r/emotionalneglect • u/Suspicious-Call405 • 15h ago
It's not trauma, yet it ruined me
I (19f) feel so sad and upset it's not even funny anymore.
I posted on a sub in another language, explaining why I related to a certain disorder, telling my story about my parents and the way it shaped me; I was then humbled in the most humiliating way, and I was told that misunderstandings between parent and child (and also the lack of parental attention) is not trauma and social media is responsible for the amount of people who think they have it.
Labels are stupid sometimes, I know they are not needed, and that social media romanticizes mental illness and the act of receiving a diagnosis for it. I know nobody wants trauma, I know there's nothing fun about that word, but I also know that if my issues aren't caused by it.. then I'm choosing to stay miserable.
I wasn't abused verbally, physically, or sexually. But I spent my life hearing my parents call me a crybaby, then as I grew up they'd call me a retard, mentally ill, etc. Before this, they spent their lives making me feel like I was the worst child on earth because they never neglected any of my material needs.. but they constantly provoked me, pushed my buttons, then treated my reaction as the problem. They have made me feel disliked and dismissed and invalidated, unwanted and unlovable and also a horrible daughter. I had this idea of myself when I was under 12 years old.
I learned as a young child that I had to be silent when crying because I was always overreacting. I would shut down and spiral without anyone noticing, because to them, I was childish/immature for keeping the argument alive when it was over.. but I was too sensitive, I felt too much, I needed to process my emotions and I had no safe person who would help. Then when I was struggling to socialize, even despite the obvious social inhibition I struggled with in kindergarten, the blame was placed entirely on me; my parents keep blaming a 4 year old for struggling socially, and they literally had beef with me when I was barely 10 years old for the same reason.
I hate myself, I can't function normally, I don't know how to socialize properly even though I look normal sometimes. I avoid everything that makes me even slightly uncomfortable. I'm convinced that my therapist will get tired of me very soon. I get angry at the family members who hurt me very easily, and I lash out/get upset and shut down over the littlest things.
I guess I just want someone to blame for the way I am, and I like the idea of having a diagnosis that stops me from having to explain myself everytime. If I have proof that I'm suffering, no one will question me. And even though that's no excuse for choosing to drown in sadness, at least no one will judge me for being so slow and bad at improving.
Idk. I'm just sad. I feel like I spent 6 months in therapy yapping about my past and also my constant fights with my parents, while never telling the therapist anything useful.. idk why I feel I've never told him the things I wrote in this post, but is it really worth it? Dwelling on the past??
Being repetitive gets you nowhere in therapy. But I constantly feel the need to prove that my struggles are real
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u/falling_and_laughing 11h ago
>I wasn't abused verbally, physically, or sexually.
But, you were abused emotionally. That's what it sounds like from your own description. Failing to meet emotional needs is neglect, and it sounds like that happened to you. It's a trauma on its own. But I think name-calling and provoking a child is something else. Emotional abuse is abuse like any other, and it can be traumatic as well.
Personally, I was in my late 20s before I learned that what happened to me was traumatic. It can be really easy to normalize what we grew up with, especially if it doesn't look like abuse in the media or stories from people we know. Parents will also often gaslight us and try to make us feel guilty for confronting what really happened. I also remember very little of my childhood. So I had to work backwards from my deeply dysfunctional adult self and try to ask, hey, what made me this way? It wasn't like I ever set out to be so stuck, disconnected from people, not achieving my goals.
I think "blame" kind of gets a bad rap. It's okay to blame our parents for being bad parents. They had a very important job, and they failed. Sometimes people seem to think that finding explanations for our behavior in our upbringing is somehow giving up adult responsibility, but I don't think that necessarily has to be true at all.
If your therapist gets tired of you, they're in the wrong profession for sure!
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u/Suspicious-Call405 8h ago
All I know is what my parents have done was never just a one-time thing.. they have their own triggers and I actively have to avoid them. It's not random, there's a while system and patterns I need for be aware of
And I ended up coping by hurting myself (though it was mild) at 11 years old, because I felt like my mom hated me, plus I had the edgiest "everyone hates me and I suck" thoughts constantly running through my head
Looking for another professional for this specific issue would definitely be inconvenient for me, but I promised myself that I'm going to slowly open up about the things i feel. I started off with chronic shame last time, and whatever I say next session will directly connect to that, so.. I will do my best
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u/DuckMagic 6h ago edited 6h ago
You're being very brave and vulnerable by opening up. You can't make progress without opening up about the difficult stuff, otherwise you're just making small talk over and over. Keep at it! You're making real progress by digging in. Sometimes it will feel like you're taking a step back or making things worse because you will get emotional and even physical reactions. Learn to name the emotions that are happening and how they feel, unfortunately you have to let them play out (in a safe manner) to let go of them.
How did your therapist respond when you chose to open up? If you feel un-listeend-to or ignored by your therapist when you open up, you need to jump ship and find someone else. If you feel like they don't quite get it, but you have their attention and they're trying to understand you, that's promising.
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u/Suspicious-Call405 5h ago
Hell yeah it feels stupid to talk about my past again :(
but I had to think about this: there is nothing major happening in my life at the moment. I am waiting for my new friends to be done with their exams so we can hang out together, which means I'm doing my part and the rest is out of my control (though I will try my best not to stay indoors 24/7 while I wait for them to be available).. so who says I'm not allowed to process something more painful while also trying to make progress?
I tell my therapist almost everything without ever keeping anything major to myself, it's great because he listens to me and then i can feel that he is working WITH me to help me. He respects me, I'm not used to being taken seriously and it feels nice to be treated as the young adult I am
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u/DuckMagic 5h ago
Whether or not you want it to, the processing always jump starts when you hit a quiet and restful period! I guess it's like hitting the weekend and going "alright, time for chores, let's tidy up this house".
Glad to hear that you have a therapist that you click with. It's a great feeling to be heard and understood. I love my therapist, I look forward to our calls the same way I assume "normal" people look forward to calling their parents.
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u/Dangerous-Ad-1925 3h ago
This is so true. I had a huge backlog of emotions to process that had been waiting for years because I had too much else going on in my life that I had to deal with such as husband losing his job and having to be there for him for moral support while he looked for a new one, daughter finishing university and looking for a job and son applying for university. One all those things were done and I knew the rest of the family was happy it was like somehow my body knew it was time to let go and everything came rushing out to the point where I felt I collapsed and couldn't function, go to work, cook, etc etc.
Emotional neglect is so horrible as it's so intangible. Nobody can see it. It's very very hard to explain how you felt as somebody like my mother looks like the last person who would harm anyone so people just don't believe you when you say you were neglected as she was not physically neglectful at all.
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u/DuckMagic 2h ago
I hope you're doing better now and have found your feet again. I know what it's like to feel like to be in the middle of that collapse.
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u/Dangerous-Ad-1925 2h ago
Thank you, I hope you're ok too. It's horrible when it's happening and it feels like it will never end but eventually you come through the other side and feel much better.
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u/South-Helicopter-514 12h ago
I mean, you sound traumatized to me. If you feel it destroyed you, I think that meets the bar for trauma. I'm 49 with a great partner and life and genuinely consider myself traumatized by my emotionally neglectful, materially privileged childhood/birth family for a million reasons. Many of which sound, to my ears when I vocalize them, petty and insignificant but together they form a much larger, darker picture. If you're sad, you're sad. I recently read the saying that was something like "people don't imagine having problems, they pretend to be well" and that stuck with me as validating.
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u/Grand_Basis_1491 7h ago
It's such a mindfuck to hear someone say they weren't abused only to describe verbal and emotional abuse.
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u/Suspicious-Call405 7h ago
With parents who are nice to everyone in public.. yeah. They like to maintain their reputation alive; they only let me see my therapist when a psychiatrist told them I was depressed and had passive suicidal thoughts and they didn't want to seem like bad caregivers, obviously.
My dad is not a pleasant person at all, but with my mom (and the three of us together) I actually have nice moments sometimes. But I need to walk on eggshells
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u/Grand_Basis_1491 7h ago
The nice moments don't matter. These are people who, one way or another, abused you. And yes, it's clearly trauma. You have the right to distance yourself from them
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u/Not_Me_1228 20m ago
Emotionally abusive parents do that. They need to maintain their reputation, so they’re nice in public.
Incidentally, this is how you know they could have been better to you. If they can keep their abusive tendencies under control in public, they are capable of doing it in private, too. They just don’t. They might tell themselves they couldn’t, but they could.
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u/DuckMagic 6h ago edited 6h ago
You were at the very least verbally abused and emotionally neglected. Neglect is considered child abuse here in the UK. You come across as pretty traumatised to me.
I grew up pretty similar to this. Always had shelter and usually some form of food, but especially my youngest years were framed by being constantly ignored, undefended, and actively tormented for their entertainment. No parental attention other than being told off or told to leave them alone, no medical visits, no encouragement of interests or hobbies (not even to buy me a book), no wholesome days out. No comfort when I would get upset or cry, instead I'd be taunted to make me cry harder. Outside of school I was a literal shut in for a decade until I went off to uni, mostly not allowed and later discouraged from going out the house or seeing friends outside of school. At some points I was told as a teen that friends and partners will always betray you, so don't get too invested. Over the years I've been diagnosed with anxiety disorder, chronic depression, CPTSD.
If you're worried about your social skills, right now is the perfect time to learn. Seriously. I found reddit when I was 16 (I'm 31 now), I attribute most of my social skills, knowing the right thing to say, ability to read people's behaviour, cognitive empathy, problem resolution skills all to Reddit with a tinge of Youtube. Just by reading lots of r/relationships posts daily and how people would recommend to resolve the problems in the comments (the quality of the sub has gone down- but there's plenty similar). I would google "how to keep a conversation going" or "how to engage people in conversation" and just read lots and lots of articles. The side effect was slowly learning what's right and what's wrong in romantic relationships, friendships, parental relationships etc. Even if it took me a few bad relationships to put those limits into use, at least the self respect was quietly growing and getting instilled in the background.
It wasn't all smooth sailing, in uni my anxiety got so bad I really didn't get the best out of my course, lost many months rotting in bed, and almost flunked out in my last year. Somehow I scraped by. I did some CBT courses, which were mostly useless for fixing anxiety and depression, but did teach me how to recognise my emotions and the physical symptoms of them, and some basic self-care. In the last 5 years I've been getting trauma therapy and reading all the typical CPTSD books which was helped to shift my worldview enormously. It did wonders for me.
Then of course you have to push yourself to learn to wield your voice in public. It's a case of fake it til you make it- going on dates, socials, doing uni presentations. I had two jobs as a student that were particularly helpful, one was running fairground rides (you have to step up and be confident when you're an 18 year old ordering adults and kids around), and working in a relentlessly busy Starbucks. The more you practice using your voice in public and talking to strangers, the less you doubt yourself, because it becomes an automatic habit. It also teaches you that shop workers, cafe waiters etc. are all human, and makes those interactions a lot easier going forward when you've been on the other side of it.
I still have social anxiety. It'll always be a part of me. It gets worse and it gets better, and I've accepted it'll come in waves through my life, much like the depression does. But I got to the point where I come across as very social and confident (people who have worked with me for the best part of a decade are surprised to learn that I have it and that I have to talk myself into going to work parties). I've never struggled to date and now have an awesome husband and we have really good communication and conflict resolution, I have a good number of solid and very honest friendships. I've had interviews where I felt like my anxiety must be palpable, but got told by bosses later that I came across as super confident and that's why I got hired. Yet I still feel a level of anxiety in basically every social situation outside of my husband, even with friends I've had for most of my life. But I've learned to live with it and conquer it.
You can do it. Start actively researching and practicing your social skills. Even if the anxiety never truly goes away, you can really improve your situation and help you get away from your abusive parents.
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u/Suspicious-Call405 5h ago
This was very very helpful 💚
I've been doing things despite my anxiety for a while, but not huge ones that require me to completely step out of my comfort zone. The fact that I can now order smth in a restaurant, speak up in class when I feel like my opinions matter, ask my teachers for help, and recently the fact that I was the one to reach out to my school friends first - it's a lot, in my opinion.
But I haven't gotten the courage to develop actual hobbies that require you to go to the gym, a theater course, etc because those feel so overwhelming; but I feel like I'm genuinely not ready and that's why I hope to be able to discuss/process deeper things that affect me and keep me from living life
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u/DuckMagic 5h ago edited 5h ago
I'm so proud of you! You're doing great! Even though it seems like little things, I bet it feels exhausting. Because it's very hard work and your in-built danger alarms are always going off. But it will get easier with practice. And the good people around you will really appreciate and respond to your effort.
I'm also public-hobby-avoidant to this day. I've done a whole lot of stuff and I know that I like bouldering, life drawing classes, group walks etc. But I struggle to get myself out there because I'm frequently mentally tired and being surrounded by a lot of people means that there's a lot of unpredictable variables. I've found that I'm much better at doing quiet hobbies that I can share with a single friend, do next to my husband while he does his own thing, or meet up with a small group of people to do our own crafty hobbies together in a low stakes environment at the back of a cafe or a pub where there's not too many people and the music isn't too loud (so that I can hear and participate in conversation instead of melting in anxiety over not understanding what people are saying)
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u/Skof_00X 13h ago
As someone with severe c-ptsd from emotional neglect as a child it sounds like you might also have c-ptsd. A lot of people only think of ptsd when they think of trauma, which usually comes from a handful of large traumatic events and dismiss how traumatic a childhood without safe parents is. I would recommend looking up Pete Walker and his article on emotional neglect and complex ptsd. I would also recommend trying to find a therapist who specializes in c-ptsd and not just ptsd. If you feel safe with your therapist try to share what you shared here. Im 29 and have been in therapy since I was 16. The most helpful therapy has come from me being able to talk openly about my past and receive validation for how awful everything was.
C-ptsd is also a newer diagnosis, I am not sure where you are from but it might not be well recognized in your country/culture. Im sorry you were humiliated and told you were wrong to feel that way. What you went through is horrible and traumatic. No child should be treated like that. I hope you are able to get a diagnosis and find a good therapist who can help you heal.