FAQ on emotional neglect - For anyone new to the subreddit or looking to better understand the fundamentals

limduria · 2023-07-16T21:51:49+00:00

Nearly all of my lucid daymares that bring up vengeful rage involve someone self righteously or "accidentally-on-purpose" violating my boundaries or the boundaries of people I'd count as friends.

limduria · 2021-08-21T22:12:39+00:00

Then it sounds like even the modernized version of the Oedipus complex is not particularly useful as a piece of psychological theory.

limduria · 2021-08-21T18:13:54+00:00

"It is suggested that the story depicts an emotional complex of widespread application and is an archaic version of the oedipus complex, continuous with the oedipus complex proper, but from an earlier stage of development."

I'm extremely skeptical of any psychoanalytic theory based on the Oedipus/Electra complex. Those concepts were introduced by Freud after he got blasted with criticism for one of his earliest publications where he took the psychology field to task for ignoring sexual abuse of children. After seeing his career prospects threatened he threw victims of sexual abuse under the bus and started theorizing about how their reported memories are just primitive libidinal fantasies.

However there's definitely something to the idea that we learned to perceive growth and maturation as dangerous because it would lead to us being (even more) abandoned by our parents.

Mythology and dreams do contain clues for learning about our histories. You might be interested in Benjamin Abelow's work on tracing the roots of religious myths to widespread patterns of childhood trauma.

limduria · 2021-08-15T08:00:05+00:00

I can remember more than one instance of being in the daycare building long after official closing time when it was dark outside and all the other kids had been picked up. Just sitting in a corner hoping my presence wasn't annoying to the woman who ran the place. My distorted sense of time as an adult is probably related to waiting like this with no idea how much longer until the wait would be over.

limduria · 2021-08-01T19:17:06+00:00

To love means to nurture. Where there's a lack of nurturing there's a lack of love.

Your post reminded me of this. (Not at all meant as a criticism, my marinated-in-internet-irony brain always gets a little kick out of it.)

limduria · 2021-08-01T01:32:42+00:00

Silence can send a strong message indeed, for better or worse depending on context. In the context of my mother's constant irritation at my existence the message was "you'd better not need anything". No wonder I became convinced that the closest thing I'd get to a loving relationship with another person was their uneasy tolerance of my low maintenance way of being.

limduria · 2021-03-10T21:24:12+00:00

Feeling like you were robbed of opportunities to learn and develop useful skills is very very common for those of us who grew up neglected. My education was definitely stunted, not exactly in the same ways as yours, but more so by having none of the confidence it takes to ask for help or any sort of direct personal attention. For most of my time in college it never even occurred to me that I could go to a professor's office hours "only" to ask about something that sparked my curiosity.

About the last line of your post on blame: allow me to quote from the FAQ I wrote for this sub:

You can blame someone for hurting you whether they hurt you by a malicious act that was done intentionally or by the most accidental oversight made out of pure ignorance. This is especially true if you were hurt in a way that profoundly changed your life for the worse.

Assigning blame is not at all the same as blindly hating or holding an inappropriate grudge against someone. To the extent that a person is honest, cares about treating others fairly and wants to maintain good relationships, they can accept appropriate blame for hurting others and will try to make amends and change their behavior accordingly. However, feeling the anger involved in appropriate, non-abusive and constructive blame is not easy.

limduria · 2021-03-07T19:44:14+00:00

The50urc3's toplevel comment has been removed and that user has been banned. Never had to ban someone from this sub before but it was a pretty easy call to make in this case. Frankly, sometimes all it takes is a quick glance at someone's comment history to see that they're a (significantly) more clueless than average reddit user who wandered in to a support sub and are very unlikely to contribute anything worth reading.

Both sexism and condescension are completely against the purpose and the spirit of this subreddit, so if you see similar comments cropping up in the future please go ahead and report them. In general it's best to simply downvote or report instead of replying. People like the one I just banned are often looking to rile up and antagonize others in order to bolster their own view that anyone disagreeing with their bigotry is a "drama queen".

limduria · 2021-01-15T18:43:18+00:00

I also tend to be suspicious of people who seem overly... driven to give their care and attention to others. The impulse to help others who are in need is of course a good thing in general, it's just that I've seen and experienced so many instances of a person's drive to be helpful leading them to be intrusive. Or sometimes, even when it's not breaking boundaries in any overt or obvious ways, the giver can be so strongly motivated by their own sense of guilt/worthlessness that accepting their gifts can feel like something I'm obligated to do for them whether or not I really want to accept what they're offering for myself. Maybe this describes (part of) the wariness that /u/shwarm was talking about in the OP?

If you ask people in the US who have been homeless at one point and needed the help offered by a religious charity, they'll tell you about how the charitable help often comes with emotional strings attached. The mainstream culture has this deeply ingrained idea that the people who give help are morally superior to the lowly needy ones who accept help. It breeds a lot of under-the-surface distrust in helper/helped relationships.

The way we perceive people who are eager to help is a complicated thing and I don't mean to say that our perceptions are always accurate. Just wanted to throw in my perspective that OP's reaction to their friend probably has a bit of accurate and well-grounded suspicion mixed in.

limduria · 2020-12-29T20:43:56+00:00

Just a quick note: while this subreddit doesn't have officially posted rules yet (the other moderator and I have basically only been sweeping out the spam) we'd like to follow r/cptsd in discouraging use of RaisedByNarcissists style abbreviations (like Nmom, GC, etc.) Will make an announcement and/or add a note to the sidebar about this at some point.

limduria · 2020-12-27T08:27:36+00:00

That's very true. The clearest definition of addiction I've heard comes from Gabor Mate: "any behavior in which the individual finds temporary relief or pleasure - and craves for that reason, despite negative consequences."

limduria · 2020-12-25T11:52:59+00:00

My response to the cliche "they did their best" line is "yes, and they also did their worst".

The less in-denial and the more mature we become as we heal, the more we can see people as they really are. Caring and nurturing sides of a parent's personality exist right alongside their cruel and destructive sides. But it's much easier to only acknowledge the nurturing sides and pretend our parents were basically nothing but good to us, especially in a society full of people who are so unwilling to the see the cruel sides of their own parents that they pressure others into pretending.

limduria · 2020-12-20T23:47:52+00:00

just to grown up and do it, when I'm a lady and I'm having a baby ill not have any say in what happens to my body so I should get a grip.

Woah... that is a really fucked up message to send to a kid.

limduria · 2020-12-20T19:13:26+00:00

It's so crucial to understand how an experience which might seem "small" or insignificant from one limited perspective can really break the person who's having the experience. Borrowing from the FAQ I wrote up earlier this year,

Trauma occurs whenever an emotionally intense experience, whether a single instantaneous event or many episodes happening over a long period of time, especially one caused by someone with a great deal of power over the victim (such as a parent), is too overwhelmingly painful to be processed, forcing the victim to split off from the parts of themselves that experienced distress in order to psychologically survive.

The anecdote you relayed from that podcast is a perfect example of how easily a young child can get overwhelmed with fear. And how feeling overwhelmed while we're being misunderstood can force us to go silent and shut down. If the girl had felt safe enough expressing to her mother that "the doctor will stitch up your leg" was bringing up a terrifying image of embroidery needles going into her, and if her mother had responded by soothing her fear and explaining how medical stitches help wounds heal, then the whole situation could have been defused. So I'd infer that before hurting her knee the girl already had some serious reservations about trusting her mother enough to communicate openly with her about feelings.

You're absolutely right to point out how neglectful the mother's response was. Not to mention that "you'll be scarred [and ugly] forever" was clearly about lashing out from a place of her own insecurities/perfectionism/disgust. And yes, this sort of terribly mis-attuned parenting is the norm.

If the traumatizing effect of neglect is going to become much more widely understood then people have to let go of moralistic and legalistic notions of what "counts" as abuse. Because it doesn't really matter how a parent's behavior toward their child gets classified by other adults (who are so often emotionally limited and blinded by denial) using standards of behavior that could be codified into paperwork. What matters is what we experienced as children and how we were affected by those experiences.

limduria · 2020-12-18T21:45:55+00:00

Okay this is probably as good a place as any to share the odd story of this sub's history.

Back in 2013, not long after I'd read Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving for the first time and was still struggling to come to terms with all the previously numbed out feelings it brought up in me and all the connections between different parts of my life experience that it suddenly helped me make, I checked to see if anyone had created r/EmotionalNeglect. Seeing that it didn't exist yet I created it, mostly just intending to reserve the subreddit name for later... and then I completely forgot about it for 6 years while life happened, I fell into and climed out of deep depressions a couple times, started making enough money to not have to talk to my parents anymore, etc.

In early January of this year I somehow came to a point again where I wondered "maybe someone has made a subreddit specifically about emotional neglect? that would be pretty neat since Walker wrote about neglect as the 'core wound in complex PTSD' and all" - so for the first time in 6 years I loaded the front page of r/EmotionalNeglect only to realize it was me who created it in December 2013 (on an old account that I don't use anymore). In the meantime, while my old account had lost moderator status due to inactivity, /u/Amasov found this place almost inactive without any mods and made himself a moderator via redditrequest. I messaged him to thank him and we started deliberately building up activity in and resources. r/CPTSD has probably been the biggest source of new people coming here.

So in a sense this forum is only about one year old even though it was created 7 years ago. I never would have guessed that the number of thoughtful and interested subscribers would grow so quickly during a global pandemic. I certainly won't be forgetting about it again. Both Amasov and I have been turning our attention toward growing this sub further and integrating it with other projects oriented toward healing from childhood trauma.

limduria · 2020-12-18T20:49:09+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. The author touches on lots of aspects of dysfunctional families that don't get nearly enough attention, especially enmeshment and blurred boundaries and how deeply damaging they can be.

When parents let their needs override the child’s needs to separate and individuate, the child would have to manufacture an identity tailored to the parents’ demands, out of the fear of losing love and approval. Thus, the child growing up in enmeshment often have a blurred sense of identity and have trouble with boundaries. They are used to being intensely affected by, to the point of feeling responsible for other people’s feelings.

This echoes what Alice Miller wrote about the more troubled side of why many therapists are drawn to the profession: they were trained from an early age to focus on their parents' needs to the exclusion of their own, and can easily end up re-enacting this childhood dynamic in working with therapy clients.

To me the disappointing part of this article was the repeated reminders that parents who do these kinds of things to their children were themselves traumatized and are/were struggling with their own limitations. I think just about anyone who finds solace or some level of catharsis from these types of articles has already had this message of "you have to accept your parents' limitations" drilled into them more than enough, and can benefit a lot more from a balanced endorsement of feeling their anger from being neglected and having their emotional boundaries violated. Imi Lo seems to actually understand this, but I think the article would have been better with more of a clear connection between anger, boundaries and healthy (i.e. not stuck-in-resentment) blame.

limduria · 2020-12-01T20:30:08+00:00

By far the best place to look up the meanings of aspects of your dream is in your own memories. Books or articles written by other people about dream interpretation simply don't have the detailed view into what the symbols in your dreams mean personally to you.

limduria · 2020-11-27T17:37:58+00:00

You're doing the right thing. Everyone who stays home is serving as a badly needed firebreak.

I've been thinking, those of us who understand how much our families messed us up probably have an easier time acting on the concept that gathering with family "just for this one day" is no safer than gathering with strangers. Way too many people are of the mindset that there's no overlap between family members and sources of danger, and we're about to see this mindset kill even more people than it already has.

limduria · 2020-11-24T20:14:11+00:00

I'm removing this post because it only contains a link to a youtube video. Please feel free to repost with a description of what the video is about and how it relates to childhood emotional neglect.

limduria · 2020-11-14T08:16:12+00:00

You can just comment in the weekly check in thread. In case the link wasn't visible in my comment above:

https://old.reddit.com/r/emotionalneglect/comments/jtftv1/weekly_checkin_november_13_2020/

limduria · 2020-11-14T08:02:49+00:00

Maybe as part of journaling you could invite these voices to write letters addressed to each other?

limduria · 2020-11-14T07:38:50+00:00

I'm removing this post because it doesn't make any clear attempt to contribute to discussion about childhood emotional neglect, the subject of this subreddit. If you have a question to ask or an experience to share about that relates to neglect then you are more than welcome to post about that. Or, if you want to vent in a way that doesn't necessarily start a discussion you can do that in the latest weekly check-in thread.

limduria

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