Resentful Love: The Burden of Adult Children of Neglect

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It is quite a challenge to be raised by emotionally neglectful parents. And that challenge does not end simply because you grow up.

Childhood emotional neglect happens when your parents fail to respond enough to your emotions as they raise you. They may provide you with everything material, but little emotional validation, education, and support.

If you have seen your parents recently, did you pay attention to the experience? How do you feel when you are with your parents? Is it a comfortable, nurturing time with them?

Or does it feel like a perplexingly watered-down version of what you know, deep down, that it should be?

Having worked with hundreds of people who grew up in emotionally neglectful families, I have noticed that three characteristics define most of their relationships with their parents.

3 Markers of Emotional Neglect Between Parent and Adult Child

1. A feeling of not being understood
2. A deep, difficult-to-describe sense of emotional deprivation
3. Resentment and guilt

Parents who are blind to emotions raise their children with a lack of emotional attention. Their children are set up from the moment of their birth to experience a swirl of the three things above throughout their lifetimes.

It’s because what appears to be there is not fully there. A parent’s love must be based on truly seeing and knowing their child, and parents who are blind to emotions are not able to go that deep. This is coupled with societal pressures about how parent-child relationships should be. All of these forces together place the emotionally neglected child in a guilt bind for a lifetime.

The Love/Guilt Bind

In today’s fast-changing world, one thing has changed very little: the widely held notion that we must always love and respect our parents, no matter what. At first glance, this rule of life seems like a no-brainer. Don’t all good people love and respect their parents?

Yet, the true answer is no. Your parents did give you life, and they raised you. But that does not obligate you to give them carte blanche positive feelings for your whole life. You didn’t ask them to bring you into the world. By choosing to do so, they took the responsibility upon themselves to raise a healthy child, which is the mandate of all mammals who are contributing to the survival of their species.

Your parents and you are not governed by any special rules that require love and affection at all costs to yourself.

This is the reason why it’s so very important that you keep yourself and your own needs at the forefront of your mind in every interaction with your parents. For if you are sacrificing your own emotional health to meet your parents’ needs, you are paying a hefty price and getting very little in return.

Your relationship with your parents is just like any other enduring relationship between people. It requires enough mutual emotional awareness to make both parties feel understood, valued, and valid, and to feel cared for in a real and meaningful way. This cannot come only from your side. It absolutely must come from both.

So what do you do if you are caught in the guilt/love bind with your parents? In my book Running on Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships, I outlined several powerful techniques to get yourself out of the bind, like setting limits, saying no, and firming up your boundaries.

Aside from boundaries, saying no, and limit-setting, another of my favorite techniques is also somewhat surprising. Most people would never think of self-care as a way to protect themselves. But it is!

Protect Yourself

It’s important to remember that setting limits and saying no to your parents is not only about protecting your feelings. Minimizing your own emotional suffering is key, of course. But there’s another, bigger purpose to all of this. When you protect and take care of yourself emotionally, you are accomplishing multiple other goals. You are allowing yourself the room, stability, and strength to grow to your fullest potential. And you are filling yourself in a way that will allow you to give priceless emotional sustenance to your spouse and children.

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If you are to begin to behave differently with your parents in ways like setting limits and boundaries or talking with them about childhood emotional neglect, it helps enormously to first build up your emotional strength.

The best way to do this is to put more focus and energy into your own self-care. By focusing on taking better care of yourself, you are doing for yourself what your parents should have done, but couldn’t or didn’t. In this way, you are re-parenting yourself. If you grew up with your emotions ignored, you work as an adult to pay attention to your own emotions. See the chart below for more examples.

How to Give Yourself What Your Parents Couldn’t

If your parents didn’t/don't:

• Accept your feelings as valid
• Notice when you needed rest
• Provide you with structure
• Teach you how to manage your feelings
• Teach you how to name your emotions
• Model how to express feelings
• Talk about things
• Soothe you when you were upset
• Get to know you deeply and personally
• Support and encourage you
• Offer you help when you needed it

You must now make a special effort to:

• Accept your feelings as valid
• Make sure you get enough rest
• Structure yourself
• Learn emotion management
• Increase your emotion vocabulary
• Practice expressing your feelings
• Practice talking about things
• Soothe yourself when you need it
• Work to know yourself deeply
• Seek and accept support from others
• Ask for and accept help

I know it probably seems like a tall order to try to fill in the gaps from your childhood like this. And it’s true. Giving yourself what you never got takes a good deal of effort and persistence. But one thing helps immensely: It all feels good. It feels enriching and enlivening to finally give yourself what you’ve been missing. It makes you stronger and less vulnerable, not only with your parents but also in the whole of your life.

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.

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