How Childhood Emotional Neglect Interferes With Grief

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“Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.”

–Vicki Harrison

It’s impossible to make it through life without experiencing loss. It would be quite some luck not to encounter grief at some point in your life. Even though everyone goes through it, that doesn’t mean everyone has the skills to go through it in a healthy way. Imagine how overwhelming the ocean might seem to those who have never been taught how to swim.

Grief can be so painful that people go to great lengths to avoid it. And when you avoid it, the waves feel even more forceful. This is the reality for those who grew up with childhood emotional neglect.

Childhood emotional neglect happens when parents fail to notice the emotions and emotional needs of their child. Those who have been emotionally neglected go through life unaware of their feelings and the important messages they bring and without the skills needed to identify, validate, manage, and express their feelings. I’m sure you can imagine the difficulty, then, of an emotionally neglected person being touched by grief.

You are probably familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on grief. In 1969, she wrote a book entitled On Death and Dying, in which she describes the five stages of grief. Originally, the five stages were identified for people diagnosed with terminal medical diagnoses at their end of life. Now, the five stages of grief are applied more broadly to all different kinds of loss—the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, the close of a certain chapter of your life, and so on.

As you read through the five stages, keep in mind that they are not set in stone. You may experience the stages out of order or at different times, or you may go through stages more than once. These stages are not linear. Rather, they are a map to better understand your specific grieving process.

Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief

1. Denial: It’s common to refuse the reality of the situation upon hearing bad news. Your brain has yet to absorb and process the information. Some of these phrases can be heard when someone is going through the denial stages of grief:

This must be some sort of mistake…

This is just a bad dream…

This can’t be true…

2. Anger: Anger is a protective emotion and is quite effective at keeping you safe from pain. This stage of grief typically involves being angry at the situation, the person you lost, or someone else involved. But your anger has a purpose: It gives you energy and pushes you to take action, keeping you proactive during an incredibly challenging time.

3. Bargaining: Bargaining is a way of trying to attain some sort of control over a devastating situation. You might experience thoughts that sound like “If only…” and “What if…” You might try to make deals or compromises with a higher power to make it all OK. This stage can involve guilt caused by taking excessive responsibility for the situation.

4. Depression: When all attempts to take control fall flat, the truth starts to sink in. It’s common to experience depression or intense sadness as you sit with the reality of the loss.

5. Acceptance: When you think about the loss, it doesn’t feel quite as unbelievable when you’re in a place of acceptance. In this stage, you acknowledge that your life is forever changed, but you can also begin to focus on what comes next.

Childhood emotional neglect is one of the biggest obstacles to grief and moving through the five stages. Without enough emotional knowledge, awareness, and skills, going through these complex stages of grief can feel nearly impossible.

Childhood Emotional Neglect Blocks the Grieving Process

• It’s difficult to move past denial. Denying feelings is a staple of childhood emotional neglect. So, when an emotionally neglected person is experiencing a loss, it’s easy for them to refuse to feel the painful emotions that come with grief. Without coming to terms with the loss or processing the emotions, you can be left feeling stuck.
• You don’t know how to handle your anger. Countless folks who experienced childhood emotional neglect were not modeled healthy ways to handle anger. If your natural anger was discouraged or repressed in your childhood home, it makes sense that it might be challenging to allow anger into your life as an adult. But unprocessed anger doesn’t just disappear … it’s usually directed inward, toward yourself. Internalized anger heaped on top of unprocessed grief can make the loss even more difficult to bear.
• It feels wrong to accept help and support. Since you learned in your upbringing that emotions are to be shut down, your emotional needs get shut down as well. This sets you up to want to deal with everything independently. One of the most effective ways of moving through grief is by seeking love and support from those who care about you. Without this, you’re in the ocean alone with no raft.
• The depression phase is prolonged. The above three ways emotional neglect blocks grief can leave you in a grim place. Your emotions are walled off, your anger may be directed inward, and the people who can support you are kept at arm’s length. This puts you in a vulnerable position … much more susceptible to a depressive episode. And once you’re in a depression, it can be hard to get out of it without help.

Grief Essential Reads

Anxiety: The Overlooked Stage of Grief

The Four Needs of the Grieving

If you’ve been touched by childhood emotional neglect and grief, there are things you can do.

How to Manage Emotional Neglect Through Grief

• Is there anyone in your life who can give you comfort? A spouse, a friend, a coworker? Take the leap and talk to them. Ask them for support. It will help more than you know.
• Make a conscious effort to feel your feelings. It doesn’t need to be for prolonged periods of time—you can just start with a brief couple of minutes each day. Identify what you feel and allow it to be there. Feel free to think about what you’ve lost. Allow tears to come if they do.
• Notice if you’re angry or depressed. Reaching out to a therapist or mental health professional can help you process through these feelings. Anger and depression are signs that there are unprocessed emotions inside you, especially if your emotions have been walled off for so long. You can find a therapist to help you learn the emotion skills. You don’t have to do this work alone.
• Start learning and healing your childhood emotional neglect. While beginning to acknowledge and feel your grief is a wonderful start, the process of healing your emotional neglect is to begin feeling all of your feelings (not just the ones connected to grief). When you start to feel again, you will also get to feel more of the good stuff, too—like joy, connection, and love.

Remember that grief is a sign of how much you love. While grief can be painful, it becomes more manageable over time, especially when you allow yourself to move through the stages and feel your emotions.

I’ll leave you with a quote that captures the heaviness, along with the beauty, of grief by the poetic Winnie-the-Pooh:

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.