What is Emotional Neglect?

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What is Emotional Neglect?

Emotional Neglect is a lack of emotional validation. It involves the absence of positive and nurturing emotional support during one's formative years. Unlike overt abuse, which is characterized by harmful actions, emotional neglect is defined by the lack of necessary emotional responses. It's the emotional void created when caregivers fail to meet the child's emotional needs.

Because emotional neglect is about what did not happen rather than what did, it is often more difficult to identify and understand as there are no clear-cut marks or explicit traumatic events to identify. Instead, the harm comes from what was missing — the authentic expressions of love, attention, validation, and connection.

Some Common Examples of Emotional Neglect Are:

Indifference: Caregivers who are physically present but emotionally distant or absent, showing little interest in a child’s feelings or experiences.

Emotional Unavailability: Parents who are unable to provide empathy or comfort, often due to their own emotional difficulties, issues or stress.

Lack of Affirmation: Failure to acknowledge (celebrate or reprimand) the child's actions, good or bad, leading to feelings of invisibility and unworthiness of attention.

Minimal Interaction: Limited meaningful interaction or communication, leaving the child feeling isolated and unimportant.

Do you suspect a history of emotional neglect?

Emotional Neglect Questionnaire

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INSPIRATION

  • "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

    — Maya Angelou

  • "It's never too late to be what you might have been."

    — George Eliot

  • “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

    — Carl Jung

  • "The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a conincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people."

    — Carl Jung

  • "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

    — Thomas A. Edison

  • "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

    — George Bernard Shaw

  • "There's a power in words. There's power in being able to explain and describe and articulate what you know and feel and believe about the world, and about yourself.

    — Tracy Chapman

  • "I don't try to project any image at all, other than the person that I am."

    — Tracy Chapman

  • "The important thing about "brave" is, it doesn't mean you're not terrified."

    — Sinead O’Connor

  • "Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths."

    — Criss Jami

  • "To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment."

    — Eckart Tolle

  • "Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity."

    — Thomas J. Watson

  • "I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years."

    — Haruki Murakami

  • "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."

    — Aristotle

  • "[A person's] greatness lies in [their] power of thought."

    — Blaise Pascal

  • "In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility."

    — Eleanor Roosevelt

  • "Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them."

    — David Hume

  • "Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."

    — F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • "Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be."

    — Thoreau

  • ""To find yourself, think for yourself."

    — Socrates

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  • "The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

    — Albert Einstein

  • "The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks."

    — Christoper Hitchens

  • "We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become 'unthinkable,' thinking stops and action becomes mindless."

    — J. William Fulbright

  • "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."

    — Marie Curie

  • "Obstacles, of course are developmentally necessary: they teach [people] strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience, and resourcefulness."

    — Naomi Wolf

  • "We will fail when we fail to try."

    — Rosa Parks

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