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What is emotional neglect
To feel understood leaves us feeling less alone, and more a part of something known. A feeling that what we are going through or experiencing is something real, and that our feelings matter. This is often something missing from the adults in our lives growing up when we experience emotional neglect.
Emotional neglect is what didn’t happen, what wasn’t provided emotionally growing up. You may have had your material and physical needs completely met, known that you are loved, and still felt this sense of deprivation. It could feel like a hole inside, a persistent emptiness. What it really is, is a yearning for relatedness, to feel like someone gets you.
Examples of emotional neglect could be ignoring your bids for connection, feeling rejected for having big feelings, having to deal with feelings alone, caring for a parent emotionally- also called parentification, feeling unheard and dismissed, not advocating for struggles that parents witness in their children, withholding affection, and not being listened to attentively. Essentially not authentically relating with you. I also want to stress that many of these things can’t possibly happen all the time. We cannot meet children’s needs every time, its incredibly hard to be a parent. What I’m referencing here, is chronic unmet needs which make up emotional neglect.
When we haven’t had that attunement, curiosity, and understanding about our feelings and perspectives from caretakers or important figures in our lives growing up, we adjust our sails to not feeling seen, we get used to it. We learn the routes on the map that lead to getting attachment needs met for survival and learn to take what connection we can get.
To highlight the impact of this, to feel chronically invisible is akin to feeling like we don’t exist. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people justify their upbringing by saying well I wasn’t physically abused, no one ever hit me. And yet psychological wounding is enduring. There may be a beginning and an end to physical abuse in the moment, and psychological continues on. I am not looking to minimize physical abuse, which can be very traumatic and scarring. And also highlighting that we need not dismiss the longstanding impact of emotional neglect.
It’s deeply rejecting, especially when we’re children. Attention, when brought in a soft, tender, caring, holding way, is love. Feeling noticed is love. And being deprived of those things most of the time, is damaging.
This isn’t looking to point fingers at your parents, we can have compassion for them, that they likely also experienced ruptures in connection, feeling ignored and invisible, maybe aren’t aware of their impact on you, AND honoring your story and your experiences means talking about what really happened, which for some can feel like a betrayal. And my dear, if you have experienced emotional neglect, you have been betrayed many times already, in small and big, every day moments.
When we feel chronically unseen, we learn to develop a relational self that is different than who we really are when we’re alone. This is adaptive, as others couldn’t understand or couldn’t meet you emotionally, and or psychologically with your way of viewing the world. Most people have social masks, which makes sense. When we don’t know someone else well, or we aren’t comfortable, we’re not going to put all our vulnerabilities out on the table. And for those with childhood trauma, which is most of us, we had to trade our authenticity for attachment. Which means that we couldn’t focus on developing who we are fully because we were too busy trying to navigate maintaining our attachment to our caretakers.
We may maintain our attachment to them through parent pleasing, which becomes people pleasing, or staying loyal to them by not talking about or looking at our own experience and feelings. Both of these strategies are for good reason. We need other people. Especially when we are kids whose needs completely depend upon adults, but we also deeply need others as adults too. That even if the connection is subpar or empty, many people fear losing it because it may be all they have and it feels better than nothing. This is a reason many people stay in relationships they aren’t happy in. Fear of being alone. Because it really is that threatening for us, to feel psychologically and physically alone.
Relationships
And for those that are used to hiding themselves, and focusing more on others, its a clever way that HSPs or childhood trauma survivors have learned to adapt to the emotionally immature and unavailable ways of those they depended on.
In adult life, these skills can become a hindrance to building mutual relationships, and maintain the wound of not feeling seen. Mutual relationships being not one sided, where one partner in a relationship does majority of the emotional, mental labour. You may even feel safer not feeling seen or being vulnerable being in more of a caretaker role in your relationship. Now theres nothing wrong with this at all, if its what you want and what feels good to you. And, for folks that have experienced emotional neglect, it will feel familiar, and likely won’t feel fulfilling as it can be a reenactment of what didn’t happen, and of how you weren’t seen or valued.
We may seek out partners that are not able to nourish us emotionally, and if they do it might feel engulfing or weird to have someone really see and reciprocate our emotional care.
When we aren’t seen, and don’t feel safe when we have been vulnerable with others, it reinforces that idea that there isn’t anyone out there that “gets” us. This is incredibly lonely. It can even feel like you don’t really exist, or you’re missing something that other people seem to have.
Another aspect of being a highly sensitive person who has experienced emotional neglect is the ability to hide amongst others. It’s something HSPs are used to doing since our brains work a little differently than your average Joe. Since we can be more attuned to the subtleties of whats going on around us and inside us, we may have learned that its risky to ask others about things you notice in them, or share about our existential thoughts or worries, or whats really on our minds or how we are really doing because where do we even start.
So you may have learned to tone down what you share with others, all the things you notice, because you’ve found that with your parents or early relationships, others didn’t understand or were able to engage with what you brought up.
There is a paradox, that HSPs so deeply crave deep meaningful connection, and also feel loneliness so deeply. When HSPs haven’t felt consistently seen growing up, they may learn to create a relational structure internally that says to them other people aren’t capable or interested in knowing them.
There can be great pain and loneliness in this gap, of feeling like you can reach other people deeply but they can’t reach you. Maybe they lack the skills, or you’ve built relationships where the foundation is you being the one doing the emotional labour, and them the recipient of your curiosity and depth about them. Something that is likely familiar.
Psychological loneliness is the experience that others aren’t having the same experience as you about the same event. That what you are witnessing, others you’re surrounded by may not be. Now of course there will be different perspectives and lenses through which we all see things, and the difference is the perception that others won’t be able to see yours at all.
Loneliness with other people is something HSP’s are familiar with. In my experience it is often HSPs that feel psychologically lonely with others more often because we have such a deep capacity to relate, that can’t be found at your average party or get together in large groups. We can struggle with expressing it, unless we sense the other person is like us, or feels safe.
One of my favorite podcasts, We can do hard things, Glennon Doyle says “When I am alone is the time that I feel like I exist the most”. Like she is the color blue, and can feel her blueness, but that when she is with other people her colors mix with theirs and she starts to feel green, and how she enjoys that with a group of people having the same experience with others like at a concert, or watching a sports game with loved ones – both experiences where you can dissolve together. But that she is the most lonely when with a group of people and she can’t connect with and see others blueness or connect with her own blueness she feels like she is disappearing. She says when you feel like there is supposed to be connection and there isn’t any, that’s really lonely, and that can feel like you really disappear or don’t exist.
Robin Williams said that he used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up all alone, It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.
Feeling invisible is familiar for those who have experienced emotional neglect. Almost as though they don’t exist to others in ways that feel really big for them inside.
When Glennon talks about how when we feel that there is supposed to be connection with others and there isn’t, this is especially hard for HSPs who have experienced emotional neglect for a few reasons. We may witness that others seem to be okay with lacking emotional depth and vulnerable authenticity to conversations, which are the most stimulating kinds for HSPs. This can feel depriving, and empty, which may bring up grief for the lack of stimulating, engaging and alive relatedness that wasn’t there growing up or for much of their lives. On a deeper level, a reminder of not feeling known, or cared for.
It is inherently lonelier to be having a deeper experience of life than most people are having.
You are having a different experience, and that is both beautiful to be affected by life so deeply and very hard, and at times isolating. It is even harder to have experienced a deprivation wound of lacking emotional connection and attunement as a child, and to have that wound in adulthood which can intensify the lonely feelings.
There isn’t a simple, or one size fits all answer to the loneliness. It could be inner child work and learning how to be with our young selves when they feel so alone and unseen,
checking in with yourself around safe people- do you hold back, or withdraw, take the listening role, changing up our routines to take more risks, joining a class or something that feels good for you regardless of if you meet others or not, or simply tending to yourself. Can we assess who or what makes us feel less alone? And a reminder – You are not something to fix.
I don’t have a clever one liner to wrap up the real experience of this. The more that we know ourselves, and learn to respect and care for ourselves in the ways we weren’t when we were little, I believe, our loneliness may lose its intensity, but not its longing.
Amanda Bowers Counselling 