It's not the situation (what did or didn't happened) or the overwhelming emotions of hurt, anger and fear that are necessarily "traumatizing", but the confusion and self-judgment that results from being alone in the pain; the lack of an emotionally available adult to provide context and validation to the child so that they can make sense of what they're feeling.
The confusing thing about neglect trauma is, your parent could be in the room with you, you could have even been in their lap, but if they weren't emotionally available - present, attentive, engaged, and curious - there's an unseen absence or void created in you.
This happens because they weren't able to reflect back to you your inner l world /emotions so that you could make sense of them. Without the ability to make sense of you inner as a child, you end up blaming yourself for the pain you're in which creates more pain (often in the form of unexpressed anger and grief which cycles as rage and confusion within you).
In this article, I’ll help you:
1) Understand what neglect trauma looks like in childhood
2) The correlated symptoms or challenges in adulthood
3) How to heal / resolve neglect trauma
1) Understand what neglect trauma looks like in childhood
To a child, the absence of attention, context and curiosity can be just as painful as physical abuse because it leaves them to assume the pain they or others are experiencing is their fault or they simply don’t have a right or reason to feel the way they feel. That has lasting implications into adulthood, often resulting in anger, bitterness or hate towards oneself and/or the world at large.
Unlike physical abuse, neglect trauma isn't what happened, it's what didn't happen, so it often goes unnoticed.
It also goes unnoticed because the experiences we have in childhood are perceived as "normal". Since we have no relative reference to contrast our upbringing against, we don't even know to call it normal, it's just what is, it's the water we're swimming in. Therefore, dysfunction for many people is all they know. When dysfunction is all you had modeled for you as a child, you take on that imprinting and seek it out (even though it’s unhealthy) as an adult.
This is why it's common to repeat the love blueprint (the emotional resonance and relational patterns) that you had modeled by your parents. It’s the familiarity of what we thought love felt like that we end up being attracted to. It’s common to attract a partner that neglects us in the same ways we were neglected or hurt in childhood as a way of trying to get the love we never received.
The sentiment is, “If I can get this person who doesn’t love me or isn’t able to, to love me, then I can resolve my childhood and prove to myself that I am worthy of love and belonging.”
Neglect trauma can be grouped into complex and developmental trauma. That means it’s often not a one-off shock trauma kind of “big incident”, but rather a series of events with many layers that happens over a period of time.
When you were a child were you ever:
hurting but no one knew or no one would acknowledge your feelings?
part of a large family where it was necessary to take care of yourself or provide emotional support for your parents or siblings?
blamed for being upset or told you shouldn't be upset? (as if your reaction was unreasonable, unwarranted or out of proportion)
in a room of people or even in someone’s arms but felt uncomfortable or alone? (people were there, but not there; not truly present, attentive, engaged, or curious)
As an adult do you:
blame yourself frequently, believing most issues are "your fault"? (have low self-esteem)
Question or judge yourself for feeling the way you feel?
over-empathize with people who hurt you to the point where you apologize and forgive them quickly even though you were the one who got hurt?
apologize or feel bad for having needs at all, as if they are a burden?
minimize your suffering relative to others? ("It's not that bad, others have it worse").
Give endlessly while others seem to endlessly take?
Feel your worth is tied up in what you can do for someone? (So you’re constantly trying to prove that you’re worth loving through your actions that never feel like enough)
These are all potential symptoms/byproducts of neglect trauma.
Imagine this: You're 6 years old and your parents are fighting so you get scared and start crying. They’re so caught up in the fight they don’t even notice. You’re in need of comfort, presence and safety but no one is there to hold you. A feeling of tension and stress in the house lasts for days, weeks or even months on and off. The unpredictability is jarring, unsettling and scary. Eventually this feeling becomes “normal”.
You’re hurting, scared and lonely but you don’t know what you’re missing because you’ve never really experienced the loving presence of an emotionally available adult. Any problem or complaint you have only adds to their stress, so you learn to suppress your feelings.
In some cases you may even provide emotional support to your parents by listening to them or trying to relieve their stress, but they are unable to do the same for you. You’re left hurting, angry, sad, scared, helpless, confused and alone. Those feelings are a lot for even a healthy and resourced adult to deal with let alone a child.
On top of that, for many children the pain of neglect was often exacerbated by critical and reactive parents. Your parents are fighting, you start crying then one of your parents yells, "Stop crying, go to your room!" But crying is a natural reaction to a stressful and scary situation, so you're being criticized for an appropriate response. The implication is, “It doesn’t make sense to feel how you’re feeling."
Getting blamed for being upset is similar to gaslighting because it makes you question the validity of your reality. When another person imposes their reality upon yours as the only true reality that exists, it’s extremely confusing and painful.
Children often internalize the beliefs of their parents. If your parents trivialized, minimized, or ignored their emotions, they likely taught you to do the same with yours. If they explained away their feelings, you likely learned to explain away yours.
Can you see how messed up that is? The child is told their feelings don’t make sense so they can’t figure out why they’re in pain, sad or lonely, etc.
Can you sense the child’s confusion? “I’m not supposed to be feeling this way? I’m not allowed to feel this way? Why does this keep happening? Every time I’m upset I make things worse. What’s wrong with me? Maybe I deserve this… Maybe I should just get over it…”
If emotions are like a bottle being stirred up and shaken, neglect and criticism are the cap on the bottle. The emotions that are supposed to go up and out into a safe space to be validated (seen, heard, acknowledged) and contextualized (understood why they make sense) have nowhere to go, so they loop back in.
So begins the spiral of shame, self-hatred, self-punishment, self-criticism and the crystallization of the belief, “I’m bad. It’s my fault. There must be something wrong with me. I guess I deserve this. I should feel the way I feel, I should toughen up and get over it.”
External criticism and neglect are painful but perhaps even more painful is the internal split that happens as a result of one’s own self-judgment. This is the lasting "traumatizing" effect:
You're forced to disconnect from your emotions/authentic self to stay safe and keep the peace. People-pleasing (the fawning survival response) becomes a necessary and positive adaptation to a stressful and unsafe environment. You do whatever you have to do to keep the peace, to avoid conflict and to be a “good kid” in your parents eyes.
2) The correlated symptoms in adulthood
Many of the problems we have as adults were actually solutions as children. The survival adaptation of people-pleasing is an example of this. It’s a solution/strategy that kept you safe as a child, but as an adult it keeps part of you unhappy, numb, disconnected, feeling like a fraud and sometimes addicted to something as a way of dealing with the pain.
It’s impossible to be truly happy and at peace when operating from survival adaptations. Survival adaptations like pleasing, perfecting, proving and performing are all for others, not ourselves. So our motivation ends up being externally focused trying to control other people’s perceptions of us, trying to be seen by those who might never see us. We end up unhappy, unmotivated, unfulfilled and not living a life true to ourselves.
What was neglected (not paid attention to) as a child - your authentic thoughts, feelings and needs - bubble to the surface to be seen, expressed, felt and heard. So you need to learn how to relate to them in a new way rather than your old conditioning that pushes them away.
Many self-aware adults add to their cycle of shame because they think, “This shouldn't be a problem. I shouldn’t have these feelings. I should be able to handle this [referring to self-sabotaging behaviour]. Why can’t I get this under control? ”
But what they don't know is there’s a war inside of them between their Conscious Rational Adult and their Wounded Child / Protector Part. It’s not a matter of discipline, it’s a matter of resolving trauma.
The Conscious Rational Adult judges the Wounded Part. But you can’t “logic-your-way” out of feeling how you feel, that’s just more neglect, dismissal, ignoring, invalidating, suppression.
As children we often put up with behaviour that we realize later wasn’t okay or “normal”, to keep ourselves safe. We had to disconnect from or abandon ourselves in order to please others, be liked or loved and to keep the peace.
Eventually the pain of disconnecting from your authenticity and suppressing your emotional reality becomes too much. It’s unsustainable.
So the opposite of internalization (taking on other’s beliefs), suppression (pushing down what’s coming up) and neglect (dismissing, minimizing or not noticing) is boundaries (discerning and giving back what’s not your responsibility) and self-expression (giving yourself permission to feel how you feel because it matters).
Ever wonder why some people struggle more than others to communicate their boundaries? It’s not because some people were taught the “right words” and others weren’t.
In my book Boundaries: 6 Myths & the Truths that Set You Free, Myth #6 is, “Confident boundaries are mainly about communication skills.” The reality is, “The foundation of confident boundaries isn’t communication skills, it’s self-esteem.”
Self-esteem stems from acknowledging the validity and importance of your thoughts and feelings. It’s giving others permission to like you or not like you. It’s sourcing your self-worth internally because you see you and don’t need others to see you. You have nothing to prove and there’s no one to please. Of course you still might want others to like you and see you, but you’re free when you don’t need them to and none of your energy is spent trying to be perceived a certain way.
In many cases people don’t communicate their boundaries not because they “don’t have the right words”, but because they’re operating from a belief that their thoughts and feelings don’t matter as much as others’. The minimizing or neglecting of our thoughts and feelings is a symptom of neglect trauma.
In order to maintain connection, keep the peace, and avoid conflict the Wounded Child Part believes they need to abandon their authenticity to survive (as children our survival depended on being acceptable and belonging to those who took care of us.) This is the basis of unhealthy, toxic, dysfunctional and codependent relationships. “I’ll be into whatever you need me to be so that you don’t leave.”
Ever wonder why people stay in relationships that aren’t good for them? It’s this need for attachment that is a survival impulse. You cling to what’s not good for you because you believe you’re lucky to have morsels of love. That’s all you’ve really experienced so far, so you believe you’d be hard pressed to find any better. The Conscious Rational Adult knows you should leave, but the Wounded Child in you is attached to the other person, desperately trying to get the love they never had.
Even though you rationally know better, deep down the Wounded Child in you believes you don’t deserve any better. You don’t really know what secure, respectful, healthy love feels like, so you’re attached to the only thing you know. You expend enormous amounts of energy trying to fix the other person and try to make a dysfunctional, often incompatible, relationship work. Your attempts to make what’s not working work are attempts from a child desperate for love.
To review some key points so far:
Without context for their pain, children blame themselves. This creates a cycle of shame (self-judgment) and low self-esteem.
Core emotions in neglect trauma (besides anger, fear and pain) are confusion (Why am I in pain? What’s wrong with me?) and helplessness (a sense of victimhood and resignation; why bother even trying, it’s my fault, they’re right and I’m wrong.)
People-pleasing is a positive, necessary and intelligent survival adaptation to complex trauma that keeps us safe (but unhappy).
Lack of boundaries isn’t a communication problem, it stems from low self-esteem that is a byproduct of complex trauma.
There’s a war between your Conscious Rational Adult and your Wounded Child Part. That conflict often lends to a cycle of self-blame and a corresponding cycle of shame (self-judgment).
In adulthood this generally goes 2 polar opposite ways:
a) You’re a fairly reactive person. You get angry or triggered easily.
b) You’re “not an angry person”. You rarely find yourself angry and automatically empathize with other people more than yourself.
Both adaptations protect us from the vulnerability of acknowledging our pain.
a) You’re a fairly reactive person. You get angry or triggered easily.
You might rationally know better, but deep down you believe you’re not worthy of love - you don’t matter, you’re fundamentally bad and deserve punishment. This means you’ll react easily to any minor suggestion that you don’t matter. Someone’s late and you react. Someone cancels plans with you and you react. Your partner says something and you take it personally.
Ever notice how the very same words or circumstances don’t trigger everyone, but they trigger you? Why? It’s your unique upbringing and life’s history; your trauma.
You’ve got so much pent up emotion - pain, anger, and sadness - inside of you that wasn’t allowed as a child that you’re bursting at the seams. All of this unexpressed emotion is like ammunition. All it takes is a trigger, a spark, to set it off.
People-pleasing in this case is done as a way of avoiding conflict or being set off. Again it’s a protective response that attempts to manage or control interactions by shapeshifting to keep your ammunition from being set off. That’s exhausting!
b) You’re “not an angry person”. You rarely find yourself angry and automatically empathize with other people more than yourself.
You repress your emotions so deeply that you genuinely believe you don’t ever get angry. To not acknowledge your anger is to not acknowledge your pain. They’re connected.
Many spiritual types bypass their anger because it’s seen as unloving, unspiritual or anti-unity in some way. It goes against your “I’m a good loving person identity”.
It’s easier to see the validity of anger when it comes to physical pain. Imagine you get punched then think, “They had a really hard day, they normally aren’t like that”. You see that you contributed to their stress and upset so you apologize for setting them off.
Kind of crazy right? But this dynamic happens all of the time in smaller subtle emotional and psychological ways. You get hurt by something someone says, then you default to making them feel better without acknowledging your pain and anger. The anger is a healthy boundary protective response, “That’s not okay. Don’t do that again please. That hurt. I don’t like that. I won’t continue to take that. Are you okay with how you just treated me?” Anger points to our pain. It reveals what matters within us.
Anger is the assertive energy that advocates for yourself. Unexpressed anger is turned inward and feeds the inner critic that believes everything is your fault and feeds your cycle of shame.
But no energy is successfully repressed, which means that energy goes somewhere. It can manifest as stress and dysfunction in various forms from simple jaw clenching and tension in the shoulders to dis-eases in the body.
Many empaths have become so good at and used to pushing all of their emotions down they barely even notice it’s happening because they’re so externally focused. That’s the nature of repression, it’s unconscious. Their repression of anger serves as a conflict avoidance protection mechanism that simultaneously preserves their self-perception as a “good person”, “not an angry person” or sometimes a “spiritual person”.
Both types of people (quick to anger or "not angry") are in a lot of pain and don’t know how to get out so self-harming, addictive and self-sabotaging behaviour are common and natural solutions.
Self-harming often stems from numbness (disconnection from self) so it’s an attempt to feel something, an attempt to gain attention (crying out for help), or an attempt to gain control in their life (because they feel helpless).
Self-sabotage is actually self-protection. It’s the war between the Conscious Rational Adult and the Wounded Child / Protector Part. For example, you sabotage relationships that are actually good for you because your Wounded Child part doesn’t believe they deserve it.
Addictions in this case are solutions, temporary ways to get out of pain. Despite popular perception, they are actually resourceful strategies with the positive intent of survival.
3) How to heal / resolve neglect trauma
The following is not an exhaustive list of “how to heal” from this type of trauma, but rather some key points that I’ve noticed are common among all of my clients’ “healing process”.
I personally don’t resonate with the word heal because it is a loaded word with a lot of mixed meaning. To me, “healing trauma” is about “resolving” or ending a recurring pattern by facilitating its completion. It’s about facilitating the reconnection of the disconnected parts. Disconnection happens through judgment. We can also call this integration because it’s the process of bringing together that which has been dis-integrated through judgment which means, pushed away, or disowned.
The following are not steps that necessarily happen in order, but are rather aspects of the resolving trauma process that are all interconnected.
1) Ever notice that you can’t just tell someone or explain to them why they should stop judging themselves? Symptoms of trauma can’t be explained away. There’s something deeper at play. To resolve trauma and shame we have to work with the Wounded Child not the Conscious Rational Adult. It’s the Wounded Child that needs to have a realization that it’s not their fault, not the Conscious Rational Adult. That happens at an experiential level not the level of the rational mind.
For this, I facilitate an eyes-closed reconnection and conversation between the Conscious Rational Adult and the Wounded Child. How that looks is unique to everyone. We follow your subconscious mind to where it needs to go and facilitate changing your relationship with different parts of yourself so you’re out of resistance and judgment.
2) The Wounded Child is stuck alone, so what they need is the presence, curiosity and attention of an adult. That adult is you. This is the process of reparenting, inner-bonding or “inner-child work”: relating to different parts of you as if they are children and realizing how you have been rejecting different aspects of yourself based on your conditioning. I hold space for you to hold space for yourself. Part of the magic of resolving relational trauma is doing it in relationship. I’ve personally found it very helpful, if not necessary, for myself and others to have space held for them. Having space held for you and the conversation facilitated allows you to be fully present with yourself.
3) During this conversation, I support you to contextualize the Wounded Child’s experience. This has much less to do with me or you telling the child something, and more to do with the child having an experience of safety. It’s your presence, energy and attention that matters more than any words you can say to the child. The energy of safety and presence is what begins the unraveling / resolution of the emotions that previously had nowhere to go. In other words, they’re not told, “It’s okay, you’re allowed to feel what you feel”, that message is communicated through your presence alone.
4) You get to be the parent for yourself you never had. Interacting with the Wounded Child looks very different for everyone, but in general, we shift from judging our Wounded Child and their emotions to welcoming them. The emotions that you previously repressed or judged are more easily welcomed when you consciously relate to them as your Wounded Child. The validation of the child’s emotions happen naturally without words simply through your own presence.
5) The cycle of shame ends when the Wounded Child experientially realizes it’s not their fault. This goes hand in hand with the Adult realizing the addictive behaviour they’ve been shaming themselves for is actually a resourceful strategy with the positive intent of survival.
6) It’s important for the Adult and Wounded Child to understand what their emotions are actually trying to communicate. For example, anger is a healthy boundary mechanism. It’s meant to say, “I matter. That’s not okay. I have something worth saying. You’re in the wrong, not me.” It’s meant to delineate between self and other. Anger reverses internalization - the taking on of someone else’s reality.
7) Your Protector Part is relieved of its burden. It realized it no longer needs to be on guard in the way that it was. For instance, imagine you’re addicted to weed as a way of numbing yourself when you feel overwhelmed, anxious or uncomfortable. Rather than need to label that behaviour as bad and need to discipline yourself to stop, the behaviour naturally subsides when it’s not something you’re in resistance to or in judgment of. It’s a behaviour you can partake in, but the way that you partake in it changes from a reactive need (coping mechanism) to a conscious choice or desire. When you resolve the trauma driving the addiction, you can engage in the same behaviour with a different intention. Most people also find, as they work through their pain and other suppressed emotions, their addictions loses it’s hold because they no longer need a short-term coping mechanism to deal with uncomfortable sensations in their body.
8) We dissolve any residual resistance or judgment that gets in the way of your connection with yourself. This is part of the “intuitive empathic healing” aspect of the process. Certain words you speak will have more emotional weight to them than others. I sense and identify those resonant words which allows us to go deeper. These resonant words are different for everyone as they relate to your personal experience. Since we’re resolving the emotional root of long-standing patterns, it’s this honing in on the emotional resonance of your unique experience that can save years in therapy. Within the multi-layered complexity of your experience, it’s as if your subconscious is our guide when we hone in on those words, feelings and stories with emotional weight. In this sense, we’re not “talking through your problems” , we're directly and quickly getting to the bottom of your presenting symptoms to resolve their emotional root once and for all.
9) You learn to have just as much empathy and compassion for yourself as you do for other people. In order to do this, gaining distance and perspective, to see yourself from the outside is is very helpful. You learn to value yourself and your needs and feelings as equal to others rather than habitually maximizing other people's needs while minimizing your own.