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Key points
- Childhood emotional neglect teaches you how to hide your feelings from others, including your future friends.
- Friends need to see and feel the real you; your friendships may suffer a lack of depth and resilience.
- Hiding emotions takes a lot of energy, potentially making your time with friends feel tiring, not energizing.
Do you…
- Notice your friendships tend to fizzle out or drift apart?
- Feel drained after spending time with friends?
- Feel taken advantage of by some of your friends?
- Have acquaintances but too few close friends?
- Give more frequently than you take in your friendships?
- Feel let down by the friends you do have in your life?
- Feel like your friends don’t truly know you?
If you’re answering yes to some of the questions above, you may have grown up with childhood emotional neglect. It’s something that legions of people experience in childhood, and the enduring impact spills over into adulthood, oftentimes without them even knowing it.
Childhood emotional neglect happens when your parents fail to notice, respond to, or validate your emotions enough as they raise you.
The result: You tend to treat your feelings as useless or burdensome, just as your parents did. Many emotionally neglected adults are fantastic friends because it’s easier for them to focus on the feelings and needs of others than it is to turn inward and notice the feelings and needs within themselves.
So many of these fantastic friends are baffled as to why their friendships seem lacking. How can they be such good friends to others and not get the same kind of friendship in return?
Why Growing Up With Childhood Emotional Neglect Affects Your Friendships Today
Children can fall victim to childhood emotional neglect despite the most well-intentioned of parents. Yet, when the most significant people in your life ignore your feelings (the deepest and most personal expression of who you are), you are forced to adapt.
And how might children adapt? They wall off their feelings. Since emotions are treated as unimportant, a child learns to treat them as unimportant, too. They falsely believe that their feelings are unnecessary and need to be pushed far, far away.
Now that wall is still there today. But the reality is that this wall doesn’t protect you from your emotions; it starves you from them. It blocks you from the very thing you need to have rich and genuine friendships: your feelings.
After such a long time of living as if that wall was there to help you, it’s imperative to see that truth. Your emotions aren’t the problem; the wall you have in front of them is. Behind that wall lies connection and meaning.
3 Ways Childhood Emotional Neglect Impacts Your Friendships
- Your friendships feel unequal. When you treat your feelings as unimportant, you also treat yourself as unimportant. This sets you up to naturally focus on others’ feelings, needs, and desires more than your own. You might notice your conversations with friends are focused on them, or that the activities you engage in are ones they prefer.
- You don’t feel truly known. Your feelings are the most personal part of who you are as a human being. Your feelings make you, you. Your lack of access to your feelings makes it almost impossible to know yourself … and for friends to know you … on a deep, authentic, and personal level.
- You have difficulty communicating. When you grow up with childhood emotional neglect, you miss out on learning the essential emotion skills all kids need to be equipped with to be healthy, interactive adults. You might notice it is challenging for you to identify, understand, and express not only your feelings and needs but perhaps also the feelings and needs of your friends. Without knowing how to interpret and respond to emotions happening within and around you, it’s easy for you to miss the mark in your friendships.
I realize these negative impacts of childhood emotional neglect can seem potentially overwhelming, but it’s important you know that the difficulties you experience in your friendships are changeable. I have seen scores of people who grew up with emotional neglect build rich and rewarding friendships in adulthood. I do not doubt in my mind you can have this, too.
Here’s how:
3 Steps to Enrich Your Friendships
1. Take up more space.
Since your friendships are unequal, it’s time for you to even them out. To do this, start asking for things and expressing yourself. Assess how much time your friend talks when you're together and how much time you talk. I predict you’ll find you don’t talk nearly as much. Start sharing more!
2. Feel, feel, feel.
Feeling is at the core of healing your emotional neglect. Start paying attention to your feelings—they’re inside of you, I promise. Below are helpful steps for accessing your emotions:
- Put special effort into identifying your feelings, naming your feelings, and allowing yourself to sit with them.
- Carve out a time each day when you have a few moments to yourself. Perhaps it’s when you’re driving to or from work, in the shower, or before bed. Choose a time that you can consistently and reliability engage in the following exercise:
- Sit or stand in a comfortable position and close your eyes if you’re able. Turn inward and ask yourself what you are feeling. Write down what you come up with on your sheet. It’s OK if you don’t identify anything, too. Just engaging in this exercise is enough.
3. Communicate with phrases starting with I feel, I want, I need, and I think.
The more you practice the exercise above, the easier it will become to communicate your feelings and needs to others. Start using these phrases when communicating with your friends.
Your Friendships Matter and So Do You
The way you treat yourself shows. When you treat your feelings, and ultimately yourself, as unimportant, other people are more likely to treat you that way, too. So, imagine what might happen when you start treating yourself as someone who matters. You guessed it! Others will start seeing and treating you like someone who matters, too.
The three steps above will help draw people closer to you. Your conversations will begin to feel more substantial and less superficial, your wants and needs will be honored instead of unfulfilled, and your friendships will energize rather than drain you. You’ll feel more connected and supported by people who care about you.
Slowly but surely, you’ll start to become the vibrant person who has been living dormant inside you. Every time you access your feelings, you’ll feel more and more like yourself, setting yourself free—ready to live wholeheartedly in the world among other people who matter, too, your friends.
© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.
Facebook/LinkedIn image: Dejan Dundjerski/Shutterstock
