Childhood emotional neglect
A failure to respond enough to a child's feelings: not noticing, naming or validating them, often in a materially secure home. Defined by what didn't happen.
What drives it
The child learns that feelings are irrelevant or a burden and shuts them down. The adult often can't point to anything wrong, so doesn't understand why they feel empty.
How it shows
Work
Highly competent and self-reliant; doesn't ask for help; unclear what they want from a role; finds it hard to offer emotional support to reports; feels little after a success.
Relationships
Partners describe them as kind but hard to reach; they don't know how to ask for comfort and feel undeserving of attention. "I had a good childhood", with few specific memories.
Self
A background emptiness; difficulty naming what you feel; a sense of being different from others; harsh with yourself and generous with everyone else.
What tells it apart
Emotional deprivation schema: The schema is the adult conviction that one's needs won't be met; emotional neglect is the history that often builds it.
Alexithymia: Alexithymia is difficulty identifying feelings and can have other causes; neglect is a history that often produces it.
Dismissive-avoidant attachment: Avoidant attachment is a strategy of minimising need; neglect is one route into it, and neglected adults can also become anxiously attached.
A test
Ask what happened at home when they were sad or scared as a child; "nothing really, we just got on with it" is a common answer.
Questions to carry
- When they were sad or scared as a child, who noticed, and what happened next?
- Which feeling of mine still seems like a burden to mention, even to people who would want to know?
How strong the research is
moderate. Measured as a subscale of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and linked to adult depression and anxiety; the popular 'childhood emotional neglect' label goes beyond the research.
Where it comes from
David Bernstein and colleagues, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, 1994; popularised by Jonice Webb, 2012
Sources
- Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes) (1979)