CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Childhood emotional neglect can shape how someone trusts others and how they give and receive love as an adult. But that can be changed.
5 Ways Childhood Emotional Neglect Can Make You Feel Unloved
Why love can feel out of reach when your feelings were ignored in childhood.
Key points
- Hiding your feelings as a child can lead to emotional walls in adulthood.
- Rejecting or mistrusting emotions may make love feel distant or unsafe.
- Fear of vulnerability may prevent the close connections you deserve.
Here is a fact that may surprise you. When you grow up in a family that ignores, devalues, or eclipses your feelings, it can damage your ability to feel loved as an adult.
I have seen it over and over and over again in my therapy office as I work with folks who grew up in emotionally neglectful families.
I see good, loving people with a lot to offer and much about them to love who are incapable of fully accepting and experiencing the love that naturally comes their way.
Childhood emotional neglect is, in fact, the silent killer of love. It undermines the feeling of love in a family in myriad invisible but powerful ways.
It raises children who are emotionally restrained and disconnected from themselves and held back from becoming who they’re meant to be.
Growing up with your feelings ignored requires you, as a young child, to develop some special skills.
You must learn how to hide your emotions—the deepest, most personal, biological expression of who you are—from your family.
Pretending you don’t have feelings is like pretending you have no right arm. To make them invisible, you must make sure you do not have them.
And this comes at a great cost to you.
So, perfectly lovable people walk the Earth feeling unloved, and people drag their emotionally neglected spouses to couples therapy because they feel shut out. And none of it is OK.
5 Ways Childhood Emotional Neglect Makes It Hard to Feel Loved as an Adult
1. You didn’t experience enough deep and personalized love as a child.
All children have a basic need to feel seen, known, and loved for who they really are. In an emotionally neglectful family, living under the “Hold your feelings back” mandate, you are forced to hide this key part of yourself.
How can you feel a depth of meaningful love from your family when the deepest, most meaningful part of you is never seen?
So you may grow up knowing that your parents love you, but not feeling truly loved.
Since the love we receive as children sets up our expectations for love as adults, you are now set up with a lowered ability to absorb and feel love.
Having experienced a watered-down version of love from the people who were supposed to love you the most, it is all you know.
2. You are walled off from love.
As a child, you had to harden yourself against your own natural need to feel loved.
Above, I said: “All children have a basic need to feel seen, known, and loved for who they really are.” All children also need emotional validation and nurturance from their parents.
As a child, you naturally looked to your parents, over and over again, for those things. And, as a child, over and over again, you were disappointed.
Eventually, you learned that there was no water in the well and stopped seeking it. You walled yourself off from your need for validation and love.
Where is your wall now? You still have it. And it is blocking you off from the genuine love coming your way.
3. You don’t trust feelings in general, and that includes the feeling of love.
When your parents discouraged your emotions, they inadvertently taught you some false lessons about emotions.
They taught you that emotions, in general, are useless burdens that are best avoided. Now, as an adult, it’s difficult for you to believe that feelings, including love, have value.
Some part of you automatically rejects the love that comes your way.
4. Disconnected from your emotions, it’s hard to feel your feelings, in general.
Your solution as a child was to wall off your feelings as best you could.
This is the reason so many adults who grew up with childhood emotional neglect experience a sense of emptiness or numbness: their feelings are still blocked off.
When it comes to blocking our feelings, we cannot pick and choose.
Unfortunately, out the door goes your anger, happiness, joy, and pain, and along with it goes your love. All of these feelings are sitting on the other side of your wall waiting for you to accept and acknowledge them.
5. You have a fear of vulnerability.
To love is to be vulnerable; there is no way around it. When you don’t quite trust feelings in general, and you are not accustomed to being seen, validated, and known, love can feel more like a challenge than a gift. It’s scary.
You may hold back parts of yourself, fearing that if people see the real you, they will not like what they see. Or they will leave.
Perhaps you see rejection lurking around every corner. Perhaps you are afraid to initiate friendships or activities because you fear that doing so may be burdening the other person or chasing them away.
Fear of vulnerability may be holding you back from the satisfying connections you deserve.
The Solution
One thing I have learned from working with hundreds of emotionally neglected people is that it is never too late to change and heal.
All of the ways that childhood emotional neglect happened to you as a child can be reversed by you, an adult.
You may have spent years believing that something was wrong with you, when in reality, something important was missing from your childhood.
The obstacles you face in feeling loved today do not reflect your actual worth, your potential, or your capacity to connect. They are simply the long-term effects of growing up unseen and emotionally unsupported.
When you begin to understand how these early experiences shaped you, something powerful happens.
You stop personalizing the emptiness. You stop blaming yourself for the walls or the discomfort with closeness. You begin to see that you were not broken. You were adapting.
And the skills you needed as a child are not the ones you need now.
Healing begins when you allow yourself to turn toward your feelings rather than away from them.
When you start treating your emotional world as valid, important, and worthy of attention.
When you gently take down the wall that once protected you but now keeps you separate from the love you should naturally have.
As an adult, you can give yourself what you did not receive.
You can learn to recognize your own emotions, trust them, and let them guide you.
You can open yourself to the experience of being known. You can let love feel real.
This is not instant work. It is steady, thoughtful, and intentional.
But every step you take brings you closer to the connection you’ve deserved all along
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