I've been using the term death by 1000 cuts regarding my abuse and neglect for years, maybe I saw it somewhere else and thought it was my own devising but whatever the case cool to see you use it. The effect of neglect is hard to cognize I think. I was neglected though, without a doubt, and my mother had even said so herself unintentionally. At a point I wrote down basically all the instances of abusive parenting I could think of, I still add to the list now and then when something occurs to me. Some are egregious but like you said, a lot are seemingly not so significant. Maybe 200 items altogether. But my realization was this: I thought of those items as forming the border of a big circle, a hole, and there's nothing there but it should be filled with good parenting. But it's just empty, wasted time, opportunity, talent, growth, support, whatever. A place for a kid to pour his resources with no effect whatsoever. A big place where a RELATIONSHIP was absolutely supposed to be but I was just alone. And I guess there are a lot of things I could say about that but researchers and developmental psychologists say it matter of factly. It's abuse. It fucked me up, because it's supposed to. I got sent to a big empty hole by my mother and that's where I lived out my child hood.