The Aftermath of Childhood Neglect

When no one feeds you when you’re hungry, puts you to bed when you’re tired, or comforts you when you’re scared, wires get crossed. Why should your system waste energy on signals no one's listening to? Here you are now, noticing that your needs feel foreign to you while you're an emotional geiger counter for the needs of others; constantly buzzing. It’s almost a superpower. There’s a deeply felt sense of everyone else’s emotional experience. You may even step in to help before they ever have to ask. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it feels like your survival depends on being useful to others. Your own needs only get in the way of that.

How This Shows Up Day to Day

Hyperindependence by necessity.

Depending on people is dangerous when you’ve learned that people let you down. A part of you starts to believe it’s easier to handle everything alone. That works until it doesn’t and now when you really need help, it feels impossible to ask for. The very thought of it is nails on a chalkboard. It feels like defeat, weakness, or worse, that you're burdening someone.

Your system is stuck in a constant loop of “Don't need. Don't ask. Handle it.”

Relationships that keep you in the shadows.

You're great at knowing what people around you need so you bend yourself to accommodate. But what do you need? That question can strike fear into the heart. You honestly don't know so you become the person who adjusts; the person who's easy to be around because they go with the flow almost to a fault.

The problem: over time, there's no you left. You've adjusted yourself into invisibility.

You feel numb or blurred out.

Neglect teaches you to disconnect from your body and your emotions. It tells us they’re not welcome; that if we ignore them, they’ll go away. Now you have nightmares about driving a car from the passenger seat. You’re not in control. It feels like life is happening to you. You participate, but you're not feeling much of anything.

People sometimes describe it as depression, but it's not quite that. It's more like you're behind glass. Life is just on the other side.

You don't trust, even when you want to.

You may have had your physical needs met and there may not have been physical or verbal abuse, but the people who were supposed to care most just didn’t show up or pay attention. Even when you’re in relationship with someone trustworthy, there’s a part of you that is just waiting for them to disappoint you. It's scanning for evidence that they don't actually care.

You find yourself staying distant so you're not hurt when people leave or people pleasing to try and make sure they don’t.

You carry shame about your own needs.

This is a deep one. There's a baseline belief that your needs are too much. Again, it's not always something you think about consciously but it sure is something you feel, and it affects every decision. Should you ask for a raise? No, that's asking for too much. Should you rest? No, that's selfish and lazy. Should you tell your friends you’re struggling? No, that's burdening them. Glass of water? NO! They’d have to get up.

The shame runs so deep that there’s no questioning it, it feels like a fact.

What We Work On First: Building Safety and Noticing

In the early sessions, my job is to create safety. Before we do anything else, we need to give your system evidence that this space is different. This space is one where your feelings and needs are quite literally the most important thing. That provides some guardrails.

You'll talk about your childhood. Not to blame anyone, but to understand what you learned and where. Over time your nervous system will start to relax when it learns that I can hold it with you. I'm not minimizing. I'm not telling you that you should just get over it or be ok. That may feel deeply uncomfortable for a while, but that’s ok too.

You might notice crying; the desire to flee therapy; emerging feelings; your patterns.

The Middle Phase: Waking Your Body Back Up

Once your system starts to give the possibility of change some trepidations side-eye, we can move towards deeper work. This is where IFS, EMDR and somatic work come in. We're not just talking about things, we're helping your system process. What does it mean to process? In some ways, it’s synonymous with grieving the life you had and the life you could have had so you can focus more on building the life you want to have now.

Your body may still think it's unsafe to need. We work with that directly. Where do you hide the pain? Is it tension in your chest? Heaviness in your stomach? Tightness in your throat? Are you holding your breath? We slow down. We stay with it. We connect with the system and help it understand that you do matter and you are allowed (dare I say, even encouraged) to have needs. EMDR won’t make you forget what’s happened, but it will reduce the emotinal charge of it. IFS engages with the parts of you that learned that in order to tolerate neglect, you have to self abandon. These parts learned to keep you safe, now we help them learn that they’re part of the system in a new way.

All of this asks you to practice something radical: asking for small things. Changing an appointment time, dimming the lights, opening a window. Asking for that glass of water. Your nervous system starts to collect evidence that people can actually come through.

You might notice anger; more of your bodily sensations, emotions, or needs; shifts in your relationships; deep grief.

The Great Beyond

There’s no science to how long it takes. Sometimes months, sometimes years, but over time something shifts at what feels like a cellular level. You start to believe, not intellectually but actually feel in your body; you matter. Your needs are not over the top, you can ask for help without shame. You can say no without guilt. You can want things without immediately talking yourself out of them.

You’ll get to know yourself in ways that hadn’t occurred to you before. Did you ever panic when someone asked you what your favorite anything was? Yeah, no more of that. You’re not a stranger to yourself in the ways you used to be. Best of all? You can be vulnerable without disappearing and receive care without feeling like it’ll be held against you.

You might notice clarity; capacity for joy; confidence; and a difference in how you show up for yourself and others.

To Sum It Up?

There’s no checklist for how this will go. You might have a breakthrough one week and find yourself in familiar patterns the next. You might feel amazing for two weeks and then feel numb again. That's not failure, it’s just the system beta testing you 2.0. Setbacks are part of the process. Sometimes it gets worse before it feels better, because you’re offering the young version of yourself compassion for what might be the first time. I tell clients that they might hate showing up week to week because good therapy is hard work and emotional hangovers are real.

Healing requires you to come face-to-face with the fact that you didn't get what you needed and you can't go back and change that. It demands that you slow down and pay attention to yourself even when it feels shameful to do so. It insists that to be vulnerable means letting yourself be disappointed in people while still recognizing that disappointments aren’t a unilateral indicator that you’re not cared for. Repair is possible. Come on in, let’s get to it.