’t know what we never had if we never had it in the first place, if that was our normal.
What Was My Personal Realization?
Growing up, especially in my case, the first time I started noticing it was when I actually saw my friends and how their parents were with my friends. Now, I have a great relationship with my parents at the moment. I had to educate them a lot about what went wrong, but I’m not going to blame my parents for what happened. What happened happened to me. They had their own share of traumas which was passed on to them by their parents, and they had a lack of education. There was a lack of awareness because of which they did not even know how to do it. After all, even they are being parents for the very first time too.
But things happened the way they happened, and I’m not going to blame them. Instead, I take responsibility for my healing, and I also take responsibility for educating them, of creating awareness in my parents. But it was a very difficult period for me growing up when I did not receive that kind of emotional validation and assurance that I needed from my parents.
Emotional Neglect Despite Physical Presence
In most cases, when you go through emotional neglect, your parents are physically there. They’re taking care of all your physical needs like providing you shelter, food, everything. But this is the case where, you know, your emotional needs are not at all being met, where you don’t have someone to lean on as a child growing up. And that’s a very difficult situation for a young one to be in.
And this often results in us feeling, you know, that our feelings and our emotions do not matter at all. And as a child, as a kid, we are often narcissists. So let’s say our parents do not show up for us in the way that we want them to show up.
When we are young, we are not going to think, “Oh, our parents have so many problems; they have their own share of hardships.” What we are going to think is, “Oh, there is something wrong with me because of which they are not loving me. I probably do not deserve love, which is why they are not treating me in this way.” And this is what I went through growing up as well.
Impact of Childhood Experiences
In my family, we had a very tough financial situation growing up, because of which my mom was stressed out, my dad was emotionally unavailable, and my mom used to take out her frustrations on me. In this scenario, it never occurred to me that, “Oh my God, they are so stressed out.” What I used to think often is, “I am not wanted. I am not needed. My mom does not love me, and my dad also does not love me,” because he was emotionally unavailable.
And in these cases, we often have a very difficult time trusting our own feelings and trusting our emotions because the people who are supposed to be protectors, when they are not validating it, how are we supposed to validate our own emotions when we are barely, let’s say, 5 to 10 years old?
And in our childhood, from the age of 0 to 7, our brain waves are usually in delta and theta waves. Now, these are the lowest brain waves possible, and when your brain waves are in delta or theta, that’s when our subconscious mind is wide awake. So whatever thoughts you think, whatever you’re seeing in front of you, whatever fights your parents are going through, whatever emotions that you feel of being unwanted or being unlovable is directly getting registered into your subconscious mind.
Because at that age, your conscious mind has not developed; your prefrontal cortex has not developed. So whatever small little thing you think of is directly going into your unconscious mind. The person that you are today is a result of your past programs, your past unconscious thoughts, and until you deliberately put in an effort to change that way of thinking, nothing’s going to change in your life.
My Final Message
When we grow up in a situation where we have gone through emotional neglect, we do not have a secure foundation built for our life, and we even do not know what a secure attachment looks like. This converts into us having a very difficult time when it comes to forming healthy relationships in our teenage and adult life as well, because deep inside, when you’ve gone through emotional neglect and abandonment, there is a sense of unworthiness, and you always grow up with the thought process that people do not want you, people do not love you.
So I hope this article was helpful to you. I think now, you must have understood why in your childhood, you used to feel like that and now how you exactly feel. If any part of my article is not clear to you, feel free to ask your doubts in the comment section. I will try to answer your doubts as soon as possible. So that’s all for today’s article guys, thank you so much for reading. And I will come back soon with another interesting article. Thank you!