On emotional neglect

Another common struggle that I've noticed for people who were emotionally neglected is difficulty actually feeling and receiving empathy and compassion. Empathy and compassion can often be received as like pity or being looked down on. It's common for people to say that they feel like they're being viewed as pathetic or that the person is being condescending to them when it's an offering of empathy. The way I understand this is that empathy is being experienced as another form of disconnection instead of a form of connection. Emotionally neglected people have consistently been met with so much disconnection in their lives that it's actually hard for them to register and trust offerings of connection — because being pitied or being treated with a condescending attitude or looked down on, all of those are experiences of separation. What's being described is still an experience of emotional isolation because it doesn't feel like the other person is genuinely just feeling and sharing your experience.

It's also common for emotionally neglected people to feel like they're given empathy only because the other person feels obligated — like, oh well, now they feel like they have to be nice to me because they know I'm struggling. This is really difficult because it's essentially a blocking of any reparative experience that could be had from feeling another human being empathizing with you. What's missing is the actual resonance — that experience being able to resonate on an internal level and actually land as an experience of connection. A part of healing from emotional neglect is learning how to practice letting experiences of empathy or connection actually resonate within you instead of just kind of gliding off of you, and being able to trust them enough to actually absorb them internally.

Sometimes there can actually be protective blocks against this because there's something really painful that would come up if the person were to let themselves really feel and internally resonate with that empathy. So if I'm noticing this difficulty with the client, I might really slow down with them and ask, what comes up for you when you try to imagine that I'm actually connecting with your emotional experience right now? I might even describe a little bit of what it feels like for me when I'm empathizing with someone, because emotionally neglected people also really benefit from actually understanding how other people emotionally experience them — because that's part of the being mirrored and being seen that is missing in childhood emotional neglect. There's not a feeling that you really exist in the mind and heart of somebody else, and so it can be really helpful to reflect: here's how your experience is being held in my mind and heart, and here's what I mean when I say that I'm feeling empathy for you, here's the actual experience that I'm having inside. And I'll try to describe the experience — which is not pity, which is not an experience of separation or looking down on. It's an experience of genuine connection and really connecting with another person's emotional pain and holding it with them. A lot of the times when we really slow down and work on letting that resonate within, that will bring up a big wave of grief.

Five physical symptoms of CPTSD I didn't realize were connected to trauma.

Number one, delayed auditory processing. You ever say what? And then understand what the person said before they repeat themselves. Your brain is consumed by scanning threats. Processing information can sometimes take a little longer.

Two, chronic gut issues — nausea, stomach pain, IBS symptoms, loss of appetite. Many trauma survivors notice their digestive symptoms get worse during periods of stress, conflict, or emotional flashbacks.

Three, skin flare-ups. Eczema, hives, itching, or unexplained rashes can sometimes become worse during periods of nervous system dysregulation.

Four, constant exhaustion despite sleeping. You sleep for maybe eight hours and still feel absolutely depleted. Many people with CPTSD spend years in a state of hypervigilance, making true rest difficult.

Five, getting sick after the stressful event is over. You push through a crisis, a deadline, or a difficult period of time. The second it's over, you get a migraine, cold, or physical crash. Sometimes the body waits until it feels safe to let go.

Emotional neglect is more common than not. That's my opinion. And it's insidious because you can have the perfect picket-fence childhood wherein all of your needs were met physically, wherein your parents were present. They might have even been involved, like very involved. And yet you were left entirely alone in your emotional experience, in your internal world. And I think we finally stopped pretending that that isn't deeply traumatic.

To be met with curiosity about what goes on inside your mind, your interests, your dreams, the things that hurt you — to be met with open-minded, open-hearted curiosity, to have that reflected back to you, is an essential part of the human experience, especially for small children. Otherwise, we learn that we are invisible. We learn that although there are people around, we are deeply alone in this life.

And American culture is so goddamn superficial. I interned in grad school to be a therapist. I interned at a public high school here in Massachusetts. And oh my god, I couldn't breathe there. The conversation was so surface level. And I was in the mental health section of things. I was in a milieu that was supposed to be helping kids who already were depressed, anxious. We just talked about nothing. When I would get these kids one-on-one, the experience that they had of their parents was this like managerial one. Did you do your homework? You're failing this. It was all — we just treat our kids like that. There was not one kid that I met with who didn't come from a home where they were being emotionally neglected. None of them had that language. None of them, because the way that they're being treated by their parents was the way everyone's parents were treating their kids. So it was just a norm. A culture in which we say, how are you? And the answer is good, how are you? Regardless of what's actually going on — is an emotionally neglectful culture.

So, an interesting adaptation from complex trauma, and one that I see pretty readily in therapy and also in treatment, is the masochistic or the self-defeating personality. So when somebody has a masochistic personality, especially as an adaptation from complex trauma, they tend to be their own worst enemy. They tend to be in situations where they are enduring a lot of pain and a lot of suffering. They tend to self-sabotage themselves and they tend to reject help. So instead of eliminating problems, they tend to really just ruminate on the suffering and the pain without really trying to find some sort of solution.

So there is this unconscious belief that for them to reach some greater good, or for them to maintain a relationship, it means that they have to be suffering. They have learned from their childhood that suffering is really the price of being in a relationship. So we're talking about people that remain in relationships that are very painful, that are not serving them, that could be abusive or even neglectful, because they feel like it's going to get them to some sort of greater good — doing it for the children, doing it to protect an image, doing this to even prevent abandonment. So all of these different dynamics are really geared towards a person constantly being in a state of suffering.

And this is really a pattern that is a repetition compulsion from a childhood of abuse and punishment, where a person is constantly going through patterns of suffering to be able to find some sense of control. So when we look at somebody's childhood, a lot of times they're in situations where they're being punished without any sort of reason. There is a punishment following achievement, and even a role reversal in parenting where a parent is constantly making their pain the responsibility and even blaming the child for their pain. So if the parent is going through something like depression or dysregulated, they will put the blame on the child for that pain, and the child learns that for them to be in relationship or for them to prevent abandonment, they need to endure the pain, because it's the only way that they can maintain attachment and even get some sort of attention. So there is this unconscious association between suffering and relationships, and a person that has this personality style, despite the fact that they don't want to suffer and they don't want to be in pain, are constantly maintaining relationships where they're in pain and they are suffering because they believe it's going to get them somewhere.

One of the most common results of emotional neglect in terms of present-day attachment patterns is the inner conflict — the push and pull of simultaneously longing for connection, longing for intimacy, but also being terrified of it and not knowing how to accept it. And this can be such a frustrating and confusing inner experience where it feels like, oh, I want love, I want love, I want love. And then if I have any opportunity to actually be seen or known, to be vulnerable, to connect on a more intimate level, I freeze up, I collapse, I shut down, I pull away, I get scared.

And this is essentially an inner conflict between two different evolutionarily adaptive systems. So we still have our attachment system, which is reaching towards and longing for unmet needs to be met. Like as mammals, we have a built-in evolutionary wiring for finding safety and belonging and connection, and wanting to feel love, wanting to feel securely attached and bonded with other human beings. So having those needs unmet is very painful, and there's this emptiness and this lack of satisfaction, this longing for connection. So that pain is the attachment system signaling, hey, these needs aren't being met and I don't feel safe because I don't feel bonded with other human beings.

But then when there's any pursuit of trying to bond, or when someone else tries to get too close, there's this different process that happens. And that's the self-protection system kicking in and saying, actually no, I've learned that it's not safe to connect with other human beings, it's not safe to try to get these needs met. And depending on the history, it can be that's not safe because I'm going to be hurt, I'm going to be betrayed, abused, abandoned, rejected. Like if I open myself up and let myself rely on somebody else to meet my needs, I'm going to be profoundly wounded and traumatized. There can be a shame-based learning where it's like, well, I've learned that when someone actually sees me on a deep level, they reject me, they don't love and accept me. So I can't let people see me because it's going to be so painful if I let people see me and then I'm rejected again. So it's too risky, right? Even if it might allow me to get my needs met, there's this way greater risk of this expectation that I'm going to be once again alone, but now it'll be way more painful because I let myself actually open up for connection.

There can be a disbelief that real connection and belonging actually exists. And so human beings have just been associated with profound emotional danger instead of actually knowing I can get my needs met by other people. Or it can just be profoundly painful to let yourself open up emotionally because there's been this deadening of the emotions and the attachment system in order to survive the neglect. And so opening up your attachment needs, opening up your emotions that have been so shut down and collapsed, brings up all of this suppressed grief and pain, and it just feels really, really overwhelming and too scary. So there can be a protective response of like I'd rather stay numb and shut down. I don't know how to feel all of this stuff that I've had to suppress and compartmentalize and dissociate from. This is the core dilemma of emotional neglect — that our attachment needs are set up in competition with our self-protective instincts.

Why you're so hard on yourself and how it links back to childhood emotional neglect is from Complex PTSD by Pete Walker.

Unrelenting criticism, especially when it's grounded in parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of a child's brain. Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adapted by the child, who eventually repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetition results in the construction of thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust. Over time, a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Eventually, any inclination towards authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of a full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated. With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an inner critic that dominates mental activity. The inner critic's negative perspective creates many programs of self-rejecting perfectionism. At the same time, it obsesses about danger and catastrophizes incessantly.

The survivor typically lives in varying degrees of emotional flashback much of the time. The verbal and emotional layer of the abuse onion has many sub-layers of minimization. I have heard clients jokingly repeat numerous versions of this over and over: I know I'm hard on myself, but if I don't constantly kick my own ass, I'll be more of a loser than I already am. In fact, I really need you to come down on me if I try to get away with anything.

A childhood rife with verbal and emotional abuse forces the child to so thoroughly identify with the critic that it is as if the critic is his whole identity. Disidentification from the critic is the fight of a lifetime. To liberate your identity from the toxic critic you will have to repetitively confront it for a long time. You will have greater success if you are prepared to forgive yourself for repeatedly collapsing back into the old habit of self-blame. Progress is always gradual back and forth progress.

Emotional neglect. Minimization about the damage caused by extensive emotional neglect is at the core of the CPTSD denial onion. Our journey of recovering takes a quantum leap when we really feel and understand how devastating it was to be emotionally abandoned. An absence of parental loving interest and engagement, especially in the first few years, creates an overwhelming emptiness. Life feels harrowingly frightening to the infant and toddler who is left for long periods without comfort and care. Children are helpless and powerless for a long time, and when they sense that no one has their back, they feel scared, miserable, and disheartened. Much of the constant anxiety that adult survivors live in is the still aching fear that comes from having been so frighteningly abandoned.

Many survivors never discover and work through the wounds that correlate with this level. This happens because they overassign their suffering to overt abuse and never get to the core issue of their emotional abandonment. As stated above, this is especially likely to occur with survivors who dismissively compare their trauma to those who are abused more noticeably or more dramatically. I find this painfully ironic because some people suffer significant active abuse without developing CPTSD. Typically, they are spared because there is one caretaker who does not emotionally neglect them. Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker with whom she can turn to in times of need or danger. CPTSD then sets in to the degree that there is no alternative adult to turn to for comfort and for protection. This is especially true when the abandonment occurs 24-7, 365 days a year for the first few years of life. Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly passing away of thirst outside of a fenced-off garden of a parent's warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable, and excruciatingly empty.

The inner critic that develops in an emotionally neglectful home often looks a little different. It's not always built through criticism or harsh words the way an emotionally abusive home would be. Sometimes it develops because emotional support, validation, comfort, or even attention were missing when we needed them. As children, we naturally assume that if our emotional needs are not being met, the problem must be us. So we learn to minimize our feelings, lower our expectations, and stop asking for support. Over time, those beliefs become an inner voice that tells us our needs are too much — who's ever felt like that, right? — that our feelings don't matter, or that we should be able to handle everything on our own. And because there's no dramatic story, those of us from an emotionally neglectful home often don't give ourselves permission to connect our inner critic to our childhood at all. We can tell ourselves things like, you know, nothing that bad happened, or other people had it way worse. And so what happens is our inner critic starts to say that too.

Children of emotionally immature parents develop a message, which means that you are raised to put your parents' emotional state or opinions before your own. You're more focused on how they feel or how they'll react rather than your own needs. This is why people struggle to keep boundaries with emotionally immature parents, because they're so consumed with guilt and fear. But here's what you need to understand. Every adult needs to set boundaries. It's not wrong, and in healthy families, it's understood and respected. Emotionally immature parents subconsciously make their children feel responsible for their happiness and their life choices. And the truth is, they've had their own life where they've made their own choices. And even if they're unhappy with those choices, it's not on you to fix them. When we become an adult, the one thing we all have is the opportunity to make our own choices and to build a life on our terms.

One of the exercises that I often find helpful for people who have been emotionally neglected is something that I call compassionate witnessing. It's like an inner child or parts-work type of exercise, but the important thing is that the only purpose is to be a compassionate witness for the suffering of your younger self. You don't do anything to try to change how they feel or make them feel better, even things that would appear to be like comforting or reassuring or soothing. Because for people who have been emotionally neglected, they've already dealt with so much minimization and invalidation of their emotional experiences. So often what is actually lacking the most is literally just compassionate witnessing, just having someone there to see and hear your pain. So other inner child or self-soothing type of exercises, even if they're not intended this way, can feel like more invalidation, more emotional abandonment — anything that's an attempt to make the pain smaller or make it feel better.

There comes a time when offering a new perspective or inviting a new experience is important, but not until the original experience has been fully held for what it is. And if we skip holding it for what it is and we skip right into trying to make it better, it feels like bypassing. I think this is the most important type of what we call reparenting for people who have been emotionally neglected. It's giving that developmental need that goes unmet in emotional neglect, which is someone to just share your emotional truth with you, so you're not alone in it. So we try to go back and just give the inner child what they missed back then, what they needed.

I might prompt this by saying, if a client is telling me about a particularly hard time in their life, a time where they felt really alone, where they were in a lot of pain, I would maybe have us imagine just going back and sitting with that younger version of them. However they imagine that younger self — maybe alone in the room crying, or in a frozen shutdown state, or however captures the way they felt back then. And then we just invite that younger part to share their experience and to share their pain. Even if there's no words — maybe there's words and things need to be said, maybe there's no words and it's just a feeling from early developmental trauma. And then we can just let that younger part know, I see you and I'm feeling into right now how bad this was for you. And it was that bad. It really was that bad.

The other thing that comes up is that sometimes people don't feel able to provide that for themselves. Like it feels like they can't give themselves that compassion and that witnessing. And so then I will ask, could I be the one to do it? Like we'll imagine me going and sitting with your younger self and I'll be the one to provide that compassionate witnessing experience for you. And then whatever comes forward — whatever that younger part is sharing, emotions, thoughts, sensations, memories — all we're doing is just saying yes, you know, what else, what else? Like yes, I am fully seeing and acknowledging exactly what this felt like for you and what this meant for you. You would be surprised how powerful that can be for someone who never experienced that growing up.

Emotionally neglected people don't just experience loneliness, they experience aloneness, and I feel like those are important to differentiate. Loneliness is like a transitory state. You can be someone who feels overall connected to the world and other human beings and still have times where you feel really lonely. Like you could feel lonely because you went through a breakup and you've been single for a while and you're missing that intimacy, or lonely because you've moved to a new city and you haven't made friends yet. But if you know that you have the capacity to connect with other people, that connection is something that is real and possible for you, it's not the same depth of aloneness as the people who have been really emotionally neglected experience.

With emotional neglect trauma, aloneness is an overall truth and overall reality, not just a transitory state. So it's not just like I'm lonely right now, it's like I am alone almost in an existential way. So this ongoing, really profound sense of separation from other people, isolation, disconnection is really woven into the fabric of reality. It's not just an experience like right now. The aloneness almost becomes a part of identity — like alone and separated is part of who I am. There's something about me that inherently cannot experience connection.

And then the really difficult thing is that people who have been emotionally neglected develop these different self-protective mechanisms — different attachment patterns and emotional patterns that make it really difficult to disconfirm that reality, that continually keep that reality intact. So self-protective mechanisms that keep other people at a distance, or that keep emotional walls up, make it so that state of permanent aloneness continues to persist.

So what I found is that for people to heal from emotional neglect, even coming to regard yourself as a person who is capable of experiencing connection, that you are not intrinsically and inherently separated from other people. Separation and aloneness was something that was inflicted onto you. Like actually you were born wired for connection, just like everybody else. And separateness and isolation was inflicted onto you. And that's what we're trying to undo. And we're trying to unlearn all of the different protective mechanisms that are now keeping you in that state of aloneness, like trapped in that reality. And this is why for emotional neglect trauma, it's not a simple solution like, oh, just go make some friends or just go on dates or just go be around people. People who have been emotionally neglected in a profound way can be around other people and still feel just as alone. That aloneness is something that they carry within them as a devastating emotional reality that is not really touched or changed by just being with other people. We have to actually be open to experience and connection, to actually receive and feel connection. And that takes a lot of deep inner work.

Minimizing is one of the more confusing traits of emotionally immature parenting, because it doesn't always look harmful. Comments such as it's not that big of a deal or other children have it worse can even sound reasonable at times. Consistently repeating such responses, however, can cause a child to lose trust in their own feelings. What's happening is erasing your emotions. The parent shrinks the experience so they don't have to deal with it. The child adapts by learning that only extreme pain is recognized, and even then it might not be. This can show up in adulthood as second guessing yourself, downplaying your needs, or feeling embarrassed for having normal reactions. You may have learned to over-explain because your word alone wasn't enough. Healing isn't about proving that your past was bad enough. That's part of the conditioning. Recognizing that impact matters more than comparison is what we must learn. If something affected you, it affected you, and that's enough. A place to start is noticing your first reaction before the minimization kicks in. There's usually an initial honest feeling before your mind says, it's not that bad, or you're being too much. The goal is to let that first response exist without dismissing it. It is okay to feel your feelings. It is healthy. Feelings do not hold moral value. They are information. They're signals about the internal state of our being. Validating your feelings doesn't make you dramatic. It helps regulate you. You can acknowledge that something bothered you or hurt you without turning it into something bigger. With the parent, your expectations matter. Don't hold the expectation that they're going to change. Create boundaries around the patterns that actually show themselves. People who minimize tend to lack emotional depth, and that doesn't change easily. Instead of trying to get them to understand, it's usually more effective to set simple boundaries such as, I'm not looking for advice, I just was wanting to share and be heard, or to share less altogether. If they keep minimizing, treat it as predictable rather than taking it personally. It's a reflection of their limited emotional capacity. It has nothing to do with your worth. Emotionally immature individuals can't have true depth with anyone. They would minimize whoever it is trying to share their feelings with them. This doesn't make their behaviors okay, but it can help take you out of the cycle of trying to get them to understand your emotions. You can validate your experience even if they never do. The goal is not to erase the conditioning. It's to build a stronger internal compass — your experiences do not have to meet anyone else's threshold to matter. Have a good day.

(Whisper transcription note: 'somatics' was rendered as 'semantics' and 'interoception' as 'interception.')

And this is exactly why I prefer blending somatics with IFS to address emotional neglect, because most of us cannot verbalize what didn't happen. How do you tell somebody what you didn't get when you don't even know that that was something you were supposed to receive in the first place?

When somebody has experienced emotional neglect throughout their developmental years, and then that has continued throughout their adulthood, they feel very cut off from their bodies. Their interoception skills are usually shit — for those of you that don't know what that means, it usually just means your ability to tell what's happening in your body. For example, my nose is a little bit stuffy right now, my throat is dry because I've already had five sessions today, and I'm a little hungry.

But outside of not being able to feel the physical responses, emotionally, we tend to go into storytelling the same way survivors of childhood SA do. In fact, as somebody that has experienced all of these things, I had a lovely little habit when I first started therapy myself of storytelling. And if you're not sure what I mean by that, that is when you can sit down and give all of the facts of what happened to you when it happened, but you're telling it as if you're not really a part of the story. Like you are using I and me statements, but the way you're explaining it is almost as if you're telling the details of somebody else's traumatic experiences.

There's a similar reaction with emotional neglect, because you will explain in great detail, intellectualizing — 'well, yeah, like my parents really never told me they loved me.' It just becomes facts that you're telling. Anytime you do feel any little semblance of emotion, there's usually a lot of frustration because you're an adult now, you should just be able to get over this. Why can't you let it go? Well, you can't let it go because you still haven't resolved what happened to you. And nobody has actually taught you to feel your feelings about it so that you can move on from it, and to feel safe feeling those feelings. And nobody has ever truly validated for you just how bad that was.

But when we use combined approaches through somatics and IFS, we can do a few things. One, we can actually teach you how to feel and how to experience your emotions and those physical responses your body has. We can address the phrase — my favorite thing to address. But we can also help you establish and meet the needs that were never met, that you don't even realize you had, all without needing to truly verbalize what didn't happen.

As a therapist who works a lot with developmental trauma, and how people have adapted out of these environmental failures, one of the most common questions that I get asked is: if I've been through so much abuse, abandonment, neglect, whatever it is, then where do I begin therapy? Where is the starting point? And I think this is a great question.

Part of understanding where to start is also about understanding how developmental trauma impacts the developing sense of self. For people that have been through complex trauma — complex trauma is the ultimate threat to the self, meaning that for an individual to have their own experience that is separate or different from the people that are raising them, the people that are abusing them, the ones that are neglecting them, is too threatening for their own survival. So if I have my own authentic experience, it is going to have a significant impact in a negative way on my attachment.

So the way that people survive is by disconnecting from their authenticity, shaming their authenticity, experiencing guilt or anxiety anytime they have an experience that is different from the people that they want to be attached to. So as they go through these adaptations, all of their internal world is replaced with shame. And anytime they try to do something in terms of thoughts, feelings, behaviors that are driven by their own internal motivation, it becomes so disorienting and so dysregulating that a person just tries to numb out their own experience as a way to be able to cope and have some sense of control.

So everything about their internal world is always going to be contingent on maintaining control of the external world. So whatever is happening around me is happening inside of me. A person develops no sort of self agency, meaning that I have no control over my own experience. Everything that is about me is contingent upon the external world being okay, and that becomes the agenda — to cue into the external world. Now, despite the fact that this may give them some sense of stability, it also causes a lot of internal turmoil and chaos, and there is no sense of peace.

So when we get into the recovery aspect of things, the place where we start is by developing the capacity for self agency and connecting to the self. And the way that we do that is by promoting organization through asking questions like, what do you most want for yourself? Now on the surface, this sounds like a very easy question, but for somebody who has always had to disconnect from themselves to be able to maintain attachment, it becomes very threatening. So as we connect to what a person most wants for themselves, what we're going to notice is that they're going to start to become disoriented, they're going to start to generate a lot of anxiety, and all the anxiety is going to cause a lot of defenses and internal barriers that stop them from connecting to the self.

And this is where the relational work for complex trauma is actually supposed to do its job. It's my job as a therapist to help a client tap into the times where they're connecting to what they want, but also the disconnection and the barriers that come up as a result of somebody trying to push their internal world away. And as I help them track it and work through it, what we find is that a person develops a more coherent sense of self, a deeper understanding of who they are, and more agency to have their own experience that is not dependent on the outside world. A person understands that I can actually do something, I can actually connect when I want to, and disconnect when I want to, rather than feel like I have to constantly disconnect to be able to be okay.

And this is where we start therapy — we start the process of organizing based off of what a person actually wants for themselves. And this is a very beautiful process as it goes along, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of patience to be able to do it.

There are three different types of parts in internal family systems that I want you to know about and be thinking about in your relationship. If you can start to identify which part jumps in the driver's seat the most often, you will be one step closer to making a conscious choice if that is something that you want to continue or something that's not serving you or your partnership anymore.

My name is Bahia Miller. I share here about parts work, partnership, and growing up together in love. Follow along for more of that.

Number one are the managers. These are our proactive parts that are trying to keep us safe, make us feel loved, help us stay in control. This might look like parts that are trying to keep the peace, parts that keep us quiet, or parts that even try to get loud as a tactic to get some need met. They're trying so hard to help us, but sometimes these strategies that worked when we were younger aren't really effective in our relationships anymore.

Number two is our exiles, and these are parts of us that are often younger and are carrying old wounds, fears, and unmet needs from the past. The burdens that they hold are often much older than our partner in this partnership, but they get activated by what our partner does. These can be feelings of unlovability, worthlessness, rejection, or that you're too much. And the thing about our exiles is that once they're actually unburdened, once they can let go of the weight they've been carrying, they also contain our core essence, our innocence, our self-expression, and all of the beauty that's in our heart.

And part number three are our firefighters. They swoop in when our exiles get triggered with those feelings of shame or unlovability, and their job is to put out the fire. Some firefighters get really loud and angry to make it stop. Some of these firefighter behaviors can be truly damaging to the person, to your partner, and to the relationship.

So all of these parts — the older that they are inside of your system, the more extreme that they are, the more likely they are to jump in the driver's seat and start driving in your relationship unconsciously. And our goal is to start to identify them, to slow things down and really get to know their story, how they came to be a part of you, and if that job that they're doing is still actually helping you or if it's causing more pain and causing you to go in loops.

Because there are other choices, there are other possibilities once these parts can see that you — the Self energy, the wise adult — is also here in the room, and that they don't have to be the one driving the ship. Oftentimes there's tremendous relief in that, and as we do this work of growing up as individuals in a partnership, these conflict cycles that we get stuck in can start to soften and fade away the more that our parts start to trust ourselves.

Something I'm going to talk about is the type of emotional neglect that's really hard to name, and I think the difficulty naming it is actually part of what makes it so damaging. It's called covert emotional neglect, and the reason it's so hard to identify is that nothing obviously bad happened. There was no abuse, no dramatic outward dysfunction. You had food, clothes, a roof over your head. Your parents probably worked hard. Maybe they were well respected. Maybe your family looked perfectly fine on the outside.

And that's exactly the problem, because covert emotional neglect isn't about what happened to you. It's about what didn't happen. The attunement that wasn't there. The 'how are you really feeling' that was never asked. So the emotional needs were either invisible, inconvenient, or simply not on anyone else's radar. It's essentially growing up in a house where things were functionally okay, but emotionally very empty.

And here's what makes it so confusing as an adult. You can't really point to one specific thing. There's no one event to process, or one clear moment where things went wrong. So when you find yourself struggling in relationships or with yourself, or a persistent feeling of something is missing in my life, you don't know where to trace it back to. Because you can't trace it back to anything specific, you might start to wonder if you're just broken or ungrateful or making it up. Well, you weren't and you're not. What you experienced was real. It just didn't leave the kind of mark that is easy to see.

A lot of adults I work with in my therapy practice are those who grew up in these kinds of environments, and they often share a few things in common. They're often high functioning on the outside, very good at meeting other people's needs, but they feel deeply unsure of what their own needs even are. They often feel a kind of chronic, low grade emptiness that they struggle to explain. And they often feel like they don't have enough of a reason to be in therapy because nothing bad actually happened. But the absence of something you needed is still a huge loss, even if no one around you ever acknowledged it, and even if you spent years not acknowledging it yourself.

So, in learning about complex trauma, one of the most important concepts to understand is the mirroring process. The mirroring process in development between a parent and a child is really there for the child to be able to develop their own capacity to self-reflect on what is happening internally and to really develop a healthy sense of self and a relationship with their emotional experience.

So if a child is experiencing an emotion like anger, it's really the parent's job to help them describe this emotion, connect to this emotion, and stay present with this emotion until it's gone — in a way where the child learns that this emotion is mine, this is something that is going on inside of me, and it also is something that I can connect to in a safe way and learn from and be able to utilize to support myself. 'I'm getting angry because I feel like a boundary is being violated. I'm angry because I don't really want to do something that I don't want to do.'

The parent's job is really to be able to support the child in this way, and as they transition out of these developmental periods, the child is able to reference themselves and have a clear understanding of who they are and what their emotions mean. 'I can experience my emotion and it have no impact on the relationships around me, and I can take care of myself in a way where I can reference myself as a way to have some sort of certainty about what is happening outside of me.'

This doesn't happen in complex trauma. In complex trauma, the child is always getting an inaccurate representation of the mirror. They are not getting a reflection back on what is happening, so every single time the child experiences anger, for example, the parent might get flustered. They might get angry themselves. They might get abusive. The child is not learning that they are a separate entity and that these emotions are safe.

What they're learning is really the enmeshment process — that every single time I have an emotion, it is going to impact the emotions of the people around me. This really starts the process of even codependency, where a child learns that my emotions are so much attached to the people around me that it is going to lead to some sort of abandonment, that I always have to either suppress my emotions or I have to always externally reference to be able to have an understanding of what is going on inside of me.

This sets people up for so much confusion because they tend to always be around people that are dysregulated. Every single time I reference the external world, on the inside, I'm in chaos.

You might get a little mad at me for this one. Here are five CPTSD symptoms that look like personality traits. And number three is the one people usually praise you for.

CPTSD can make survival habits look like personality traits because at some point you might start wondering, is this who I am, or is this what I had to become?

Number one, being low maintenance. Sometimes you learn that having needs made things harder. So you got really good at pretending you didn't have any. You became convenient because being inconvenient didn't feel safe.

Number two, being independent. Hey, maybe you are independent, but sometimes independence is what happens when relying on people became unsafe, inconsistent, or dangerous. So now you handle everything yourself, even when you're drowning, because needing help seems riskier than exhaustion.

Number three, being chill. This is the one people love to compliment. But sometimes chill means you got really good at hiding your reaction before someone else could judge it, punish it, dismiss it, or make it worse. You're not relaxed, you're cosplaying relaxed.

Number four, being private. Sometimes privacy is preference, but sometimes it's protection. Because being fully known or seen didn't necessarily feel safe. So you give people the edited version, the acceptable version. The version least likely to be used against you.

And number five, being easy-going. You just learned to abandon your preferences so quickly that nobody actually knew you had any. You became adaptable because having an opinion sometimes came with consequences.

So if you have CPTSD, the question isn't always, who am I — side note, the whole who am I thing needs its own video, really. Sometimes the question is, which parts of me were built for survival, and which parts am I finally allowed to choose?

Niche experiences for folks living with complex trauma. Feeling responsible for the emotional tone of the room or the experiences of everybody else around you. Feeling uneasy when somebody is consistently kind or calm, always waiting for the other shoe to drop when things are going well. Apologizing quickly even if you're unsure of whether you did anything wrong in the first place. Getting a vulnerability hangover and overthinking whether you overshared with somebody else. Feeling the need to constantly over-explain yourself so that you can justify what you're doing and how you're thinking. Being extremely skilled at understanding what mood somebody else is in, but having a hard time identifying your own emotions. Feeling on edge and like your body has a really hard time relaxing, even when you're in the safety of your own space.

From an IFS therapy perspective, these are protective parts that have learned to scan for disconnection, rejection, abandonment, and these parts learned their roles really early on in your relational history. They're trying to keep you safe, they're trying to protect you from re-traumatization or from putting you back in the vulnerable position that you were once in. And if you relate to these, you probably developed really attentive protective parts that have a story behind them of trying to keep you safe.

A common trait of emotionally immature parents is a sense of entitlement to their children's time, attention, and personal information. The parent may act as if they automatically deserve access regardless of how they behave. They often struggle to recognize their child as their own independent individual with a right to privacy and boundaries.

The entitlement develops because emotionally underdeveloped people have a hard time separating themselves from others. They see children as extensions of them instead of separate independent human beings. Normal boundaries therefore feel like rejection or abandonment.

The entitlement shows up in many ways. A parent may demand immediate responses to calls and messages. They might pry into the child's relationships, demand explanations for personal decisions, and assume that they have a right to know everything happening in their child's life. They may become upset when information is withheld even when it is private and has no impact on them.

When access is limited, emotionally immature parents typically respond with guilt, shame, or emotional pressure. They may accuse the child of being selfish, uncaring, ungrateful, or secretive. Some parents play the victim and act hurt while others become angry and demanding. The goal is to restore the access that they feel entitled to rather than understanding the child and their limits.

Genuine closeness requires respect for autonomy, and when a parent treats a child's boundaries as offenses, the child learns that honesty is unsafe. So the child begins to withhold information, avoid conversations, or limit contact to protect their peace. The tragic irony is the parent's attempts to force closeness actually create more distance. The more the parent demands that the child share, the less they feel comfortable sharing. The relationship simply doesn't have the sense of safety that true connection requires.

The healthiest response is to stop defending your decisions and boundaries as if they require permission. Adults are entitled to privacy, personal space, and independent decision-making. A boundary is not something that must be justified until the other person approves of it. The other person does not have to approve of your boundary. A boundary is simply a statement of what information you'll provide, what your limits are, what consequences will happen if those limits are crossed.

Consistent enforcement of the boundaries is most important. Not engaging means refusing to argue about your right to have boundaries. Calmly state your limit, and what the parent chooses to do with that and how they feel about it is on them. Their disappointment, frustration, or disapproval belongs to them. Your responsibility is not to manage their emotions, but to uphold the boundaries that were implemented to protect your well-being. Have a good day.

(Note: this clip contains profanity, transcribed as spoken.)

People love dismissing relational trauma, like it's just feelings, while having absolutely no fucking idea about modern neuroscience. Attachment science, developmental trauma science, or just how the brain in general develops. Children's brains are not built in isolation. They are built inside of relationships. This is not woo-woo. This is developmental neuroscience.

So I had someone pop off in my comments to do with trauma, parents, all of the whole topic. And yes, for sure, there is a whole camp that believes that kids are just entitled and all of that shit. Fine, they're out there. Cool. This isn't my first day interneting. I know they are there. I know they are going to comment. In fact, I encourage you to comment because it helps my algorithm.

But I am entering this conversation from a lot of personal experience, not just with clients, but also with my own life. And I'm gonna say this once, and then I'm just gonna copy-paste the link to this video to all the people. Get ready. This is a therapist rant.

A child's nervous system literally uses caregivers to regulate their nervous system. Regulates stress and organizes safety inside of them. Develops emotional regulation, shapes attachment systems, builds self-worth, develops threat detection, wires expectations around relationships and self. This is science.

Let me stack some facts for you real fast. Chronic relational stress in childhood has been associated with altered cortisol regulation, chronic hypervigilance, heightened amygdala activation (which is the threat response), attachment dysregulation, stress tolerance levels, increased anxiety and depression risk, nervous system over-activation, emotional regulation issues, shame sensitivity, relationship instability, altered threat perception, increased inflammatory responses. That cortisol causes inflammation and lots of inflammation causes disease in the body. Executive functioning under stress. And this isn't being dramatic. This is neurodevelopment.

People act like physical harm affects children, but emotional environments magically don't. That is scientifically absurd. Children are profoundly shaped by chronic criticism, emotional unpredictability, emotional invalidation, rage, shame, coercion, parentification, emotional inconsistency, fear of caregivers, inability to repair, attachment insecurity. The nervous system adapts to the environment that it's in and it develops inside of it. That is quite literally what nervous systems do.

And you know what's fascinating? When people say, ooh, stop basing everything on feelings — while completely ignoring that shame is emotional, defensiveness is emotional, denial is emotional, minimization is emotional, superiority is emotional, contempt is emotional, outrage is emotional, rigid certainty is emotional. Humans are not hyperrational robots that once in a while get impacted by emotions. Modern neuroscience overwhelmingly supports the opposite. Emotion organizes perception, memory, behavior, threat detection, and relational processing constantly, all the time. And our unconscious nervous system is driving the bus so much more than we think.

Let's bring in attachment science. Children who repeatedly experience emotional dismissal, chronic defensiveness, inconsistent caregiving, emotional volatility, lack of repair, emotional role reversal — they often adapt by becoming hypervigilant, people-pleasing, emotionally avoidant, anxiously attached, shame-driven, terrified of conflict, emotionally flooded, excessively independent, chronically self-doubting. Again, not random. Adaptive.

Let's get into ACE studies — adverse childhood experience research. It's repeatedly demonstrated correlation between early stress and trauma and later in life a whole bunch of bad things: mental health struggles and addiction risks, chronic disease, nervous system dysregulation, relational dysfunction, emotional regulation difficulties in general. And the ACE score isn't just about severe beatings or sexual abuse. This includes emotional abuse, emotional neglect, household dysfunction, chronic instability, domestic conflict, substance abuse environments, and psychological fear and stress environments. This is mainstream trauma science right now.

And people love mocking younger generations with therapy talk, while at the same time having zero emotional regulation, zero accountability tolerance, huge shame reactions, chronic defensiveness, sometimes unresolved trauma, emotionally immature coping, and just a nervous system that is built around suppression and denial. And then they call that wisdom.

And estrangement is often discussed in this culture as a point of weakness or entitlement — oversensitivity, cutting people off over feelings — while almost nobody asks what kind of chronic relational environment leads to someone severing an attachment bond that evolutionary biology has us wired to try to maintain. Because attachment bonds are super powerful. Humans are biologically wired to preserve attachment bonds, which means that many estranged children stayed through it all — stayed through the guilt, through minimization and self-doubt, through repeated failed repair attempts, through nervous system distress, before they paced out.

There is a much more psychologically sophisticated conversation to have that's not 'oh, kids are just so emotional these days.' Let's bring in the nervous system hard here. Kids who are repeatedly exposed to emotional unpredictability, emotional invalidation, emotional danger, rage, chronic criticism, unstable attachment, and lack of repair — it's not simply they got offended. Their body and brain adapted around survival. This is neuroscience, not ideology.

Relational trauma is not just feelings. Trauma research is literally the study of how emotionally significant experiences shape the nervous system, attachment system, and stress system over the course of time. The people who just dismiss relational trauma as feelings are often just revealing how little they know about neuroscience and developmental psychology. Do you wanna talk about it? DM me 'impact' and we can talk more. Okay, rant over. Bye.

What people don't realize who have complex trauma histories — if you had developmental trauma, maybe you grew up with abusive parents or there was neglect in the home, your parents were unable to meet your needs — what happens is, as a child, your nervous system, your body starts creating defense mechanisms.

For example, you might have a people-pleasing part, an approval-seeking part. You might have a detached part that kind of falls into fantasy worlds of maladaptive daydreaming, reading lots of books, watching lots of movies. You might have a self-soothing part — maybe this part has an eating disorder, maybe it drinks alcohol, drugs, that sort of thing. So there's an escapism part. A lot of your childhood are defense mechanisms, and these defense mechanisms carry over into adulthood. And we kind of call them in psychology protective parts, because they protect younger you, little you — the part of you that was not cared for, that was not kept safe, that maybe experienced trauma. They protect vulnerable little you from getting hurt.

And as an adult — you might be 30, 40, 50, 60 years old right now watching this — yet you still feel like a 10-year-old child. You never really feel like you're fully grown, you're fully matured, because there is this vulnerable little you and lots of protective parts that have come out. And you feel like whenever you leave the house, you wear a mask. It is not really you. You're putting on a facade for the world to see, because inside you don't feel comfortable with who you are.

Because, one, your parents never really mirrored healthy attachment and attunement, and this is confusing for a child, because they learn who they are in relationship to other people. And when parents are unable to do this because of their own dysfunction or because of neglect, we — children — you will become confused with your identity. And then as an adult, there's identity confusion, and you're a lot of different parts. And you can go to work and you can be that productive mask and competent, but then when you get home, you might crash, you might overeat, you might be binging Netflix or whatever. And you never really feel safe. You never really know who you are. And there's kind of this constant simmering anxiety. Or you feel nothing — you're just apathetic, you're dissociated, disconnected. These are survival responses to an environment that you grew up in that was not nurturing or that was traumatic.

I saw someone the other day comment on one of my videos and ask what is the point of unlocking all of the suppressed emotions and getting out of the intellectualizing and feeling all this pain and doing all this deep processing — like what is the actual point of it? And the point of it is to experience actual change, actual relief from the patterns that you're struggling with. Emotionally driven patterns are changed through an emotional process. You don't change emotionally driven patterns with your thoughts. You don't cognitively override something that is not primarily happening on a cognitive level but is coming from this deep felt sense within you.

I think people have gotten so disillusioned with therapy and with what it even means to heal that there's a lot of people who genuinely feel like the best it gets is just endlessly trying to manage your own symptoms and fight with your own brain, and it's exhausting, and of course people burn out doing that. I think there's a lot of people who have been led through their experiences to believing that there's no such thing as really powerful healing — that concept doesn't actually feel meaningful or tangible to people, especially for people who have already spent years and years in therapy and all they've gotten is a bunch more ways to try to cope and manage and strategies to try to counteract their patterns.

Here's the reality: when there are patterns that we are struggling with that are rooted in emotional learning — like attachment patterns for example, when they come from that deep place within — there are real processes that can transform those patterns. That is a well documented, well researched thing. In fact, we have a lot of neuroscience telling us exactly what needs to happen for those patterns to transform.

But the very sad thing is most therapists are not taught that. Most therapists are not trained in those approaches, and in fact the approaches that are considered evidence-based, the gold standard in this field, often are not really implementing that neuroscience — are actually really really behind in terms of what we know creates more powerful emotional change. So we've ended up in this place where everyone just learns all these techniques to try to override what feels true inside, and it's disillusioning and exhausting, and it might help a little bit with reducing the significance of things but people are still really suffering and then they just learn to live with that. And so from that perspective, of course it doesn't feel worth it to open up all your emotions and get out of your head if you don't really believe in the end result.

I'm not trying to make it seem like healing from trauma is some super simple formula — it's not a quick and easy thing, it's definitely hard, it's complex, it can take a lot of time and a lot of work. I'm not trying to erase any of that. But what I am trying to say is healing is real, it is a real thing. I have seen people experience powerful transformational changes in their lives where emotionally driven patterns are no longer relevant, are no longer affecting people. And I really hope we can get to a point as a field where that is an experience that people are having way more often in therapy instead of that being so rare, which is how it feels to me right now.

Let me talk a little bit more about what it actually means to reprocess or heal from attachment trauma, because these concepts get thrown around a lot, but a lot of people don't actually understand the neuroscience of it or what it really means in practical terms.

A lot of times when people are thinking about trauma, they're thinking about memories of specific upsetting events. But a lot of time what actually impacts people the most long term is what was learned through those experiences. So it's not the memory of the experience itself, it's the learning that happened as a result of those experiences.

We have different ways of learning. We have our explicit learning process, which is conscious intentional learning, and then we have our implicit learning process, which is how our brain just extracts information from experiences. It is a raw experiential learning that happens all the time, even when we are preverbal, like as infants, toddlers. So you don't even have to consciously recognize what you're learning. You learn from experiences and those learnings become mental models of reality. So it becomes this deeply embedded felt sense of how reality works, what to expect from life.

This is its own type of traumatic memory. It's implicit memory instead of discrete episodic memory about particular events, and implicit memory is experienced as what is true and real right now. It is experienced as the lenses that we perceive everything through and what feels true inside of us. So our attachment patterns — what we anticipate from other people and how we react to it, emotional triggers, the ways we feel about ourselves — all of that is being generated through implicit learning.

And you know it's generated by implicit learning if the reactions happen quickly without even consciously thinking about them, like when something triggers you and you just have this emotional, somatic response that you can't even control. It just happens so automatically. Or like our attachment patterns, how we feel about and experience relationships — that's not something that you're consciously deciding to think or feel and it's not something that you can cognitively control. It's just a felt sense of reality.

So those are the learnings that need to be transformed in trauma therapy. And in my opinion, healing is much more about those learnings than dealing with the details of specific traumatic memories. It's the felt sense of what is true right now, in the present, that impacts people so much. And what feels true now is learned through past experiences. So memories are still a part of it, but it's these implicit learnings that really need to be targeted for people to experience healing and profound change, because we can't change the memories. We can't change things that happened in the past. We can change what was learned through it and these mental models that people build.

And most of that implicit learning actually happens on an unconscious level. So people typically aren't even fully aware of all the implicit learnings that they're carrying inside of them, but they are aware of how those mental models make them feel and all of the distress and suffering in the present as a result of that.

So trauma therapy to me is about finding those implicit learnings, unlocking them — which is an emotional process, a felt sense process, not a cognitive one — and then updating them. And I can talk more about what that part of the process looks like.

Why emotionally neglected people are often the "biggest intellectualizers" in therapy — and why looking highly self-aware can be the problem, not the progress. A child whose cries went unanswered eventually stops crying and retreats into the analytical mind ("we flee to our left hemisphere" — Bonnie Badenoch) to escape unbearable, unmet need. So the polished self-awareness is a collapsed-nervous-system adaptation guarding ungrieved pain. When a therapist praises it ("you've got it figured out, you don't need much"), it reinforces the original wound: that not-needing is safest.

Takeaway: Being "so self-aware" can be armor. Insight about the pain is not the same as feeling it — and the work is letting the shut-down parts be seen.

In my experience people who were emotionally neglected as children tend to be some of the biggest intellectualizers in therapy. They tend to be way more comfortable with analytical processing rather than emotional processing, and so actually these are often the people who come across as highly self-aware in therapy. And if therapists don't understand emotional neglect trauma and don't know what to look for, these are the people who will hear from therapists, oh wow you're so self-aware, seems like you have it all figured out, maybe I don't even think you need therapy anymore. What's being missed is that this analytical exterior is guarding against a tremendous amount of ungrieved grief, unfelt pain, and actually what we're seeing is the manifestation of something really tragic, which is a child learning that their cries do not have an effect. Because the child's first impulse when they're being neglected, when they're not having their needs met, is always to reach out towards the needs, to cry out, to show distress and to show pain as a way of trying to get connection and get care. But after a prolonged enough period of neglect and not being responded to, they learn that their tears are not effective, that their cries for help are not effective, and so the only option left is to then try to get away from the pain and the distress. So when the cries for distress don't work, when there's no way to get that connection, people camp out in their analytical minds and dissociate from their emotions and their attachment needs, as a way to avoid the overwhelming pain and distress of not being able to get those needs met. As Bonnie Badenoch puts it, we flee to our left hemisphere, so we won't notice that we're drowning in a sea of isolation and abandonment. So this intellectualization is really an expression of a collapsed nervous system, a state of like hopelessness and helplessness that was experienced very young. And just because the emotionally neglected person has gotten really good at avoiding that pain and hiding that pain doesn't mean the pain is not there. And so then when this exterior is praised or is mistaken as like, oh, you're really doing well actually, it seems like there's not really much that you need here, because you're holding it together so well — that is so reinforcing of the same wound. The not needing is the problem. The problem is that this person has learned that they can't need anything from anybody, that they can't allow themselves to even feel their own needs, so of course they're going to show up in the world, in friendships and relationships and even therapy, like they don't need anything and they're doing fine. Sometimes what emotionally neglected people need most is for therapists to see through that exterior and say something along the lines of, I know that there is a tremendous amount of pain that you're holding inside, and the reason that it's not being expressed is because you've learned that it's not safe to show it to anybody, and it's not even safe to let yourself feel it or acknowledge it. And that's what we're here for, right — to help you tune into the parts of yourself that have been so neglected that they have shut down like this.

Father–son wounding, framed around its core question: "Am I enough?" When connection to dad is tied to performance, competence, and toughness, the son learns "be valuable" instead of "you are valuable" — hearing "great job" (performance) but rarely "I'm proud of who you are" (identity). With a critical or emotionally avoidant father, mistakes come to threaten respect, and respect gets fused with worth. Adult result: workaholism, perfectionism, fear of failure, difficulty asking for help. The shame wound isn't "I failed" — it's "I am a failure," and the real fear is what failure will confirm about the self.

Takeaway: "Be valuable" and "you are valuable" are different messages. A nervous system organized around self-improvement instead of self-worth experiences feedback as a verdict on the whole person.

Okay my people, we have done mother-son, mother-daughter, father-daughter, and now we have arrived to father-son wounding inside of the shame-defensive relational trauma subject. Dad-son wounds often appear very differently than the other three. It's a very different adaptation. Mother-daughter asks, who am I? Father-daughter asks, am I worthy? Mother-son asks, am I allowed to be myself and still be loved for that? And dad-son is, am I enough? That's the core wound. Many boys learn early on that connection to dad feels like it's all about performance and tied to things like competence, toughness, achievement, emotional control, masculinity, usefulness, success. And it's not always obvious, sometimes it's subtle. So the son learns things like, wow, dad lights up when I perform. Dad approves when I'm competent. Dad respects strength. Dad struggles with vulnerability. Dad gets uncomfortable with emotions. And so the nervous system starts adapting. Many boys never hear, I'm proud of who you are. They hear great job. And those two aren't the same things psychologically. One's about identity and the other one is about performance. So then the son starts to grow up thinking, oh, am I enough? Am I enough yet? How about now? And this is without realizing that he's asking that. Now add in some shame. So if dad is critical, emotionally unavailable, perfectionistic, harsh, dismissive, intimidating, emotionally avoidant, son will often learn that mistakes are threatening. They threaten specifically respect. Because respect then becomes tied to worth. So in adulthood, this can look like workaholism, perfectionism, addiction to achievement, emotional suppression, fear of failure, difficulty asking for help, shame around weakness, defensiveness, avoidance, emotional shutdown, and a lot of self-criticism. Because underneath all of that is: if I fail, I lose value. Here's a heartbreaking part of all of this. A lot of boys weren't taught you are valuable. A lot of them were taught be valuable. Those are two completely different messages. So many men become incredibly self-aware of mistakes, shortcomings, failures, weaknesses, while being almost completely disconnected from the good — goodness, resilience, character, emotional intelligence. It's a nervous system that became organized around self-improvement rather than self-worth. Then in adult relationships, feedback can feel devastating. But these are younger parts of them that are still carrying very specific messaging. And the idea is like if I disappoint someone, I am a disappointment. That's the shame wound, and that's the crux of any shame wound. Because it's not about, oh, I did this thing that wasn't great. It is: I am bad. I am unworthy. I am unlovable. I am abandonable. This is for everybody, not just dudes. A lot of men aren't afraid of failure per se. They're afraid of what the failure will reaffirm for them that they secretly believe about themselves. Fear that they're not enough, that they're disappointing, that they're weak, inadequate, incapable, a burden, incompetent, ordinary, fill in the blanks. So if I were to boil down this particular shame wound, it's not that I failed, it's that I am a failure. Okay, bye.

Why a simple request from an emotionally immature parent can trigger a disproportionate flash of irritation. The reaction isn't to the one question — it's to the whole history it represents (years of emotional dependence, the same question for the 100th time, anticipatory fatigue that a "quick" interaction won't stay quick). It reframes that irritability as a normal response to chronic emotional strain rather than a character flaw.

Takeaway: Self-check — "Would this bother me the same if it came from someone else?" If no, you're reacting to the pattern, not the moment. (Distilled into the "someone else" self-check technique.)

It is normal for adult children of emotionally immature parents to experience irritability or lower frustration tolerance with the parent, especially after years or decades of watching the same patterns. From the outside, it doesn't necessarily make sense why a seemingly simple question or request causes such an intense response in the child. What they often do not see is the long history behind that moment. The irritation is seldom about one isolated event. The adult child is not only responding to what is happening in the present, but what the behavior represents. A parent asking a question for the hundredth time may represent years of emotional dependence, boundary violations, and expecting others to carry responsibilities for them. A current interaction can feel like a reminder of the entire pattern instead of just one occurrence. For example, having to explain how to use a device that's been in the house for 15 years may be surprisingly aggravating. The frustration is not about the technology itself, but about having to be the responsible adult again and again. If the same question came from a child who was still learning, the response may be totally different because the context is different. Many adult children find that they have much more patience with their own children than with the emotionally immature parent. The child is expected to need guidance. They are learning, growing, developing new skills. An emotionally immature parent may place themselves in a dependent role, despite being fully capable of learning or solving problems independently, and this dynamic becomes exhausting. Another factor is emotional wear and tear. Each individual incident may seem minor, but thousands of similar incidents can create a reservoir of frustration. The adult child may have spent years explaining the same things over and over, managing crises, providing emotional support, or accommodating behaviors that never change. Eventually, even small requests can feel heavy because they're sitting on top of a mountain of unresolved experiences. There is also anticipatory fatigue. An adult child has learned from experience that a simple interaction may not stay simple. One question may turn into ten. A quick errand may turn into an afternoon of problem solving. A brief conversation may become a long complaint session. Because of the past, irritation can begin before the interaction has even fully unfolded. This is why a behavior that would barely register as bothersome can feel extremely agitating when coming from an emotionally immature parent. The adult child is reacting to a memory of countless similar situations. The technology question is not just a technology question. It's the 500th technology question, the same question that was never important enough to commit to memory. This doesn't mean the adult child is being unreasonable or unkind. Irritability is a normal response to chronic emotional strain. A good question to ask is, would this bother me the same if it were coming from someone else? If the answer is no, then the reaction is likely related to the history of the relationship, not the specific behavior. Understanding that distinction can help adult children feel less guilty and recognize it as a signal of emotional exhaustion instead of a character flaw.

How the "problem child" gets manufactured in controlling, critical, or image-conscious households. When appearances matter more than understanding, a struggling kid becomes an embarrassment to be silenced rather than a person to be understood — so the behavior gets targeted while the environment that produced it is ignored. Emotionally immature parents scapegoat rather than self-reflect, and the child learns to doubt their own perceptions. The healthier adult frame: view behavior in context — accountability for your part without accepting blame for the entire family system.

Takeaway: You can own your reactions and recognize the environment that shaped them. Taking responsibility doesn't require carrying the whole system's blame.

One thing that often gets overlooked when discussing emotionally underdeveloped parents is that children don't grow up in isolation. Their behaviors are shaped by the environment that they're raised in. In highly controlling, critical, or image-conscious households, children often have to manage their parents' emotions. They're expected to follow rules without question and protect the family's reputation. When they struggle with these conditions, they end up being labeled the problem child. In many families, appearances matter more than understanding. Parents are extremely focused on how things look to others, not on what's actually going on behind closed doors. A child who is angry, anxious, withdrawn, or rebellious may be an embarrassment because they're not projecting the image of the perfect family. Instead of asking why the child is struggling, the focus becomes stopping the behavior. This is not saying that every behavior is acceptable or not harmful. There are plenty of unhealthy and unproductive reactions that children can have — acting out, arguing, becoming emotionally volatile, sneaking around. These things can create real problems, but such behaviors don't arise in a vacuum. There is an underlying reason that those behaviors developed and it usually stems from the household environment. Children react to feeling unheard, distressed, controlled, criticized, or emotionally neglected. What looks like acting out to an outsider could actually be frustration, hurt, or a desperate attempt to regain control. For example, a teenager who is rarely trusted, constantly monitored, and criticized for every mistake may eventually stop cooperating. The parent may point to the rebellion as proof that the child is difficult, but they neglect to look at the years of over-controlling that led to the behavior. The reaction becomes the focus while the environment that helped create it is overlooked. Emotionally immature parents struggle with self-reflection because of this; anything that they perceive as inappropriate behavior in the child, they consider something to be wrong with the child. They don't take a look at their actions that could have led to the behavior. It is easier to identify a scapegoat than to admit uncomfortable truths about family relationships or yourself. This creates a confusing experience for the child. They are continuously told that they are lazy, difficult, dramatic, selfish, disrespectful, and overly sensitive while all of their concerns about the family are dismissed. Eventually, they might start to doubt their own perceptions and actually wonder if they are the cause of the problems. In adulthood, many people from these backgrounds realize that their family's story was incomplete. They can acknowledge their behaviors and responses that were problematic while also recognizing that there were real experiences and circumstances that led to those responses. Taking responsibility for your behavior does not require you to accept blame for an entire family system. A healthier perspective is often to view behavior in context. This isn't to excuse harmful behavior in parents or children. It's to see cause and effect. When a child grows up feeling consistently judged, not trusted, unheard, and over-controlled, it is not surprising that behavioral and emotional struggles may follow. Understanding the context allows for accountability without placing blame on the person that had the least amount of control in the situation.

An attachment-trauma specialist explains why emotional neglect is so easy to dismiss and so damaging. Because it's an absence (of connection, attunement, love) rather than a discrete bad event, there's "nothing to point to," which breeds confusion and shame ("nothing that bad happened to me"). She argues neglect is inherently dissociative — surviving it means cutting off your own attachment needs — and that it compounds the harm of any other trauma because no connected adult was there to help.

Takeaway: "Nothing happened" is the thing that happened. The absence is the injury, and the shame about struggling is part of the wound.

One of the things I am undoubtedly the most passionate about as an attachment trauma specialist is educating people on emotional neglect because most people really do not understand the devastating impacts of emotional neglect and people that have experienced really profound emotional neglect therefore often feel very confused and very ashamed of why they struggle so much. Like a really common sentiment will be, I don't have a reason to feel as messed up as I am. Nothing that bad happened to me, but that's the thing is that emotional neglect is that bad. In fact, it can be one of the most developmentally consequential forms of attachment trauma, but it can be harder to recognize because of the absence of big events, because there aren't big scary, intense things to point to. Instead, it's an absence, an absence of connection, an absence of love of feeling of deep and profound aloneness. And not only that, but emotional neglect also seriously compounds the devastating impact of any other traumas or adverse events. Like let's say there's other things happening, like bullying or an unexpected loss of a family member or complex medical issues. Any of those adverse experiences are going to be significantly more traumatizing because of the emotional neglect because there is no connected adult to help them through that and they feel completely alone in it. Emotional neglect has widespread impacts on self-worth, on relationship patterns, on the way that we experience our own emotions, our relationship with identity. And I found from my own experience working with complex trauma that emotional neglect is actually an inherently dissociative experience because the only way to survive it is to cut off very large parts of your own humanity and to suppress and dissociate from your attachment system and your natural, evolutionarily wired needs for connection with other people. So there's a big split, a big compartmentalization that happens because parts of us will always continue to long for and reach for and desire closeness and connection. Then there's also this immense dissociation and suppression of those natural attachment needs, which comes in the form of hyperindependence, avoidant attachment patterns, dissociation, a lot of shame and self-hatred around our own needs. And when a child has an experience where no one is ever interested in their inner world, no one ever like joins them in their inner world, that child loses a large portion of their ability to connect with their own inner world. Healing from emotional neglect is a complex journey but it is possible, but it's not possible unless we can recognize what emotional neglect is and give it the seriousness and the consideration that it deserves in the field of trauma.

A clinician's field guide to how emotional-neglect histories show up in the therapy room — useful as a mirror. Two hallmarks: (1) difficulty feeling and naming inner emotions (a developmental injury to interoception from never receiving co-regulation), often masked by minimizing, humor, "I don't know," or intellectualizing; and (2) difficulty receiving compassion — a protective wall goes up, because being attuned to reawakens the grief of how long that need went unmet.

Takeaway: Walling off comfort isn't ingratitude — it's a survival adaptation. The pain shows up precisely because someone is finally offering care.

Okay, now I want to talk a little bit about how people with an emotional neglect history can often show up in therapy and things that therapists should be aware of. So the first one has to do with difficulty feeling and accessing their own inner emotions, their own inner state and sharing it and describing it. And this is for a few main reasons. One is that when a child doesn't receive co-regulation growing up, when they don't have adults who are helping them learn how to talk about and share and understand their feelings, there's a developmental injury. So it's actually much more difficult to build interoceptive skills, like just the capacity to notice what you're feeling inside and learn how to communicate it. There can be kind of like a feeling of cut off from the inner experience from that developmental injury. So that's one thing. The other thing is that it can feel really scary or overwhelming to allow yourself to feel your emotions when you've never had co-regulation and support for dealing with those emotions. So children who are emotionally neglected tend to feel really like overwhelmed and flooded by their emotional pain because they never got their needs met in terms of having an adult to help them through those feelings and to therefore learn how to feel safe in their own emotions. So there can be like an adaptive kind of cut off or numbing or minimizing of emotions. For this reason, we can see dissociation, we can see emotional numbness or flatness. We can see often like a minimizing — people with emotional neglect trauma will often like dismiss and minimize their own experiences, they will use humor to deflect from things that are actually very painful. They'll say things like, yeah, it's not really a big deal though, or maybe they'll be able to like share something painful for a moment, but then they'll very quickly try to move on. It's very uncomfortable to stay in touch with it. This can show up as saying like I don't know, not being able to answer questions about what's going on inside of them. Or it can also show up in just that intellectualizing where they kind of stay in like narrative storytelling mode but don't really allow themselves to feel things. The second thing that therapists will notice a lot is difficulty accepting compassion or empathy either from the therapist or even like self-compassion, self-empathy. And that's a really tricky dilemma because even though people who have been emotionally neglected really desperately need compassion and empathy — like that's a need that's been unmet for so long — it also brings up very very uncomfortable and painful feelings to actually receive that attunement. And so often therapists will feel like, oh, I'm trying to connect with this client and offer my compassion and it almost feels like I'm being pushed away, or the client kind of puts a wall up, or they get uncomfortable when I try to express my empathy and compassion. Or like I try to attune to this client and it feels like there's some sort of disconnect and I don't know why. That's often because the client actually has a protective wall up stopping them, preventing them from really receiving that empathy and care, because getting those needs met, even though it's essential, also brings forth a ton of pain and grief from the neglect trauma. The experience of feeling profoundly alone and unloved is actually triggered by attempts to receive love or care. So those are some of the flags that as a therapist I would recommend keeping emotional neglect in your mind and being aware that that might be the source of some of the issues that you're bumping into.

Why intimacy can feel intolerable even with a partner you know is safe. To survive neglect, the attachment system gets suppressed (structural dissociation); the parts that crave closeness go into hiding. Years later, consciously knowing "this person is safe" doesn't reach the implicit parts still living in the old reality. Opening to love is the medicine — but the same opening that lets love in also lets the long-numbed pain out, which is why closeness can trigger an automatic shutdown.

Takeaway: The push-away reflex isn't a verdict on your partner; it's old wiring protecting you from grief that surfaces the moment you let care in.

What about when you have a safe partner and can't tolerate intimacy even though a part of you craves it? So I want to talk about why this is a really common experience for people who have been emotionally neglected. So in order to survive emotional neglect trauma, children have to adapt to a relational environment in which they have no way to get their needs met. And one of the main ways that children survive these circumstances is a kind of structural dissociation where the attachment system is suppressed and disconnected from. So the parts of you that do long for intimacy and crave intimacy and closeness and connection have to shut down and go into hiding. Dissociating from those attachment needs is the only way to endure the really excruciating pain of not having those needs met. And so locking up those parts of the self, dissociating and disconnecting from those parts of the self, is a necessary and adaptive survival strategy. So fast forward years later and you've managed to actually build like intimate relationships with a partner or with friends and that's great. And consciously you might know like oh this person is safe and they love me and they want to be close to me. But there's a part of you that automatically rejects that closeness, that intimacy and that love even though you can also feel that there are parts of you that still really need and want it. So why is that? It's because the implicit learnings in the brain from that neglect trauma don't really know what you know on a conscious level. So there are parts of you that are still living in the emotional reality of that neglect trauma. And therefore those parts are still adapting to that trauma, protecting you in the same ways that were necessary back then. The thing about opening ourselves up to receive love and care is that even though that's the medicine for emotional neglect — we need repair experiences of being loved and receiving connection in order to heal — the process of opening ourselves up to receive that love and care also lets out a lot of pain. Because in order to open up to receive that love and care, we have to bring our attachment system back online out of that dissociated and suppressed state that it's been in. So the way I heard this described before is that the same part of you that has to open up to let the love in also lets the pain out. When you allow yourself to actually feel that intimacy and that closeness, it exposes the deep pain of all those years of emotional neglect that have been numbed and avoided through that dissociation. So not only can there be emotional learnings that have taught you to not trust other people, that people won't actually be emotionally available for you and that you'll get hurt if you try to get those needs met, but there's also an automatic need to keep those attachment-oriented parts of you in a shutdown and lockdown state in order to avoid that grief and that pain and that agony of the neglect trauma. So I hope that makes sense and it's helpful. Obviously I can't say that that's for sure what's going on with the person who left this comment, but that is the general pattern that I have observed in my work.

A deeper read on hyperindependence. The usual story is "no one showed up, so I rely only on myself." A clinician (who shares the same history) adds the trifecta — neurodivergence + emotional neglect + parentification — and a second driver: the fear of being judged incompetent. So instead of asking a clarifying question, you smile and nod, then frantically figure it out alone, making everything ten times harder, because asking risks being seen as stupid, lazy, or a burden.

Takeaway: Hyperindependence isn't only self-reliance from neglect — it's also self-protection from the shame of looking like you don't know. Asking for help is the harder, braver move.

Hyperindependence isn't just the result of nobody ever showing up for you, so now you have to take care of everything by yourself. Most of my clients experience parentification and emotional neglect when they were younger. It comes with a lot of very common issues, such as intellectualizing and struggling to feel your feelings, being extremely self-critical, and the double-sided coin of perfectionism and imposter syndrome, as well as being very hyperindependent. But when we discuss hyperindependence, it's typically framed as a result of never receiving help, so you've now become a person that just relies on yourself because you can't rely on anybody else. There is another reason for this, and I'm going to tie in the other aspect that is really common for my clients, and that is being ADHD or AuDHD or autistic. When you throw in that whole trifecta of being neurodivergent, emotionally neglected and parentified, you tend to have a really common experience. As a child, you had to take on a very adult role for the adults that couldn't regulate themselves out of a paper bag, amend a lot of high expectations and criticism when you did not meet those expectations because you were being asked to perform as if you were an adult. Which means you had to figure out a lot by yourself, and you've just been raw-dogging life ever since. And you had to do it all with little to no support. Factor in gender and cultural experiences, the masking, the parentification, the criticism, the expectations can be even higher. As a result, we're not just dealing with hyperindependence because help was never reliable before, so why would you bother asking for it now? We're also dealing with the hyperindependence that comes with this little nagging voice that says, don't ask for help. They expect you to know what you're doing because you've always had to figure things out for yourself. And if you tell them you don't know what to do, they're going to judge you. They're going to think you're incompetent, stupid, lazy, and a burden. Which means you will smile and nod when somebody gives you directions, acting like you know exactly what to do, and then trying to Google that stuff frantically because you didn't understand a damn thing instead of asking clarifying questions. And you'll make everything 10 times harder than it needs to be because you'd rather spend five hours going through three years of nearly daily text messages than asking somebody, hey, is there an easy way I can look up a specific text message in my phone? It's me. I did that because I have the same trauma as my clients. So it's not just a result of continuous letdowns and disappointment. It's also a result of fearing that you will be seen as a failure and rejected for it.

The specific shape of mother–son attachment wounding. Sons get socialized away from emotion while being deeply shaped by their mother's emotional world — a contradiction that often resolves into shutdown, emotional containment, people-pleasing-through-performance, and hyperindependence. A common layer is parentification / "spousal surrogacy": the son becomes mom's emotional regulator and confidant, which stays invisible because boys are praised for being "good, strong, mature." The deepest wound: "I was emotionally needed more than I was emotionally known." Adult echoes include guilt around boundaries, shame about disappointing women, and shutdown in conflict.

Takeaway: A lot of avoidant, over-responsible men were once over-functioning little boys who got loved for performing, not for being known.

Now, what about mother and son dynamics inside of attachment wounding and relational childhood trauma? And like shame dynamics, because they're layered just like it is for a mother and daughter, but they are differently layered for mother and son. Make no mistake, they can be just as psychologically powerful. Let's talk about it. The biggest difference is that sons are usually socialized away from emotionality and emotional vulnerability, while at the same time being deeply emotionally shaped by their relationships with their mothers. And this can create a very specific type of tension. A lot of sons learn that emotional needs are weakness. That vulnerability creates shame. That emotions overwhelm women. Emotional dependence is threatening, dangerous. That softness threatens masculinity. Closeness creates engulfment. That emotions are to be suppressed and managed, dealt with and handled privately. And here's the kicker. That all of that might be the belief system while at the same time being profoundly emotionally and psychologically attached to the mother's emotional world and influenced by it. That's the messed up contradiction. So if mom is emotionally immature or emotionally inconsistent, shame defensive, emotionally enmeshed, intrusive, needy, overprotective, controlling, emotionally volatile or emotionally dependent on the son, well, then the son often adapts differently than a daughter might. From an external perspective, instead of blatant emotional hypervigilance or the relational pursuit, many sons move towards the shutdown response — compartmentalizing their emotional world, avoidance, emotional numbness, people pleasing through performance, withdrawal, conflict avoidance, suppressing their emotions, bottling it up, overfunctioning practically instead of anything emotional. They have difficulty identifying their feelings and it can come with this hyperindependence, because for a lot of boys, emotional survival becomes linked to emotional containment. Another layer to talk about is that many sons become like emotional husbands to their moms, and this is called parentification or spousal surrogacy. And this can happen when mom is lonely in her marriage, in households that are deprived emotionally, divorced dynamics, narcissistic systems, parentified systems. So the son in that environment becomes the confidant, becomes the emotional regulator, protector, the stabilizer, the good boy, a source of validation, the emotional caretaker. And because boys are often praised for being good or strong, mature, easy, protective, parentification can easily become invisible. Then fast forward to adulthood. This can look like discomfort with emotional intimacy, guilt around boundaries, conflict avoidance, compulsive caretaking, emotional suppression, shutdown under emotional pressure, avoidance of vulnerability or vulnerable conversations, feeling trapped between autonomy and obligation, intense shame around disappointing women, difficulty tolerating emotional dependence from other people, emotional withdrawal inside of conflict. Sound familiar? One of the deepest wounds that sons carried was that I was emotionally needed more than I was emotionally known. Listen to me guys, this is profound because many sons receive love conditionally through performance, compliance, emotional steadiness, caretaking, not causing problems, emotional containment rather than emotional attunement into their inner world. And that creates men that often struggle with emotional attunement for themselves, emotional language and vulnerability, shame tolerance, emotional repair, staying connected during conflict. Y'all, it's not because they don't care. It's because their nervous system learned that emotions create danger, engulfment, guilt, even inadequacy. And this is where shame becomes massive inside of mother-son dynamics. So a lot of them internalize: if the woman that I love is hurt, then I have failed. So when a partner brings conflict or hurt later in adulthood, those younger parts are the ones that are often reacting, reacting with defensiveness and shutdown, fixing, withdrawal, fairness, explanation, emotional disappearance, because that shame is being activated immediately. And that's a very common attachment bridge in adult relationships that come from mother and son dynamics. And another big nuance is that some moms have a lot of struggles around individuation from the son, because maybe he represented emotional safety, purpose, emotional closeness, protection from loneliness, validation, identity. So when the son sets boundaries, prioritizes the partner, separates emotionally, disagrees, individuates, mother might unconsciously react to that with guilt, with withdrawal, criticism, emotional injury like tears, possessiveness, victimhood, subtle emotional punishment. And then many sons feel tremendously guilty for separating. That's a deeply layered attachment dynamic. Here's the reality guys, because a lot of avoidant men out there were once emotionally over-functioning, over-responsible little boys. Okay, bye.

A short reframe of what safety in a relationship actually feels like. Safe people don't make you justify your boundaries — they get curious about why the boundary exists, respect your limits, and don't treat your needs as an inconvenience. Because there's no power imbalance, you don't have to over-explain. Experiencing that consistently helps you see, in hindsight, that you weren't "asking too much" before.

Takeaway: If a relationship makes you defend your boundaries, that's information about the relationship — not proof your boundary is wrong.

Just to remind your safe people don't make you defend your boundaries, they get curious on why they are there in the first place. They respect your limits. They don't shame you for having them. They don't want you to feel overwhelmed or pressured. They don't want you saying yes when you really mean no. They actually want you to feel safe enough to be honest with them. They don't see your needs as an inconvenience. They see them as a window into how to love you best. You don't have to over explain or justify yourself because there's no power imbalance. There's no control, there's just connection. And when you experience that type of safety consistently with someone, you realize maybe you weren't asking too much from that other person before.

A blunt reframe for highly empathic people who keep getting walked over. Letting people repeatedly cross lines and absorbing their pain isn't love — it's a pattern that ties your worth to how much you give, often rooted in a fear of losing someone who wasn't really there for you anyway. "Empathy without boundaries is self-abandonment dressed up in a cape." You can understand someone's whole story and still say "this is how far we go."

Takeaway: Your boundaries have to be stronger than your empathy. Protecting your peace isn't cold — it's giving yourself the protection you've extended to everyone else.

Your boundaries have to be stronger than your empathy. I'm gonna say that again. Your boundaries have to be stronger than your empathy. And I know that sounds cold. I know it does, but hear me out. Because some of us are so full of love, so full of understanding, we keep letting people cross lines that we swore we would never let them cross again, and feel their pain and we make it our problem. We see their struggle and we sacrifice our peace over and over again. And we call it love, but is it? Or is it a mindset that you convince yourself that your worth is tied to how much you give? A fear of losing someone who was never really there protecting you anyway. That's not love. That's a pattern. It's a mindset pattern that can be broken. Empathy without boundaries isn't kindness. It is self-abandonment dressed up in a cape. You can understand someone's story and still not allow it to become your burden. You can love someone deeply and still say, this is how far we go. That's not cold, that's not cruel. That's a mindset shift that will change your life. That is finally you deciding your peace deserves the same protection that you've been giving everybody else. So tell me in the comments, have you ever lost your peace because you were allowing people to cross boundaries? Just because empathy is your gift, don't let it become the thing that keeps you stuck. Protect your energy like your life depends on it because honestly, it does. I love you.