When Love is Not Enough Growing Up

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.” - Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

Growing up, we may have had parents who were present. They were caring. They provided material comfort. They were consistent.

Yet we grew up with a sense that something was off. Something never quite felt right beyond the appearance of everything being fine. 

We then become adults who feel disconnected from ourselves. We don’t know who we are or what we want. 

There is an emptiness inside of us that we keep trying to fill - with the next achievement or with food or alcohol or validation from other people. Yet nothing fills that hole, that emptiness or numbness inside of us. 

Spending time with our family can feel confusing, or be done out of guilt. Even though everything looks fine on the surface, there is a sense of distance, or fakeness or the feeling that we can’t be fully ourselves with them.

Yet everything was fine growing up. Nothing bad happened. Others had it so much worse. So it must be my fault, we conclude. There must be something wrong with me. Why can’t I just be happy? Why do I feel so empty all the time?

It’s not always about what happened. It can also be about what DIDN’T happen. 

What didn’t happen is that your internal village of emotions, needs and thoughts wasn’t taken into account enough.

Being loved and cared for growing up is essential. And we also need to feel seen, to have our inner world or village reflected back to us. 

One of the roles of a parent is to help their child get to know their own village, to help them understand and mirror back to them their emotions and needs - their internal world. 

Yet it is very difficult for a parent to provide this, if they didn’t experience it themselves growing up, or if they were overwhelmed with parenting, grieving, depressed, or struggling with another child who needed more attention. 

This isn’t about blaming parents - it is about understanding and bringing compassion to ourselves that it is difficult to really see and understand ourselves if this didn’t happen to us growing up.

How were emotions dealt with in your family? Were they talked about in a healthy way? Were all emotions welcomed, even more difficult ones, like anger or sadness? Or were they ignored, or played down or invalidated? Perhaps only certain emotions might have been allowed, like happiness - but there was no room for more vulnerable emotions like sadness. Or maybe emotions weren’t really shown, or talked about. You were never asked about how you felt or what you wanted or needed. Perhaps there was a need to keep up appearances that meant avoiding conflict or showing anything ‘real’ or vulnerable.

You might have heard things like:

There’s nothing to be upset about.

Boys don’t cry. 

Suck it up.

You think that’s bad, other kids have it worse. 

Don’t be sad. Count your blessings. 

There’s no room for anger in this home. 

I don’t like seeing you like this. Cheer up. 

And because emotions are such an important part of us as humans, we might have concluded that WE don’t really exist, that WE don’t really matter, that WE are not interesting. Because we were not really understood on a deeper level, WE don’t really understand ourselves as adults. Because we weren’t really held and told it’s OK to feel what we are feeling, that all emotions pass, and that it’s OK to be feeling this way - we now don’t know how to hold ourselves as adults.

We may feel numb and disconnected from ourselves and like we are too much and not enough all at once. 

This is the result of emotional neglect.

As Dr Jonice Webb writes: 

“Emotionally neglectful parents may be loving and well-intentioned but they still, perhaps through no fault of their own, fail to notice your feelings and respond to them enough. And by failing you in this way, emotionally neglectful parents fail to teach you the emotion skills you will need for your lifetime. 

Now, as an adult looking back, you may readily recall all that your parents gave you, but it is far more difficult to see the vital ingredients they failed to give you: emotional validation, attention and attunement, emotion skills, and emotional intelligence.”

Jonice Webb compares emotional neglect to baking a beautiful cake but forgetting the sugar. It looks good, yet lacks sweetness. Emotions provide sweetness. Emotions are what give us a sense of aliveness. They are like signposts in our internal village that provide information about what we like, what we don’t like, when something feels right or not. 

As adults, it is not about blaming our parents for what they did or didn’t do. But it isn’t about blaming ourselves either and thinking there is something wrong with us. Having a term like emotional neglect can help us accept the reality of what didn’t happen growing up. We can stop blaming ourselves or thinking there is something wrong with us and instead start taking responsibility for giving ourselves what we need as adults. 

If you are a parent yourself, it’s never too late to start doing this with your own children. Emotion skills can be learned - all they require is a willingness and curiosity to explore your inner world. 

Perhaps a really simple step is to pause and simply take a moment every day to ask yourself:

What am I feeling right now? 

What do I want / need? 

Physical sensations like being hungry tired, thirsty, energised count too, and can be a good place to start. 

If this resonates with you and you want to find out more, you can download my PDF on emotions here and find out more about emotional neglect on Dr Jonice Webb’s website here.