Emotional Neglect Is a Common Cause of Holiday Emptiness

It’s the holidays. What are you feeling?

Interestingly, as a psychologist who helps people with their feelings every single day, I know that the amount of difficulty you have answering that question—“What are you feeling?”—can tell you something important about yourself. Your level of difficulty answering the question can actually tell you even more than the answer itself. It speaks to how much you are aware of and in touch with your own emotions.

If you are not generally a feeling-aware person — don’t be alarmed, many people aren’t — this can make you prone to one of the most indescribable, difficult-to-identify, least-talked-about feelings that exist, especially during the holiday season. It’s emptiness.

Emptiness

In preparation for writing this post, I searched for some research to share about empty feelings during the holidays. What I found instead were many great articles on depression, sadness, loneliness, and grief, which are all common during the holidays.

Emptiness, on the other hand, is less recognized. Yet it can be quite challenging for many who experience it. Here are some of the ways people have described their emptiness to me:

• I know I should be feeling something, but there’s nothing there.
• A vague discomfort that feels like an absence of something.
• Numbness in my belly (or chest or throat).
• An empty feeling in my body.
• A sad longing for something vague that seems unfulfillable.
• A deep sense that I’m missing something inside that everyone else has.

Everyone experiences emptiness in their own unique way. That’s why empty feelings are so difficult to talk about. “Empty” isn’t a typical feeling; it’s actually an absence of feeling. I call it “the un-feeling feeling.” It’s a deep sense that something is missing. So it’s not quite sadness, not quite grief, not quite loneliness. In fact, I have heard plenty of folks say that experiencing any of those emotions might be better than feeling empty.

How the Holiday Season Brings on Empty Feelings

Everybody knows what they should be feeling during the holidays: joy, warmth, and family connection, to name a few. But some people are less able to feel their feelings in general (much more about that below) and others don’t have those wonderful feelings on offer this season.

But one thing is certain: Being pressured to feel something is a great way to make you sense that you are not feeling. That’s emptiness.

Not everyone experiences emptiness. So when you do, it means something special about you. Feelings of emptiness are a sign of Emotional Neglect.

But before you read on I want you to know the plus side, which is that you have the power to change all of this. Childhood Emotional Neglect or CEN is not an intractable or diagnosable psychiatric illness. It’s only a childhood experience that you have unknowingly and unintentionally carried through your adult life. Childhood Emotional Neglect is something you can repair.

Childhood Emotional Neglect

If parents treat their child’s feelings and natural emotional needs for validation, support, and empathy as unimportant or invisible — the very definition of Childhood Emotional Neglect — the child will naturally wall off, or block, their own feelings and emotional needs so they will not be a “problem” in their childhood home. It’s a child’s brain’s way of adapting to the demands of the environment in which they are living and growing up.

Taking that “wall” forward into adulthood, you may end up emotionally disconnected from yourself or “ emotion-blind” to your own feelings and emotional needs. This sets the stage for some significant life challenges. For example, you may find yourself attracted to partners who are also emotion-blind, setting up a backdrop of Emotional Neglect in your relationship or marriage. Or you may find yourself feeling a sense of emptiness from time to time. Your body can sense when some vital part of yourself is “missing.” When your emotional self, which represents the deepest, most personal, biological expression of who you are, is blocked, this is a significant loss.

What You Can Do

1. Have compassion for yourself. Emotional Neglect is never a choice. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that you experienced it and it’s not your fault that you’ve continued it. It’s simply a matter of not being aware of the problem.
2. Know that your feelings are not missing, they’re just blocked. They are right there, waiting for you to feel, name, and acknowledge them.
3. Make a decision to become aware of your feelings. If Emotional Neglect is part of your life, from your childhood, within yourself now, or in your marriage, this is a powerful change that you can make right here, right now that will help you through this season and far beyond.
4. Several times each day, pause and turn your attention inward. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now?” Try to sense the feelings your body is experiencing. It’s OK if the answer is, “Nothing at all.” The more you ask with a genuine intent to know, the more your feelings will begin to answer back, and the less empty feelings you will feel.

Here, I’d like to share a fundamental truth from my book, Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

“The fuel of life is feeling. If we are not filled up in childhood we must fill ourselves as adults. Otherwise, we will find ourselves running on empty.”

Does Childhood Emotional Neglect impact you? Take the free Emotional Neglect Questionnaire

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.

Originally published at https://www.psychologytoday.com.