How Emotional Neglect Disrupts Mother-Child Relationships

The world is full of people who love their mothers, most of them very much. But love comes in many different shapes, sizes, forms, and depths. And what therapists know is that when it comes to relationships with mothers and fathers, no two people are quite the same.

As a specialist in childhood emotional neglect, the comments below are ones that I have heard many times in my therapy office. They often come from caring, well-intentioned adults who are confused by their feelings about their moms.

I always look forward to celebrating Mother’s Day with my mom. But then when it happens, I end up feeling disappointed.

I approach this holiday with positive spirits and lots of love for my mother. But for some reason, I always end up getting annoyed and snapping at her. Then I feel guilty.

It’s so hard to pick out a Mother’s Day card for my mom. None of them fit how I actually feel about her.

I dread Mother’s Day. I know it’s wrong, but it’s how I feel.

Yet the pressure comes upon us all from everywhere: media, the press, and moviesall paint a picture of moms and love and happiness. But we know that real life is not usually like this.

Mothering is one of the most complex and demanding jobs in the world, and the huge majority of moms try their genuine best and meet the threshold of what famous psychologist D.W. Winnicott called “the good enough mother.”

Even many mothers who do not meet that threshold did try their best. They simply didn’t have the tools to respond to their child's emotional needs, perhaps because they didn’t get nurtured properly by their own moms.

This brings us to the elephant in the room. It’s a big one, but also an invisible one. It’s the elephant no one can see but everyone can feel. It’s an elephant that weighs on everyone in the family without their knowledge. It’s childhood emotional neglect.

Childhood emotional neglect happens when your parents fail to notice or respond enough to your feelings while they raise you. Emotionally neglectful moms come in all sorts of different packages. She may be a soccer mom, a doting mom, a working mom, or a stay-at-home mom. She may be an addict, a narcissist, or just a mom who’s working two jobs to put food on the table.

It’s not the amount of time she spent with you and it’s not the number of things she did for you. The key question is this: Did she notice what you were feeling? Did she seem to care what you felt, what you wanted, or what you needed to be happy and emotionally strong? Did she do all of these things enough?

Even if your mom spent all day every day driving you to and from soccer games or after-school activities, she may have inadvertently ignored your emotional life as a child. If that’s the case, it does not make her a bad mom. It just makes her an emotionally neglectful one.

Emotionally neglectful moms, because they’re not tuned in enough to the feeling world, end up delivering a unique kind of love to their children. It’s real and genuine love, of course, but it is missing something. It’s missing emotional attunement.

Emotional attunement is the source of true empathy. It happens when your parent connects with you on an emotional level, sees what you feel, knows you deeply enough to predict what you will feel, and understands what you feel. An emotionally attuned mother is also able to feel what you feel. If your mother did all of these things when you were a child, there’s a good chance she still does, now that you are an adult. All of these qualities of emotional attunement are not in the skill set of the emotionally neglectful mom.

Growing up without being deeply emotionally seen, understood, and known by your mother takes a toll on your relationship with her. Since emotional attunement is a necessary ingredient for all children, you will always feel, on some unnamable level, that something is missing, or not quite right, between you.

And that is what weighs on you.

For your mental health and progress, start by naming the elephant in the room. This can help more than you can imagine. Finally understanding the problem takes a tremendous weight off of you. Accept that your natural human need to be emotionally connected with your mother has not been met and that you feel it. Accept that it’s not your fault (and it may not be your mother’s fault either.)

Talk about it with a trusted person, whether it’s your partner or spouse, a sibling, family member, friend, or therapist. Telling someone about your relationship with your mom and how emotional neglect has happened to you makes it feel more real and also helps you understand it.

Don’t just think about your mom at these times; also, do something kind for yourself. For example, when you buy your mom some flowers, get some for yourself. Take a nice long walk, and take some time to relax. Nurture yourself.

Think about talking with your mother about emotional neglect. There are ways to approach it that are indirect and thoughtful and ways to talk about it that are non-blaming. Some mothers can benefit greatly from learning about emotional neglect, what it is, and how it affects people.

It's time to start learning everything you can about childhood emotional neglect. It affects much more than your relationship with your mother. It affects your self-worth, your self-knowledge, your emotional awareness, and your emotion skills. But every single one of these areas can be addressed now, by you, as an adult.

You may notice that when you acknowledge the elephant, everything feels a bit different in your life. For you have not only named the elephant in your relationship with your mother. You have named the elephant in your life.

And in doing so, you can see that you can give yourself everything you never got and that you can become emotionally attuned to yourself. You can reverse generations of emotional neglect, and give your children what they need.

Then, you will know: you didn’t have to get it from your mother after all.

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.

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