Childhood Emotional Neglect Therapy
For the child who learned to be low maintenance
Were you praised as a kid for being low maintenance? Did people comment from an early age about “what an adult you are?”
Every child wants safety and love above all else. If your parents were busy, self-absorbed, or narcissistic you likely learned early on that being easy and agreeable was the best course of action.
Learning to Put Others First
This came from both negative and positive feedback. If you had needs, as every child does, your parents probably made you feel like you were being a burden. They gave scorn or withheld love from you. This felt crushing.
And then when you did things to make their life easier, you got praise and positive attention. Not a lot of it of course, but the tiny amount felt so much better than the alternative. In this way they unintentionally trained you.
The parents express their needs —> the child learns to take care of the needs.
If the child tried to do something for themselves, they were reminded that others had to come first.
How Childhood Follows Us Into Adulthood
When you enter into adulthood you don’t just abandon your childhood view of the world. Doing things for yourself feels wrong, so you feel guilty when you do. Doing things for others, pleasing them, seems more like your role. Seems more like the safe path.
And so you may be drawn to people who want to be served and taken care of. People who may take advantage of you. People who may never stay happy.
You may have difficulty even identifying who is the ‘real me’ and what your needs and desires are outside of relationships. The you that gets approved of becomes the you you give the world.
The Voice Inside Your Head
What the adults closest to you say in childhood becomes what you say to yourself later. Your outer monologue becomes your inner monologue. Long after you are living with your parents, maybe even long after they die, their words still ring in your head because they’ve become your own.
Compliments may get denied or avoided, because they don’t line up with this artificially created vision you have of yourself.
How Therapy Can Help
Undoing this training takes hard work but it can be done. It involves setting boundaries: whether with your parents, other relationships that follow this same pattern, or even yourself in your mind.
It involves repeating the unnatural message over and over of:
“I am deserving of taking up space. People who don’t give me safety because I am not being low maintenance aren’t people that deserve to be in my life.”
In therapy we first identify the adaptations that occured do to child you’s innocent attempt to find love and safety. This knowledge can be used to help understand the actions you took in adulthood. And from there we can work out how to think and act in ways that no longer sabotage you.
I offer childhood emotional neglect therapy in Rochester, NY, as well as online therapy for clients throughout New York, Colorado, and Utah.