When I was growing up, the saying was, “kids should be seen and not heard.”
One day, I was on social media, someone posted a meme that talked about how in the 80’s kids weren’t watched by their parents. They either roamed the streets or stayed home by themselves being baby-sat by television and movies. So many people chimed in and talked about how they were always alone.
Emotional Neglect isn’t just about being left alone. It’s about your emotions not being recognized, nurtured or ignored. In some families, it can be an unspoken code of conduct that you don’t acknowledge, discuss or show your emotions, unless they are considered acceptable, such as joy or appreciation.
From a gender cultural standpoint, young boys are often raised to suppress most of their emotions. Young boys can experience a negative response to expressing hurt through tears or complaints. They are usually admonished or told to “stop acting like a girl”.
Possibly, the only emotion that is universally accepted for boys and men is anger or aggression. But, not rage. There is a boundary they are still not permitted to cross when showing their emotions. This leads to suppression.
Young girls are much more likely to experience having their emotions soothed when they are upset, but even they experience a form of emotional suppression based on gender. Girls and women are steered away from expressing anger or to be stand-offish. Instead, they are expected to be happy and inviting at all times even in situations where they have every right to be angry or fearful. It can lead to fight, flight or fawn in dangerous situations.
Both lead to emotional self-abandonment. It becomes safer to not feel these emotions and so they become suppressed or walled off. As a child grows older, eventually they don’t even recognize when they feel them.
Suppressed emotions don’t go away. They brew beneath the surface and present themselves in other ways. Or, they wait until a person is already upset to explode like volcanoes and spew years of pent-up frustration. They are triggered by whatever resembles dismissal or neglect.
We think we leave it in childhood, but progressive evidence shows that childhood sets the tone for how we will handle relationships and challenges into adulthood. If it goes unchecked or beneath awareness, Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) affects how we operate in relationships, the workplace and how we approach life.
When a child feels as if their feelings don’t matter and they stop experiencing them, they never discover the depths of who they are or what they want. They can become people-pleasers. They can become co-dependent, where they feel like they are responsible for fixing others and catering to their needs. They can become unable to make life decisions because they don’t clearly know themselves or what would make them happy.
The most difficult place to have little awareness of who you are is in a relationship, because a relationship demands authenticity to create emotional intimacy. You can’t easily create emotional intimacy if you can’t even tap into your own emotions. You can’t share what you don’t recognize. Also, you will interpret your partner’s emotions through your own lens while your idea is that emotions are bad and need to be suppressed. You may find yourself trying to control their emotions how you control your own.
You could also become a people-pleaser which means you deny your feelings to avoid emotional abandonment. Whatever coping mechanism used, eventually the relationship will face either trouble or resignation when one or both people can’t experience emotional intimacy. One or both will experience resentment for shutting down their emotions to maintain the relationship.
Being raised not to talk about how you feel will not serve you in a relationship.
It can also affect you in the workplace. You may be the person who thinks you can’t say no, so you accept every project you are asked to take on. You never speak up for a promotion or ask for recognition because that would expose your feelings. You may give advice or help all your fellow co-workers, which could be good with boundaries, but you won’t speak up if someone is using you. This leads to burnout and lowered job satisfaction until you end up searching for job after job only to bring the same to each job.
Lastly, it can show up in how you raise your own children. You may cause them to suppress their emotions because you demonstrate that you can’t handle them. And, when they cry, instead of comforting them and discussing their feelings, you threaten to “give them something to cry about”, and punish them for having feelings.
This past election, what I saw in a lot of people, are people who have suppressed emotions. Each trying to have their hurt heard, but shutting themselves down until they lash out at one another. Perhaps we are a nation of children who weren’t allowed to cry.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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