For whatever reason, there are people who were emotionally neglected in their childhood.

Most of us are not even aware that we were emotionally neglected and live with this hurt. I know I did for so long without even realizing.

Even though unconscious, this emotional hurt and trauma play major roles in our lives and decisions.

Check the following symptoms to see if you are still hurting. From there, you can find most suitable ways for immediate healing.

10 Symptoms that You Were Emotionally Neglected as a Child and Still Need Healing:

1. You lack self-discipline and are scared to stand for yourself. You let others believe that you are wrong instead of defending your stance and telling them the truth.

2. You feel something is missing in your life but don’t know what is it that could make you whole. You know you need love but could not coherently speak about it because, in the first place, you don’t know what real love is.

3. You are a very independent person and may even take pride for it. Asking others for help is not your cup of tea and you don’t even feel comfortable working with other people.

4. You would rather be alone than with others because you find problems in fitting in. As a result, you keep a space between you and other people.

5. You feel sad, unhappy or depress from time to time without apparent reason. Not knowing what makes you unhappy frustrates you more than anything else.

6. You don’t share your feelings with anyone for the fear of being misunderstood. Because you choose to keep your emotions inside you, you fail to recognize some of your feelings.

7. No matter how much you try to be compassionate with your loved ones, you lack the ability to do so because of your own pent-up emotions inside you. You feel bad and end up criticizing yourself for the lack of your own understanding.

8. You are overly sensitive with your dealings with others and easily feel embarrassed or ashamed. What is normal for others is a disaster to you, feeling embarrassed in funny situations and getting upset with the smallest things.

9. You establish a strong connection with animals because you feel they’re the only creatures who never judge nor stop loving you. Hence, you spend time connecting with them than you do with humans.

10. You have a low self-confidence and low self-esteem because you keep on thinking how your parents neglected your emotional needs in your childhood. You fail to see the fact that in order to grow and heal, you have to acknowledge every emotion that you feel.

How to Heal From Emotional Neglect:

If you were emotionally neglected, we know that the experience was not easy because of the trauma going through it created. However, as difficult as it may seem, accepting that it happens and embracing it fully is the first step to healing.

You are no longer a child who depends at the mercy of your caretakers. The rein to your emotions is already in your hands and you hold the power to either move forward or sway to other directions.

What most people do that feels incredibly right, but it’s actually terribly wrong:

1. They try to find relationships where people will give them the things they didn’t get from their parents.

2. They attach themselves to people who remind them of their parents and try to fix them as way of vicariously repairing their damaged parents.

3. They invest too much energy trying to actually change and fix their parents so they will give them now what they needed when they were young.

These are 3 ways of trying to cope with emotional neglect, but none of them truly heals the individual who is hurting.

Instead, these are ways of running away from dealing with what happened in the past and trying to change it.

There is no better way to follow than the road to healing and freedom.

Here what you can do to start healing your emotional self:

– The first step is acknowledging the hurt and the emotional neglect.

– The second step is to stop trying to change or refraim the past but, instead, confronting the totality of our painful experiences. That is the only way to gain mastery over the past.

This allows us to objectively revisit what happened so that we can reassess it from a more mature and objective vantage point.

– The third step is to go through these painful memories from your childhood again and again until you stop feeling distress.

It’s time that you reconnect with your emotions, deal with them and get yourself back to being whole.

References:
– https://www.consciousreminder.com/2017/10/12/10-signs-showing-neglected-child/;
– https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culturally-speaking/201303/overcoming-the-pain-childhood-abuse-and-neglect;