As an adult, the dark clouds of emotional neglect can hang heavily over your head, influencing your every move and making it more difficult to navigate your relationships. Childhood emotional neglect is when parents don’t respond properly to their child’s feelings while they’re growing up. Rather can doing something harmful, neglect is the absence of doing something good and helpful. Childhood emotional neglect isn’t like trauma or abuse that happens to a child; it’s the failure of something that should have happened, such as emotional validation, emotional awareness, and more.
Here’s how it can affect a person’s mental health in the future as well:
Lack of trust
Trust is a crucial aspect of building and maintaining relationships with other people. However, adults who faced emotional neglect in their childhood might not be aware of what a good relationship looks like and aren’t able to trust that someone would truly be able to care for them.
Feeling undeserving or worthless
Feelings of worthlessness are extremely difficult to overcome, especially if you’ve grown up with them plaguing your everyday life. The lack of self-worth can cause a lack of ambition and cause you to neglect your education, settle for less, or give up on your dreams.
Issues with emotional regulation
A neglectful childhood can lead to issues with identifying and expressing emotions, which causes people to bottle up their real emotions and feelings until they burst out unexpectedly. Anger, depression, and anxiety are common issues that can lead to drug or alcohol use in order to escape the pain of these overwhelming feelings.
Feelings of guilt and shame
The lack of validation and encouragement throughout your childhood can cause you to become plagued by feelings of shame or guilt, even when you might not have done anything wrong. You might start overthinking things or blame yourself for things out of your control.
Talk to a professional mental therapist in Lexington Park
Do you believe that you might be suffering from the effects of childhood emotional neglect? It can be difficult to overcome the complex consequences of this by yourself—it’s best to talk to an experienced mental health practitioner who can help you go back to your roots and identify your pain points in a safe environment. Oasis of Hope has compassionate psychiatric nurse practitioners that also provide anxiety treatment, substance abuse treatment, and depression treatment.