12 Surprising Signs Of Emotional Neglect

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

Today,

I will be discussing the long-term effects of emotional neglect on the subconscious mind and a lifetime.

Emotional neglect can have serious consequences on our lives.

If you are the adult child of an alcoholic,

If you are the adult child of a dysfunctional home,

If you came from an unstable,

Unpredictable home life,

Chances are you've experienced childhood emotional neglect.

Emotional neglect can cause problems with intimacy.

It can cause problems with being able to trust the self.

You develop a loss of selfhood.

In other words,

Like you don't have a healthy sense of self.

You don't know who you are.

And the number one sign that you are struggling from emotional neglect is that you can't identify your emotion.

You just don't know how you feel.

So what is emotional neglect?

It's not always easy to spot.

There is abuse by commission,

Which means that something has happened to you.

And there is also neglect or abuse by omission,

Meaning that you can experience neglect.

And what that means is that it will not be easy for you to identify what was missing.

Can you miss a chocolate banana shake you've never had?

No.

Can you miss love you've never had?

No.

Unfortunately,

When we come from homes where we are emotionally neglected,

We as the children of those homes acclimate to these experiences.

We end up becoming adjusted to having people ignore us.

And if mom and dad are ignoring us,

Ignoring our emotions,

Ignoring our needs,

Then we become programmed to do the same thing.

As it is below,

So shall it be above.

So how I am treated at home by my caretakers is how I will ultimately treat the self.

If you're the adult child of an alcoholic or you come from a narcissistic home,

You are more likely to experience emotional neglect.

But anyone can experience emotional neglect.

Even the most well-intended parents can emotionally neglect their children,

Sort of not meet their needs or dismiss their needs or just miss the mark by failing to attune themselves to their children.

Even if there's a roof over your head,

Even if there's food in the refrigerator,

Parents can still fail to attune themselves to their children's emotional needs.

Emotional neglect happens when we as parents,

For instance,

Are unable to recognize the emotional needs of our children at various stages.

So our newborn is going to have emotional needs for feeling safe that maybe our 12-year-old doesn't need anymore.

Our three-year-old might need to be soothed because they're afraid of the dark,

Where our 15-year-old is no longer afraid of the dark.

Our 15-year-old might be having trouble at school,

Might be getting bullied,

Might be developing serious insecurities about the way that they look,

And those would need to be attuned to as well.

So when we're thinking about emotional neglect and we're trying to figure out if we suffer from emotional neglect,

It's important that we recognize that in the best-case scenario,

Our parents were attuning themselves to the needs that we had at various stages of our life throughout our childhood.

And let's just face it,

Being a parent is the toughest job in the world.

You have your own childhood trauma to deal with,

You have boss issues to deal with,

You have career issues to deal with,

You're trying to make the rent,

You're trying to pay for a mortgage,

You're trying to keep your home afloat.

I mean,

There are so many things that we have to deal with as parents.

I think it's important that we recognize that parenting is absolutely the most difficult job in the world,

And oftentimes the most well-intended parents are making mistakes.

Many of us who suffer from emotional neglect don't know it.

We just feel like something's off.

We don't know why we feel like an alien in our family or an alien on planet Earth.

We don't know why we feel the way we do.

We just feel like something's not right.

Here are 12 signs and symptoms that you might be struggling with emotional neglect.

Number one,

You have a hard time identifying how you feel.

Number two,

You have a real fear of needing others.

Number three,

You live in response and reaction to other people as opposed to living from a true divine self.

Number four,

You feel like you don't know yourself.

Number five,

You don't trust that other people will meet your needs.

You generally feel like people are unreliable and it's safer to only rely on yourself.

Number six,

You feel super over responsible for things that are not your fault.

Number seven,

Like I said earlier,

You feel like an alien in your own skin.

You feel like an alien in your own life.

You feel like an alien in your family and even in the world.

You oftentimes feel void of direction,

Enthusiasm,

And happiness.

Number nine,

You live in fear,

Whether it's conscious or not,

Of the next bad thing happening.

Number 10,

You may develop co-dependency issues.

You may live your life seeking approval.

You may develop people-pleasing tendencies.

You might attract narcissistic others in your life who ignore you and often emotionally neglect you.

Number 11,

You do not expect people to take your needs or to take you seriously.

Number 12,

You live in a constant state of hypervigilance in a state of survival.

So what are the effects of childhood emotional neglect on the subconscious mind?

Research has proven that those of us who come from neglectful homes,

From childhood homes that are full of emotional neglect,

That there are specific regions in our brain that become affected.

The hippocampus for one,

Which is involved in memory,

Is generally smaller.

The corpus callosum,

Which is involved in self-awareness or the ability to perceive the self,

Is also smaller than the child who comes from a more attuned home.

Now that is not our fault.

The area of our brain that's responsible for regulating and balancing our emotions is also affected.

It makes sense considering this idea that in order for a child to regulate their emotions,

They needed an attuned caregiver,

A conscious caregiver,

To pay attention to how the child was feeling.

So if I have a newborn and that newborn is crying as a mom,

I tend to the newborn.

Now the newborn develops a sense of trust.

They develop this idea that when they cry,

They get a reaction from somewhere outside of them,

And there's someone out there in this vast universe that will tend to them.

It's super important that we recognize that.

Those of us who have come from homes where those needs are needs when we cried,

We were trying to alert our caretakers to please come and take care of us.

And if those needs were met,

We were able to develop a sense of trust in others,

But also in our ability to make a noise and have someone respond.

If we grow up in homes where the crying and our feelings are being ignored,

We don't develop this sense of trust in ourselves that we are effective,

That we can affect the outside world,

That we matter,

That we have the confidence and the ability to have an effect on other people when we have a need.

So what do we end up doing?

We end up not having needs.

We end up not trusting other people.

We end up detaching from our true self.

We have to because no one has taught us how to attune to ourself.

In order for you to know how you feel,

You needed to have someone in your outer experience consistently mirror back this idea that you matter.

What matters?

Your emotions matter.

You come home from school and you're upset.

Mom is supposed to notice that.

Dad is supposed to notice that.

That's supposed to be important.

You're supposed to feel important to the people that raised you and created you.

You're supposed to feel valued by the people that raised you.

How do you know that you are valued?

By the attention and the affection and the consistent compassion that you're offered from the outside.

Now if you live in a home where your emotions are being ignored,

Your subconscious mind is literally being denied the data for how to love the self.

The subconscious mind is always receiving data from the external world.

When children are below the age of seven,

They are in a theta brainwave state which is a rapid downloading state.

This is what nature has infused into a human being out of necessity,

Out of the need to survive.

Before a child is seven,

They have to learn a lot of information and so whatever you experienced in the outside becomes rapidly downloaded.

Not bad news if you come from a really healthy home.

Very bad news if you come from an alcoholic home.

If you come from a home with narcissistic parents.

If your parents were emotionally immature.

If there was a lot of fighting.

If there was a lot of codependency.

The children in the home feel ignored and if you're not paying attention to me,

I don't know how to pay attention to me.

I am literally not wired for how to love myself or how to pay attention to how I feel because I don't have that experience from the outside teaching me how to look within and that's not my fault.

If I am taught from the outside that what I think and feel is unimportant,

On a subconscious level I am developing neural pathways and language patterns which become habituated and eventually become the narrative of my inner critic.

If you suffer from childhood emotional neglect,

You might hear yourself saying things like,

I'm stupid.

I never get anything right.

Nothing ever works out for me.

I can't trust anyone but myself.

I can't trust people.

People always disappoint me.

My feelings don't matter.

So how can you heal from emotional neglect?

Well I think the first thing that we have to do is number one,

We have to take the rose colored glasses off.

We have to acknowledge that this absolutely is our experience.

This is how we feel.

So the number one thing to do is to recognize the problem.

Admit your truth.

Stop blaming yourself for why you can't feel your feelings.

Stop blaming yourself for why it's difficult for you to set boundaries.

Understand that how you feel is valid considering you grew up in a home that was void of emotional attunement and emotional connection.

Number two,

Begin doing generational trauma detective-like work.

Become more observing of your childhood.

Again,

Be honest with yourself but develop this detective-like ability to try to connect the dots.

Ask yourself,

Did I feel emotionally attuned to?

Was I respected?

Did my parents make me feel like what I felt was important to them?

Did I feel like my parents took the being that I was seriously?

Or did I feel ignored?

Did I feel invisible?

Developing this ability to be more objective about the past will help you develop empathy for your inner child.

Number three,

Develop a mindfulness practice.

This is where you get to really hone in and begin reconnecting to your body.

Number four,

Use breath work.

Learn to deeply connect to your breath because what we're trying to do is get you to become more wired for how you feel in the physical body because it's really the physical body that is prompting you and trying to get your attention,

Trying to tell you this is how I feel.

But as a child,

If we had the experience of,

Oh she's not important,

Oh she's a drama queen,

Oh she makes a big deal out of nothing,

Then we have literally detached from the impulses our bodies are telling us or giving us.

Impulses that are important information,

Impulses that allow us to honor how we feel and even set a boundary and or even go after a goal or a dream.

Number five,

Begin journaling.

Journaling is your way of connecting the head,

The heart,

And the hand.

It's your way of excavating the inner child.

It's your way of acknowledging your truth and the truth ultimately will set you free.

So journal about how you feel.

The sixth step is where you take everything that you're learning and the rubber meets the road.

So take everything that you're learning and put it into action in a 3D world.

So if you grew up feeling emotionally neglected and you're beginning to become more aware of how you feel and what you think and what you want,

Take that on the road.

In other words,

Like put it into action.

Take a couple of moments and honor how you feel and then act on it.

Maybe you want to go for a walk in nature that day.

Maybe you want to take a dance lesson.

Maybe you feel really really excited about volunteering at that dog shelter.

Maybe you just want to take a walk near the beach.

It's about you learning to pay attention to how you feel.

As you learn to tune into the self,

That's how you learn to heal from childhood emotional neglect.

And you also get to reprogram the subconscious mind.

If you work on this long enough,

Eventually what happens is you will change the patterns and the programs in your subconscious mind.

Once these new concepts become habituated,

You're good to go.

You actually get to change your paradigm,

Which means you've changed your life.

Never give up on loving the self,

Finding the self.

And remember,

It's not you,

It's your programming.

Dear one,

You are enough.

You were born enough,

But your subconscious mind might need some help remembering that truth.

Namaste everybody.

Until next time.