Childhood Emotional Neglect Therapy
What is childhood emotional neglect?
If you’re looking for childhood emotional neglect therapy to talk about your childhood trauma or the way in which you experienced relationships in early life that you feel are still impacting you now, then you’ve come to the right place.
Many adults find themselves feeling some way and are aware that parts of their childhood are still impacting them in a way that is either making them unhappy, anxious, stressed or unable to maintain healthy relationships but aren’t sure how therapy will help.
It might be that you feel your childhood was good, happy, stable – it “wasn’t that bad” or perhaps you have found yourself questioning how you still feel the way you do because “nobody hit you”, – but you still can’t find yourself feeling happy, content and able to fully relax and live life to the full.
Childhood emotional neglect often isn’t a result of bad parents. It isn’t about blaming anyone, but about making sense of the emotional gaps where needs haven’t always been met, or emotional quotas haven’t been filled. Any parents can only ever do what they can with the knowledge and skills that they have at the time. No parent is perfect.
In every generation there will be different styles, preferred approaches, and traditions and behaviours carried across generations.
Bringing your story to therapy allows you to examine what has worked well, what hasn’t worked so well, and how you feel about things. It’s a safe space to unpack, reorganise and put things back in a new way. In a way that allows you to be more yourself, and to let go of things that aren’t helpful for you now.
Therapy for childhood emotional neglect can help you to make sense of things so that you can live life in a way that makes you happiest.
What does childhood emotional neglect (CEN) look like in adult life?
Childhood emotional neglect signs can look different for everyone, but some common signs are:
- Struggling to identify with your feelings; a sense of feeling detached from your feelings. Emotional “numbness”.
- Feeling afraid of needing others, relying on other people. Hyper-independence or a tendency to reject support or care.
- High self-critic, being much harder on yourself than other people. Self-compassion feels incredibly difficult
- Prioritising others to an extreme level, people-pleasing and a leaning towards gaining external validation
- Feeling that you are “less than” or not good enough, having a sense that something is somehow wrong with you but you can’t explain why.
None of these is diagnostic or exact, but you may find yourself relating to them in some way. Childhood emotional neglect therapy may uncover other areas as you talk things through, where you start noticing other things you hadn’t realised – but many clients have ‘aha’ moments whether they started sessions with this in mind or not!
How do I work with CEN?
Working with childhood emotional neglect in therapy specifically – I treat every client as an individual, so there’s no prescribed route – sessions are tailored to you and led by you. Being an integrative therapist means that I draw on different theories and ways of working, but my person-centred core is at the root of all of my work.
This basically means that I take things at your pace, but may suggest or offer different options depending on what feels appropriate at the time. It will always be down to you what you want to do in session.
It can be important to bear in mind that sometimes work like this can take time; so I offer open-ended sessions, there’s no limit to how long you can attend sessions for. Lots of clients start with a few sessions weekly, and then choose to have sessions fortnightly, some even moving to monthly so that they can take their time and still have check-ins if they find that useful.
If you'd like to work with me...
The first thing to do is book a free call. This is a chance for us to chat and see if we’re a good fit, and then we can go from there.
I work with clients both online across the UK and in person, in Rayleigh and Southend-On-Sea in Essex.
There’s no pressure to book; we have a chat, I can answer any questions you have, and then you decide if you’d like to start!