What didn’t happen in your childhood can be as powerful as what did. Dr. Jonice Webb, clinical psychologist, realized some 12 years ago that symptoms masquerading for many people as depression, marital problems, anxiety or anger were, in fact, mislabeled signs of Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), a term that she coined in the first ever written book on the topic: Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. That was a paradigm-changer for clinicians and public alike.
Her second book on CEN, Running on Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships with Your Partner, Your Parents & Your Children, recently published in romanian by Pagina de Psihologie, opens the doors for richer and more meaningful connections for those who were subjected to Childhood Emotional Neglect and carried with them unknowingly this burden for so long.
It has been a real pleasure to talk to Jonice Webb this month.
Are we bound to be emotionally neglected as children, despite our parents’ good intentions?
No, not at all. And in fact, children are extremely resilient. And parents don’t need to always emotionally respond to children. They don’t even need to do a fantastic job of it. All they need to do is respond enough to their child.
Every child is born with a threshold of emotional need. And most children’s threshold is not really high, it’s just their particular need and if their parents read that properly and meet their need, they will be fine. But if the parent doesn’t meet the threshold, that is what it takes to set the child into emotional neglect path and, if that continues, they will have the consequences of it.
What about the families with siblings: how does the personality of a child factors in? Some children are by nature more reluctant to express their feelings, which makes it easier for parents to neglect their emotional needs. You have the same parents supposedly responding the same way, yet one child in the family can feel neglected, the other not.
That happens a lot and I think it is because of a few different factors. It can be that one child resembles one parent more, so they can get a lot of attention from one parent and not so much from the other. It can also be because of the children’s gender that the parents respond differently to them, it can be because the children were born at different times in their parents lives or their relationship. Or the children are born with different thresholds, so one threshold got met because it was pretty low and the other one didn’t get met, being higher.
In „Running on Empty No More“, you describe five ways that your past, as an emotionally neglected child, influences your choice of a partner. Out of these scenarios which one do you encounter the most in your clinical practice?
Being attracted to someone else who was also emotionally neglected! Because if you grow up with your feelings ignored, with parents who are not responding enough to your feelings or speaking the language of feelings or willing or able to talk about meaningful things, then your developing brain naturally absorbs that as This is what love is. This relationship I have with my parents is the definition of love to me. And then we grow up and we feel attracted to someone who delivers us that particular type of love. So many neglected people grow up to be attracted to someone who is also disconnected from their feelings, who grew up the same way, who is not going to talk about uncomfortable things like feelings, and then, you end up in a marriage where neither partner knows how to deal with their feelings or talk about it.
In your book you are describing a lot of symptoms like feeling empty, feeling disconnected from your partner. Everyone is on a different path, of course, but are there any specific life events or turning points that trigger this awareness of not being ok in the relationship?
There are so many different possibilities. In Running on Empty No More the example that I use is that one of the partners develops a serious health problem.
The case of Oscar and Olive.
Yes! So it could be something like that. You really need your partner on an emotional level like you never have before and you realize there is nothing there. You feel it, but you don’t understand what is wrong, what’s missing and it could be very confusing. When you are emotionally neglected and married to an emotionally neglected partner it can feel like you are two planets revolving on your own, your orbits don’t meet. And that can start to feel lonely. Especially if you observe other couples that show emotional connection with each other and you realize: We don’t have that! There is some ingredient missing. What is that ingredient?
Emotionally neglected children, now adults, are shutting down their feelings and the ability to feel, you explain. How come Oscar is not feeling supported by his wife, yet is able to feel the support of his sister?
When we go through a severe challenge in life – and for Oscar it was cancer – that is when we are most emotionally vulnerable and most open. So, for people who have most of their feelings walled off from growing up with emotional neglect, when they are going through a dramatic, challenging event the walls are breaking down, because you are so vulnerable and you feel needy and you allow yourself to feel so.
There are some cracks and somebody who is closest to you can slip through these cracks.
Yes, by giving you something that you’ve been hungry for your entire life and didn’t know it: emotional support.
One of the things you talk about in your books is the lack of self-discipline as a marker of CEN. Can you, please, elaborate on this? Lots of people find themselves in this position of procrastinating, not being disciplined enough to follow a diet or go to gym and they blame themselves as being lazy.
Emotionally neglectful parents are oftentimes not able to respond to their child need for structure, like Do your homework before you go outside or Go to bed every night at 8 o’clock, or 9 o’clock or You can’t leave the table until you’ve eaten 3 bites of food – whatever it is. When our parents structure us that way, we actually internalize that structure and we have it just as a part of us, that voice within us that says Don’t go out to dinner until you finished your work! And it applies as an adult. But when you didn’t see enough of that as a child, you don’t have that internalized structure within you and that leaves you struggling for it as an adult. But you may not at all have any idea that your parents were supposed to give you that, so then you feel like This is on me, what is wrong with me? I am lazy! Or I am not motivated. And that is just a road to nowhere, that does not help anybody.
How can one turn this „flaw“ around? What would be a first step?
To self-discipline specifically? The first step is to try to get the self-blame out of it and recognizing I am not flawed, it’s just something I didn’t get from my parents and I can now give to myself. Once you get all that self-blame and anger towards yourself out of the picture it really does free you up to feel less encumbered when you try to go forward and structure yourself and developing the voice inside your head that you didn’t get when you are growing up, and finding ways to hold yourself accountable.
You mentioned that when working with couples that are CEN affected you are feeling as if you were working with magnets facing opposite directions. What is your way of reversing these magnetic poles in therapy?
It is a process, there is certainly no one thing that does it, of course, but there are few steps. The first is to take the shame and blame out of it, because, again, one of the biggest things about understanding about CEN and how it affects people is recognizing that no one chooses to have it and no one wants to give it. It really is no one’s fault. And usually, for most couples, they are pretty angry at each other for everything that they have not communicated about, not dealt with through their marriage. So, one of the first things I do is try to help them understand why they haven’t been able to talk about these things and why they feel so distant, and take the blame out (for they probably each blame the other). And the second thing is to try to teach them the skills of how to recognize when they are having an emotion and to identify what they are feeling, and put that into words to their partner in a way that their spouse can actually hear and take in. There is a group of skills that anyone can learn, it can take some time, depending on how severe CEN is in this marriage, but I usually have couples try to really have conversations with each other, in my office, so that I can say Stop, that was not said in a way your partner can hear or You appear angry and you are not saying that you are angry, so they can start learning those skills and using them at home.
Is there a silver lining in being subjected to Childhood Emotional Neglect? Do you develop, potentially, a specific skill that you wouldn’t have had otherwise, that might be helpful in your life? In short, is there a positive side to CEN?
There are actually multiple positive sides – I am so glad you asked that question! One of the best things about growing up emotionally neglected is that is not a mental illness, it’s not a brain problem, it’s not a chemical imbalance of any kind, it really is just a lack of something and is from your childhood and you can give yourself now what you did not get as a child. It is remarkably changeable and responding to efforts to heal it. That is what I found as someone who has been treated hundreds, maybe thousands of people at this point.
Another thing I want to mention is that people who grow up emotionally neglected tend to share some common positive traits and I wrote a blog about this that went viral. I think it’s important for people to realize that when you grow up emotionally neglected you tend to be very competent. People with emotional neglect tend to be really able and capable, because they had to rely on themselves as kids and they knew it. So, they’ve learned how to manage themselves and present themselves and just be what people need them to be, so most people who are emotionally neglected are really well liked by others. Unfortunately, they don’t always feel it or feel able to believe it or accept it, but that is a great strength. People who grew up emotionally neglected are able to kind of just go with the flow and be flexible, because they had to be as a kid. No one was asking them What do you want? What do you need? So, they just learned to keep that to themselves and manage it and go along and that could be a great strength. Most people with CEN are able to come through in a lot of situations and people appreciate that.
In another case you are describing in your book, May smiles all the time. It is a self-defense weapon, you explain, because when you are smiling, you are not causing any problems and no one asks how you are feeling. What other self-defense weapons are we using subconsciously when we are suffering from CEN?
Every defense mechanism comes from that wall that we build when we grow up with our feeling being under responded to. When you have your feelings blocked off, smile helps keep people away emotionally by saying I am happy, I am fine. But I think you can also keep people away by avoiding emotion words, by not talking about yourself very much. A lot of people who were emotionally neglected keep conversations focused on the other person and keep the other talking, and, while that could be considered one of the positives, like we were just talking about, it also prevents yourself from having to be or feel vulnerable. Your relationships end up by being too much about other people and not enough about yourself.
Another way that emotionally neglected people protect themselves is by constantly being what they think the person they are with needs them to be.
To mold yourself…
Yes, molding yourself to the situation and the people that you are with and, again, that could be a strength, but, unfortunately, because you are not connected with your inner self, you really are not able to be your true self, and this could be very exhausting. So lots of emotionally neglected people get very tired of being with other people and need to recharge a lot by themselves. That happens a lot and they avoid social situations and people.
In your first book you list hundreds of words describing feelings and sensations. That reminded me of something a psychologist recently told me: that she noticed during her 10 years of practice working with Somatic Experiencing that most of her clients cannot name their own emotions and feelings. On average, how many emotions do you think we can name?
I think it depends, in large part, if you grew up with emotional neglect or not. If you didn’t, then emotion words were used in your childhood home, maybe more different shades of emotions were recognized and acknowledged and talked about, and then, that just set up your brain to have that ability to think about emotions and label them and you likely have a much better vocabulary. But emotionally neglected people, because they didn’t get all that richness presented to them as children and maybe they even feel like emotions are dumb or useless or bad or something to be ashamed of, that part of their brain doesn’t get developed properly, so you don’t even absorb those words. A lot of emotionally neglected people only really have one word and it can be anxious or stressed.
These are generic categories, but not what they actually feel.
Right! It can even be just one category and I say to them You put all your feelings in one bucket and they don’t belong in that bucket. It’s a whole stew in there, and you are acting like it’s just one emotion. So, for example, some people have like three: mad, sad, glad.
How can one parent who, presumably, is invested in the emotional health of their child prevent CEN?
I love that question because one of my main goals in writing both of these books is to help more children grow up with their emotions responded to adequately by their parents. One thing I want to say is that parents naturally raise their children the way that they were raised themselves. That is an automatic setting that we are all born with, that we will raise our children the way we were raised. Unless we change the pattern. We have to purposely make a choice of doing something different.
Emotional neglect is not the parents’ fault, they are just doing what they were taught without realizing they should do anything different. So it is really important for parents to not get into any kind of guilt or blame game with themselves.
The biggest thing a parent can do, to start with, is heal their own emotional neglect and work on themselves, because it’s hard to see your children’s feelings if you are not seeing your own and it’s hard to speak about emotions with your child and acknowledge your child’s emotions and help them recognize, sit with, or tolerate their emotions unless you can do that yourself. Heal yourself first! – is always what I tell parents.
Secondly, increase your own emotion vocabulary, so that you can use the language of emotions with your child; and observe your child closely emotionally and figure out who your child really is. And if you have three children or four children, keep in mind that each one is different emotionally. Getting to know your child at an emotional level is really key to this whole thing.
And the last thing I want to say is that parents are getting too hung up on their children’s behaviour, so I always tell parents: Instead of focusing on behaviour, focus on the feelings that are driving that behaviour! Because all action is driven by emotion.
All of these things prevent emotional neglect.
What do you consider to be the most powerful tool we have at our disposal to replenish ourselves and run on empty no more?
The one most powerful tool is to pay attention to your feelings and take them as something that you need to address and value and deal with.