My introduction to "emotional neglect"

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks to otter for sharing this video the other day: Emotional Neglect: Healing from the Hidden Trauma of What Didn't Happen

I got around to watching it and it hit me so hard I needed to write this huge long thing about it. It's mostly transcript of the parts of the video that I wanted to make a note of, because it's not very accessible to me otherwise. But my thoughts are sprinkled around the block quotes of course.

Emotional Neglect

I think it's very common for people to start watching videos or reading content or in any way exposing themselves to information about trauma or attachment styles or whatever it is and go yeah I see myself in the symptoms of these things but there's nothing I can point to in my childhood that was overtly traumatic there's nothing that happened to me that I can really look at and go “yeah that's the reason why I have all of these challenges”…

I’m already nodding along. I used to be envious of trans people for having such an obvious Thing they could point to that made them miserable.

In a nutshell, if we experienced early emotional neglect we were not taught to make proper sense of the relationship between our inner world and the outer world. Whereas trauma disrupts our systems of meaning-making, emotional neglect can interfere with our ability to form systems of meaning and to form coherent understandings of how the world works and what information it's important for us to be paying attention to and emotionally investing ourselves in.

When we are children, we learn about emotional regulation through social referencing: so, something happens that maybe shocks or scares us, maybe we're watching a scary movie, and we look around and we kind of check “is everybody else freaked out or are my caregivers looking calm?” And then we learn how how to, with increasing complexity, categorize our own inner experiences based on how the people around us are responding to the same stimuli: so if I feel really scared and then I look around and notice everyone else is just chatting and eating popcorn, I'm going to learn something along the lines of when something scary happens but it's on the TV I'm probably safe. When we have social referencing in our environment that does not properly map on to our inner states, this gets very confusing.

She gives an example where someone had an immediate family member die, saying “nobody made that experience matter” – the adults in this child’s life were calm or making jokes or acting like it didn’t matter, they weren’t giving this child a way to understand their feelings of loss or grief or whatever – leading the child to internalize that their intense feelings are wrong because they don’t match what this kid sees in the people around them. She contrasts this with a healthy caregiving environment where it's the role of the adults to see the child's inner world and to help them associate their inner emotions with what’s happening in their environment, to teach them that for example it’s normal to feel bad when a loved one dies or whatever.

It happens more often and on much subtler levels than just family members dying: maybe a child had a difficult interaction at school but when they tell their parent about it the parent doesn't seem to have any significant reaction, so the child figures okay my feelings were hurt when that kid said that mean thing to me about how I look or how I act but I must just be too sensitive or it must be wrong for me to have this response of being upset.

Here my first thought about the time when I was in college and my dad asked how my week had been and I said “Pretty bad” and took a breath to prepare myself to explain “my boyfriend broke up with me this week” – my first real boyfriend, the first love of my life… and as I took that breath my dad said, “Did you get your W-2 yet?” A W-2 is a form you need before you can file your taxes. This was February; I had a couple months yet before taxes were due, but since new year my parents had brought this up all the time; they were so concerned that I hadn’t yet gotten my tax forms for my part-time job -- also a new thing for me, so it was the first time I had to worry about this as well.

So yeah. I didn't need convincing; just from the title of this video alone I was like oh, yeah, this sounds like me. I've struggled a lot to explain my parents because most people are used to good parents being involved and supportive no matter what, or bad parents being selfish or irresponsible or cruel or whatever and mine are...truly the secret third thing. Which this video is giving me more language to describe than I've usually had.

Emotions Draw Our Attention to What Matters to Us

And then what happens is we start to develop shame-bound emotions. When our emotions become shame-bound, we start to believe that there are things we can feel that are wrong and that we ought not to feel and this can lead to a whole host of emotional dysregulation issues when we believe that the emotions we are feeling are not connected in a way that makes sense to our external environment.

Our emotions are there to draw our attention to what matters most to us in life. Emotions are incredibly important pieces of information about what is happening in our environment and how our body is responding; what matters to us in life and what we ought to be paying attention to. If we ignore this we are robbing ourselves of the ability to make good decisions, to stay aligned with what matters. And we are also likely to be missing very significant pieces of information that are necessary for processing the world in a logical and coherent way.

If we have learned to dissociate from our emotions and tell ourselves it's not important to pay attention to them, what we are going to find is that it's really difficult for us to feel as though our lives have a deep sense of meaning. Because maybe we'll end up following all of these formulas that are set out by other people or by Society for what leads to a good life without ever really checking in on “does this fit for me, do I feel aligned with these things, is this what I want out of my life.”

I was incredibly bad at this when I was younger, but also all the times I did try to be led by my emotions didn’t work out: I felt overwhelmed by the idea of going straight to college after high school and I didn’t really want to, I wanted to just get some menial job and let myself grow up a little bit more, but that wasn’t really a possibility because of the logistical difficulties with me getting to and from any job but also my parents and everyone put such pressure on me because I was “smart” (academically successful in an unchallenging environment). And then I felt like I had to derail all the expectations for my life to go visit Andrew the first time, but succeeding in doing that just left me with another set of incredibly strong feelings from someone else about what I should do, and now this one was in conflict with my parents’ one, and I couldn’t make everyone happy even if I wanted to. I had read and watched enough stories so I knew the answer to my problem was supposed to be “you can’t please everyone so you should please yourself” but I did not know how to do that. I didn’t need convincing of the truth or value of being led by my own desires, I just didn’t know how to act on that because I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know how to find out what I wanted.

I even remember writing about this, in the LiveJournal that’s now documented here. It’s not often I link to entries from times like 2005! (I cringe at so much of my 20s...) But here’s all this stuff that the emotional neglect video is talking about: difficulty with all kinds of decisions... And at this point I’d just decided to go back to Andrew and to being engaged and getting married. I was setting my life on the course it’s in many ways still on, and certainly setting myself up for more of pleasing someone else. And that got me divorced at 40 with a whole bunch of weird hang-ups.

Shame, and Phobia of Inner Experiences

Toxic shame is this belief that "something about me is fundamentally broken, flawed or wrong, and that if anyone got close enough to me they would see that." Toxic shame often develops as a product of emotional neglect because children experience shame when they put out bids for connection and have them rejected, or when there is some sort of rupture that goes unrepaired with their caregiver. Shame is the emotion that comes online to tell us what is likely to get us rejected from our environment, and so if simply being ourselves and displaying our emotions to our caregivers leads to chronic rejection we are going to feel chronic shame, which is going to bleed into the belief that there is something just fundamentally wrong with me. The belief that the very core of who I am is shameful and needs to be hidden from others leads to a whole host of other challenges.

Yeah. One of the most helpful things that D has told me is that it’s hard for him when I end up pre-emptively apologizing for myself or act as if I’m going to be “too much.” It had never occurred to me before that how annoying, upsetting, or disruptive that could be to someone else! I still feel like I’m too much, so much of the time, but now at least I try to think about how that feels to other people and I think that does mitigate some of it.

Having a phobia of inner experiences is essentially the idea that there are certain emotional states we have absolutely no idea how to self-regulate around, so our body naturally tries to redirect us from them any time we get close to them. However, once again, all emotions are really important as pieces of information, so if we have a phobia around the experience of anger we're going to be missing out on really important pieces of information about where we need to set boundaries. If I don't know how to process sadness, maybe any time my system begins to feel that emotion of sadness – because it starts as a sensation in the body – my mind immediately finds something to distract me with and all of a sudden I don't know why I just can't pay attention to what I was doing or what I was thinking about and I need to be online looking at something or researching something that is changing my emotional state. I've flipped into a flight response. This can go for any emotion that we failed to learn to regulate as children it can become a kind of psychological no-go area in our minds.

I've been thinking a lot about which inner experiences I might usefully think about having a phobia of.

Existential Loneliness

The next thing we might see as a product of early emotional neglect is this sense of what I call existential loneliness – not just that there's nobody in my life right now who sees and understands me which is kind of how we perceive loneliness in general. Existential loneliness is this kind of feeling that it's impossible for us to be seen and known, period, because we didn't have that early mirroring when we needed it most and when we were developing our sense of self. So our sense of self may have developed largely in isolation and we might not have any idea that it's possible for other people to see and know us deeply. That might be a very strong felt sense that we have. To complicate this, if we do not know ourselves completely because there are psychological no-go areas that we've developed defensively through that phobia of inner experience now it's going to feel very true to us that we can't properly be seen or known because we do not properly see and know ourselves in our entirety and other people can only meet us as deeply as we have met ourselves.

This is the one I do have experience of articulating: it's really important to me to feel Known and Seen because that didn't happen in my childhood and as we know still isn't really happening from my parents/extended family.

One of the most profound shifts that has happened for me as I've been on this journey of attachment work is going from a sense of existential loneliness to the deep profound belief in my body that I can be known. By developing intimacy, first with myself, and uncovering all of those no-go areas in my psyche, it became possible for me to communicate myself to other people in a way that I once thought was absolutely impossible. It wasn't a conscious belief I had, it was just a feeling in my body: that feeling of deep existential aloneness. And this feeling can be changed. The more literacy we gain around ourselves and our own emotions the more we learn how to connect with other people, and those connections are the things that make our lives feel meaningful, so this stuff is so important.

This is really good to hear. Because again it isn't a conscious belief in me, but it might well still be a feeling in my body. It was there the whole time I was growing up, and almost all the time I was married (I sometimes thought I was more known or seen in the relationships outside my marriage, but I now wonder how much of that was wishful thinking).

Unconscious Self-Abandonment

Another problem we might encounter if we've experienced early emotional neglect is chronic unconscious self-abandonment: abandoning what we want for ourselves in an authentic way in favor of staying in connection with another person. There are small instances where this isn't a big deal right: you want to get sushi your friend wants to get Indian you go for Indian tonight. But when we are doing this chronically and unconsciously, it tends to be very alienating. Often we will do this because we have no idea that we can bring our authentic selves into connection. We may have internalized if we have that toxic shame belief the only way to be in connection with others is to figure out what they want and present myself as though I want that too, or to act as though I am this absolutely perfect and ideal human being so that they can find no fault with me.

I am in this paragraph and I don’t like it. I struggle with perfectionism and with just slipping into other people’s stronger opinions or more obvious (to me) needs or more easily-met needs, or whatever. I think this was a downside of ending up with so many autistic partners in my 20s and 30s; it was so easy to just be subsumed in their intensity about almost everything, and to make myself useful by filling in the gaps where stuff was hard for them still had to happen. And there is genuine upside there too of course – I love an infodump! I loved how strongly they held their convictions about justice! - it’s not like I was suffering in silence, but in hindsight it was such a trap for me because there was just no way out. There was intense emotion for me to be led by - without either me or they necessarily wanting that to be what was happening - and then all the other stuff: gender roles, the societal ableism that autistic people face, my genuine desire to help address that, even when it meant grinding myself into dust because I was always getting this message that everything was easier for me as a neurotypical person than it was for them in all these ways that they struggled… My own struggles weren’t absent, they were just invisible. My partners didn't see them so I didn't see them reflected to me in the intense feelings of theirs that I was being led by. So of course my partners weren’t seeing me, because they couldn't see those parts of me. I didn’t really understand this vicious circle myself until I was out of it. At the time I just buried my bad feelings and felt like a failure for feeling them – they all felt negative: resentment, selfishness, petulance…

For a lot of people who experienced early emotional neglect and internalize that belief," sharing any of my feelings or inner world is going to lead to rejection," self-abandonment is not even something we consciously think of, it's just something we automatically do. It's what we unconsciously believe is the price we have to pay to get any form of connection even if it's entirely superficial.

Yes. Exactly.

Sensitivity to Rejection

Very common with people who've experienced emotional neglect is: criticism hits incredibly hard and you might feel highly highly defensive to even the smallest hints from other people that you're not doing something perfectly. To integrate feedback back without having our defenses online, we need to know that we are being seen as whole people by the people who are giving us that feedback. So again if we have that belief I need to behave perfectly in order to stay in connection someone giving us any form of negative feedback is probably going to be processed by our system as you don't want to be in connection with with me at all and everything about me is wrong when in reality someone might really like 99% of us and just have one thing that they want to chat with us about because it's getting in the way of them being able to connect with us properly. The reason you might feel so defensive when this happens is because you're used to the cost of mistakes being really high if your only route to connection when you were young was behaving perfectly, so your body might go on high alert... You equate criticism with them writing you off entirely, so of course you're going to push back against it and try to make it not true instead of sitting with it and integrating it.

I first understood this as RSD, rejection sensitive disorder, but I also learned it as only happening in people with ADHD, which I don't appear to have, so that was frustrating. Other people got to have a label, a way to understand themselves, but I apparently couldn't even do rejection right?

But yeah. I used to explain this as a feature of my "gifted" academic status: not being challenged in school gave me little or no practice at getting criticized or being bad at things, and I thought that was enough to explain this, so tying it to this existential loneliness is really interesting to me.

As we work through that early emotional neglect and we learn to share ourselves more completely with others, criticism is going to start looking less scary to us because we know that people also see our strengths and our vulnerabilities. They're not rejecting us on the whole when they give us feedback – in a lot of cases they're actually trying to help, but once again this is the opposite of how we're going to process this if we are dealing with significant emotional neglect that we have not yet started to work on.

Well that sounds good! It still feels kinda impossible, but yeah it'd be fun to get to feel like that!

Using Emotions to Connect Your Inner World to the Outer World

Something you're likely to struggle with if you had early emotional neglect is trouble with the relationship between your subjective inner world and the objective outer world, and understanding both how you impact the world around you and how your environment impacts you. There's just an inadequate amount of feedback between our inner worlds and our outer worlds because we haven't been taught how to manage the connection between those two things. So if I'm feeling something strong in my body but I don't see a very obvious and overt reason in my external environment why I might be feeling that, instead of getting really attuned to my environment and trying to figure out where might this be coming from, what subtle things might be kind of adding up in the background of my life that are culminating in this emotional experience that I'm having. When we're not attuned to [our inner world and our outer world], if we don't see a super overt reason in our outer world why we're maybe upset we're just going to go I'm crazy, there is no cause for my being upset I'm just being my irrational self again so that experience gets covered up by shame, and the information that whatever feeling we were having is trying to give us goes underground and we don't process it.

I added that link there to something that I read months ago and have thought about a lot. As someone with such poor understanding and identification of many of my own feelings, reading about how differently someone can react to their emotions makes me feel like I’m reading about an alien planet:

I conceive of my own emotional landscape a bit like a map or a painting… I’ll usually see a map made up of various colours: emotions of different hues (anger! Sadness! Worry!), intensities (the more vivid the colour, the stronger the emotion), sizes (big worries take up more visual space than small ones, of course), and distances relative to me (some sadness hovers in the background from weeks ago, and looks distinctly different to the vivid, raw unhappiness of right now). If someone asks me ‘how do you feel?’ there is never one single emotion – there’s a map painted in many colours, of different hues and intensities. My emotional palette has become more detailed and complex over the years. Either that, or I’ve just become better at using it. Identifying and articulating the subtle differences between similar feelings, say, embarrassment and humiliation.

I literally cannot relate.

Maybe as we dabble each blob of paint on a new emotional picture, we become familiar with the colours and start seeing subtle differences in tone. The light yellow of excitement for a trip to a theme park is now distinguishable from the slightly more orange thrill that represents a trip to watch your partner perform on stage for the very first time. The hues are not exactly the same, and each one contributes differently to the overall emotional picture you’d paint as you wake up with butterflies in your stomach on the morning of whichever event... If the ‘colour’ analogy’s not grabbing you, you might prefer to think in terms of pixels. As a child I saw in 8-bit, and now we’re in standard definition. God help the people around me when I’m sixty and I’ve made it to HD: it already takes ages to paint an emotional picture these days because I’m so used to zooming in on complexity. If someone asks ‘how are you?’ and wants an honest answer, I feel like I’m lying by omission if my response doesn’t run into paragraphs.

I spend so much time doing this sort of thing that when someone asks me a sincere question about the way I feel, I want to give as accurate a representation of my feelings as possible… I do think most people could benefit from spending a bit more time exploring their feelings. Identifying and articulating your emotions is a skill. It’s a useful one, and it’s one most people can learn if they have the time, space and inclination. If you find yourself frequently unable to put your finger on why you feel good or bad in this exact moment, as always I recommend picking up a diary (or writing notes in your phone or on your laptop) and having a go at exploring your emotional landscape. Paint your pictures. Write how you feel (or make voice notes). Get used to spending time with your anger or your sadness (or, more fun: your love or lust!) and really dive into the specifics. Why do I feel this way? How intense is the feeling? For how long have I had it? What is causing it? Do I even know? Which other feelings are associated with it? Are there other points in the past where a similar feeling (or colourful map of mixed feelings) has cropped up? I think this self-knowledge can be powerful, and practicing it can help you to know yourself better, as well as articulate your needs and desires to the people who love you.

and it’s emphasised in her conclusion:

Emotional maturity, intelligence, whatever you want to call it: the ability to recognise and articulate our own emotions. That is a skill. One we can be taught from an early age, for sure, or one that’s sometimes crushed out of us by rigid policing of who is and isn’t allowed to openly feel. But it’s a skill nonetheless, and it’s worth spending time on. You’re allowed to spend time on it. For yourself, of course, because understanding yourself better is a gift in its own right, but also for the people around you. Because I think – your mileage may vary – that the best way to love someone starts with understanding their emotional landscape.

I’ve heard it called emotional literacy, and I like that better than the metaphors about maturity (ugh) or intelligence (remember the EQ equivalent to IQ? double ugh). It makes it clear that it’s a skill, not something innate or inevitable but something that can be learned and that people are going to have different degrees of competence and enjoyment of. GOTN is over here painting high-def masterpieces, I feel like I have about 7 crayons. But hey, it’s all good; just like with art I could learn more than I currently know.

This piece has a sequel, specifically about emotions in people you have close relationships with.

when I ask people I love how they feel, I’m hoping that they’ll be able to give me an insight into the detail. After all, that’s a large part of what friendship and intimacy means to me: stepping inside someone’s head and understanding the complexities of their emotional landscape. Getting them to paint me a picture, or a map, of their emotional state, so I can understand how best to be a friend to them in that moment.

One of the headings of that post sums it up well: If you tell me how you feel, I can love you better.

So anyway, back to the video.

When we have significant impairments in our emotional processing, we aren't doing enough checking between our inner and outer world. When we have healthy secure attachment systems we're frequently sharing our inner world with other people and getting feedback on it, and then we use that feedback from other people to update our inner world of feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And this happens continuously in a never-ending way for the entirety of our lives.

But when we have learned that our emotional world and our outer world shouldn't or don't or can't interact in a meaningful way, we can experience really big disconnects between how we're feeling or thinking and making sense of the world and the way that the world actually is.

So when it comes to healing from emotional neglect, what we're trying to do is get to a place where we are doing more reality checking on a more frequent basis, where our inner and outer world are interacting with each other more frequently and in a less distorted way.

Healing from emotional neglect can be an insidious task because the thing that we need to heal from it, mentorship from our environment, is the very thing that emotional neglect tends to tell us is useless or impossible for us. But healing from emotional neglect is the process of making our own feelings, including our own pain. matter because we need those feelings to navigate the world in a way that makes sense and we are probably going to need a lot of help getting to the place where we understand what value to give which emotions.

I don't think it's useless but I do sorta feel like it's impossible for me. So yes I probably am going to need a lot of help on this, but I’ve had some help with it already – largely from found family and by journaling for...gosh it'll be 24 years soon – for which I am grateful.

But I’ve written just short of five thousand words so that’s plenty for now.