Childhood Emotional Neglect - The Missing Puzzle Piece

Through my work as a life coach, I have found a common denominator that shows up in a myriad of ways, with most of my clients.

Whether the person suffers from low self-esteem, self-limiting beliefs, fear of vulnerability, lack of compassion or anger issues, in many cases, the maladaptive behavior can be traced back to not getting ones emotional needs met as a child.

This is called "Childhood Emotional Neglect," although I don't love the name. Neglect seems to infer something done deliberately. "Childhood Emotional Oversight" or "Childhood Emotional Misunderstanding" might be more accurate in most cases.

I'm not referring to abusive situations or situations where parents were deliberately withholding.

I am referring to cases where parents could not meet their child's emotional needs due to either a lack of time, energy, understanding or psychological ability.

In many generations this was understandably the norm for two reasons.

#1) The needs for physical survival usurp any emotional needs.
#2) We can't provide what we don't have.

My discussions about this topic are not meant to cast blame, but rather acknowledge the "missing puzzle piece." Once this is done, we can take positive steps to provide the self-love, nurturing and understanding we missed out on in our formative years.

This can be done using a variety of tools like inner-child healing and re-parenting mechanisms.

I share many many of these tips and techniques on my TikTok channel: @amaxximizedlife

Compassion in this work, and all work, is essential.

We need to have compassion for both the caregivers who did the best that they could, and compassion for the younger version of ourselves, who was just longing to be seen, heard, accepted and loved.