Childhood Emotional Neglect: The Beginnings
The world is full of people who walk through their lives appearing perfectly fine. But underneath, they are struggling in a very private way.
They have a deep-felt sense of being different from other people or somehow deeply flawed.
They feel a fear of letting people know them too well.
They have a tendency to be hard on themselves, criticize themselves, and turn their anger inward toward themselves.
They pride themselves on their independence, viewing any need for help as a sign of weakness.
They have a lack of awareness of feelings, both their own and others’.
They experience occasional feelings of emptiness or grayness that come and go.
The question is, why? Why these particular struggles? And why these particular people?
Flash Back With Me
Sixteen years ago, I made a discovery that profoundly changed my life.
Then, it changed many thousands of other people’s lives.
Now, I want to tell you about it.
I invite you to flash back with me, way, way back to the year 2008. I was a young mom and psychologist, married to an engineer, raising my two young children in a suburb of Boston. After having worked in many different mental health settings over the course of my career, I was finally running a busy psychology practice of my very own.
Earlier in my career, I had worked with folks with substance abuse issues, led groups for people with major mental illnesses, done evaluations in a psychiatric emergency room, directed a residential treatment center, and worked in a large group practice. In other words, I had worked with all kinds of struggling folks from all walks of life: underprivileged, privileged, mentally ill, and worried well, couples, individuals, groups, and families.
But in 2008, as I saw client after client in my private practice, I saw a pattern emerge and become clear to me. It was a pattern I had subliminally picked up on for years in the many settings I’d worked in. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a pattern that also existed within myself.
This pattern was a unique collection of personal struggles that my clients had been describing for many years. Despite their disparate backgrounds, a noteworthy number of people who seemed to have little in common with each other talked about the same group of non-traditional “symptoms.” It was almost like the same foot had stepped on each of them, leaving its imprint there. I knew it had to be from their childhoods, and I really, really, wanted to know exactly what had caused it.
What had happened to all these people in their childhoods? Was it a type of abuse? A specific trauma? As I sorted through the possible causes of the “footprint” I finally realized that it was none of that. In fact, it wasn’t anything that had happened to these clients as children. Instead, it was something vital that had failed to happen for them.
The one thing they all had in common: they had all grown up in families that failed to notice, name, talk about, and respond to, their feelings. Once I saw it, I called it Childhood Emotional Neglect. I wanted to learn more.
The Research
I did a massive search of the database of the American Psychological Association and found few uses of the term “Emotional Neglect.” When I did see it in an article, it typically described either physical neglect (where a child lacks food, clean clothes, or housing, for example) or abuse (active emotional mistreatment).
Virtually nowhere did I find a reference to Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) that named what I was seeing or described it.
I realized at that time that this was up to me. It was my responsibility to bring this under-discussed topic out of the darkness and shine a light on it. And because this is personal to me, running rife through my own family and my own life, I was driven by a deep personal passion.
In 2012, my first book, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect was published. It was the first book ever written to outline the pattern of Childhood Emotional Neglect in the life of an adult and to describe why and how CEN happens and how to recover from it. So the book was done, but my real job had just begun.
Soon after, to reach more people with my message, I started the first Childhood Emotional Neglect Blog. In 2018, I wrote my second book, Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships, which explains how CEN affects your connection to the central people in your life. I have done hundreds of interviews, talks, and blogs in my efforts to reach every man, woman, and parent in the world. My burning goal through these 12 years has been to make Childhood Emotional Neglect a household name. To give every person who has CEN the gift of self-understanding and the tools they need to heal. And to help parents stop its automatic transmission from one generation to the next.
Where We Are Now
Because they strike a chord with so many people, giving them an explanation for their private pain and helping them feel seen for the first time, both of the Running on Empty books have become Bestsellers. They have been published in seventeen languages, including Vietnamese, Hungarian, Brazilian and Turkish, and many of my blog posts have gone viral. Is this because I’m a brilliant writer? No. It’s because this is a topic that resonates with many.
Today, many other therapists are talking and writing about Childhood Emotional Neglect. I have trained 800 therapists across the world to treat it, all listed on my website. I receive messages every single day from people who are finally discovering the hidden source of their pain, and whose lives are changing.
Over the years, by talking with, working with, and teaching others, I have learned much more about CEN. In this new blog, I will be talking about this vital topic from every direction: from the way it affects your relationships to how you deal with your parents; from how CEN feels on a deep level to why CEN is so invisible; from how even caring parents unknowingly hand it down to their children to how to connect with your emotions and learn how to understand, use, and share them with others.
If you think you may have Childhood Emotional Neglect, you can take the free CEN Questionnaire, and be sure to follow this blog. You will learn a lot about yourself, and perhaps some of the people in your life, as well. I’m glad you’re here.
Stay tuned…
© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.
