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Emotional Neglect: How to Heal Your Invisible Childhood Wounds
How experiencing childhood emotional neglect can inflict wounds more than you realise and what you can do to heal from them
Most of us would dismiss childhood emotional neglect as anything important since it wasn’t as if we went through a life-threatening or obviously harmful experience.
We perceive neglect as not being quite the same as a situation of physical abandonment, physical or even emotional abuse. After all, how can there be childhood trauma when our parents were mostly not around? Yet, if we are to dive in more deeply, we may just discover this….
Emotional neglect can inflict invisible wounds, even in the absence of any physical signs of abuse.
The wounds are not visible on the surface.
Rather they are hidden in the deep layers of our psyche.
Well, I was able to detect mine after much investigation.
In Search for Answers
For a long time, I did not realise that my insecurity issues were connected to having working parents who were emotionally absent and being alone when I was young.
My childhood days were pretty much a blur, mostly because they weren’t filled with exciting or fun activities. “Girls are not meant to be running around,” I was told. So, for the most part, I lived in a silent world and being left on my own. I was an obedient kid, buried my head in books, hardly drawing attention and secretly believing that I was “second best” to my brother.
As I got older, life showed me how miserable one can get with living in insecurity, feeling alone and not belonging. Even after getting interested in personal development, I found out that it wasn’t easy to will away the belief of “not good enough” despite repeated attempts. I was clueless on what I was missing.
When I finally discovered that the answer could lie in addressing emotional neglect, I experienced tremendous relief. It proved to be a revelation of sorts. From the discovery, I was able to get the healing that I needed to address the root cause. My self-love tank has been pretty full ever since.
