Ep. 38: Emotional Neglect: The Pain You Didn’t Notice, But Never Forgot

We often think of trauma as the things that happen to us. Emotional neglect, however, is the trauma of what didn't happen. It's the absence of attunement. The absence of someone noticing and staying connected with your inner world. It often looks like growing up in a home where your physical needs may have been met, but your emotional world was not consistently seen, understood, or held. 

Emotional neglect is especially hard to name because as a child, you don't have language for it. As an adult, it shows up in your relationships and your patterns, and it stays embedded in your nervous system. In this episode, we're going to explore what emotional neglect actually is, why you don't need to have bad parents or a bad childhood for it to occur, why emotional needs can't be met by emotionally immature parents, the ways emotional neglect gets internalized, and how healing begins. 

Once you have awareness around emotional neglect, you stop doing it to yourself. When you stop doing it to yourself, you stop doing it to other people. This awareness gives you the power to stop the cycle of generational trauma with your own children or in the space you hold for others, and my hope is that this episode gives language to places inside you that may have never had the words before. 

Resources

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