Day: October 18, 2022

A lot of people experience feelings of isolation or loneliness caused by fear of rejection. The need to belong is one of the strongest needs all of us experience and to satisfy this need, many of us have difficulty “being ourselves” or even knowing what an authentic person is, let alone knowing how to be authentic.

Modern society and mass media send mixed signals by doling out advice on self-authenticity and promoting it as a positive trait while simultaneously suppressing it through various cultural, societal, and family norms and expectations. Most of us are trying to fit in and to achieve acceptance by those around us. This is why we try to present ourselves in a way that is more consistent with an ideal image of who we think we need to be than with our true selves.

There’s no doubt that self-authenticity is crucial to your mental health and happiness. It’s also quite clear that before forming healthy and loving relationships with other people, you first need to learn to accept and love yourself. There are many barriers preventing us from achieving this goal. Many people struggle to discover who they truly are in the first place, and then to find the strength and courage to unapologetically live their lives as their true selves.

Sometimes being true to yourself, being honest, and setting boundaries may seem hurtful to people in your life who have grown accustomed to another version of you. This is a difficult process, but it does have so many amazing benefits to your personal happiness and your relationships with other people, particularly romantic partners. 

How Does Being Self-Authentic Improve My Relationship?

When it comes to romantic relationships, self-authenticity can feel a bit confusing in the beginning. After all, relationships are about compromise, and that means that sometimes you might need to back down or give up on certain needs and desires.

However, not all needs and desires are of equal importance. Picking your battles and determining what’s essential for your happiness and well-being is the way toward setting healthy boundaries and having a truly meaningful relationship.

Discovering what your true feelings, needs, and principles are and then applying them to your everyday life is easier said than done. However, it’s the most meaningful journey you can embark on. It will improve your personal well-being and the health of your relationship. You can finally:

• Have a true connection with another person by allowing yourself to be seen as you truly are.
• Instead of presenting an inauthentic, thought-out side of yourself, show your vulnerabilities and allow them to be truly seen by the person you love. This will strengthen your connection and intensify the feeling of closeness. 
• Learn to deal with the fear of rejection in a relationship. This is a common issue that prevents people from achieving self-authenticity.
• Stop adjusting your behavior to please others. Without the pressure to act in a way that your partner or other people expect from you, you will liberate your true self so you can open up to people that accept and love you as you are.
• When you stop pretending, even in small and meaningless ways, you will achieve complete openness and honesty in a relationship.
• You will find strength and freedom, and finally, feel liberated from the constraints of an inauthentic personality.
• Learn and begin to hear each others opinions and desires and then co-create a process/answer to the topic at hand to create emotional intimacy.

Accepting and loving ourselves, including our flaws, and negative feelings like anger, fear, and sadness, as uncomfortable as it may seem in the beginning, is the only way that will lead us to our authentic selves. It will make us happier, healthier, and more connected to people in our lives.

How Can I Become More Self-Authentic?

The road to self-authenticity may both seem and actually be quite a difficult transition. First, you have to discover who your true self really is. This is not an easy task and requires self-awareness, mindfulness, and self-acceptance. And then, the people in your life need to get used to the new you as well which can, again, be difficult.

Depending on how big the difference between your “personas” are and how far you need to go to finally become your true self, you might lose some people in the process. Don’t let this stop you. Relationships with people who aren’t accepting of your true self are not the healthiest ones in your life.

When you decide to stop worrying about how other people perceive you, it’s time to begin the process of self-actualization. Take it one step at a time and don’t get discouraged if some of them take longer than you expected. If you’re wondering how to be authentic, consider these traits and inspect if and how they apply to you:

• Believe in yourself and your ability to organize your life according to your needs.
• Don’t lie. Make your opinions known and express them in an honest and healthy way. When you have to say something that might be unpleasant or hurtful to others, try to simply express your opinion without judgment.
• Remember to not deviate from your principles when making important decisions, as suppressing your core values and beliefs won’t make you happy.
• Don’t succumb to other people’s or society’s ideals of success and the pressure to adhere to them.
• Discover your true passions and pursue them.
• Refrain from hiding your feelings and holding onto impossible standards or expectations that you need to be perfectly rational and sensible. Don’t hide your vulnerability.
• Remember, you can’t please everyone. Aside from being impossible, denying your feelings and needs will make you chronically unhappy.
• Stay out of other people’s business. Unless someone asks for your input or help, don’t try to influence or change other people. Authenticity also means letting other people be who they truly are.
• Admit and accept your mistakes, shortcomings, or negative feelings. Being self-authentic doesn’t mean being perfect. Don’t try to place blame on others if you’ve been hurt by not being true to yourself.
• Accepting your imperfections doesn’t mean you can’t work on improving them.

How Can I Develop An Authentic Relationship?

A prerequisite for having a healthy relationship with other people is to first establish a healthy relationship with yourself.  If you care about yourself and become satisfied with the way you live your life and can make important decisions, you’ll feel ready for a healthy relationship with a person who has, hopefully, achieved the same goals.  

Developing an authentic relationship requires challenging work on both sides. Both you and your partner need to firmly decide that this is your goal and arm yourself with patience and strength to follow through. It truly takes an assertive and deliberate effort to overcome the learned behavior patterns that may stem from early childhood.

PIVOT’s Individual & Romantic Relationship Workshops Help Pave The Way Toward Self-Authenticity

It’s only natural to feel overwhelmed by such a challenging task, as most people don’t know where to start or how to achieve these goals on their own. Luckily, you’re not alone and you don’t have to be, as you can turn to professionals to guide you through it and provide all the advice and support you may need.You can start the process with the help and guidance of PIVOT’s relationship advocates who’ll make themselves available to you anytime you need support. Another efficient way to build trust and connection is by attending one of the romantic relationship skill-building workshops. These retreats will provide you with a safe environment to find and express your true self, so you can finally have that healthy, happy relationship most of us long for.

Each of us goes through a process of discovering ourselves and searching for our place in the world, society, and relationships. We grow up in different social environments, some of them liberal, some quite restrictive. Being able to grasp the meaning of being authentic and the main traits of self-authenticity, finding your true self, and feeling free to express it without fear of judgment or punishment can feel like a rare privilege for some.

Even those of us who were lucky enough to be born and live in liberal societies struggle to achieve self-authenticity and are frequently led astray by that nibbling inner voice convincing us that we might not be good enough and explaining how we need to contort our personality to fit that image of perfection that was created for us by society, culture, or family.

However, some studies show that hiding your authentic self may lead to a wide range of negative emotional and psychological consequences, such as low self-esteem, stress, anxiety, and depression among others. Achieving self-authenticity is therefore essential, albeit difficult. 

What Causes Problems With Achieving Self-Authenticity?

Think of all the times you kept your mouth shut when your friends were doing something you considered wrong or had to quietly listen to authority figures wishing you could talk back and express your thoughts and beliefs. 

In doing all these things we actually hurt our true selves. We tell ourselves our feelings don’t matter, consequently drawing subconscious conclusions that we, our true selves, don’t matter. This kind of behavior can provoke feelings of guilt, shame, and angst. Some of the barriers preventing us from achieving self-authenticity are self-imposed while others are imposed by the society we grew up and live in.

The most common issues that might stop us from achieving self-actualization could be:

• Abuse or trauma. Various levels and forms of neglect, abuse, or trauma can leave scars and result in building defense mechanisms to cope with them. This can push people into developing a “false self” quite early in life.
• Genetically determined traits cause differences in temperament and our emotional or psychological predispositions. The genes we inherit from our parents interact with the environment we are born into and shape our future development.
• Family dynamics. No parent is perfect so naturally, interactions with parents or caretakers who might be doing their best can still cause damage to a child’s development of self. In worst cases, various types of abuse or neglect can be severely damaging to a child’s personal identity.
• Gender roles and cultural ideals of how men and women are supposed to act or look are quite strict in most societies. Most of these traits, aside from some genetic differences, are not innate. People adopt a lot of gender stereotypes through socialization, preventing them from expressing their true selves.
• Body issues. This is an extremely powerful pressure people deal with during most of their lives. The mainstream culture sets beauty standards that make most of us feel less worthy if we don’t conform to them or at least strive to through excessive diets, exercise regimens, or corrective surgery.
• The need to constantly appear happy and content, to seem confident even if we’re generally insecure or shy, or not show that we’re nervous whatever the circumstances.
• Conventional ideas of success. Everybody has their own idea of success, and not all of us want great careers, big families, or a lot of money. The definition of success based on status and income makes a lot of people give up their dreams and evaluate themselves according to norms that are far from their own.
• Perfectionism. Trying to be perfect in everything we do and the way we act is an impossible goal some of us subject ourselves to. Studies have shown that many people who strive for perfectionism and are afraid of failure battle depression and experience suicidal thoughts.
• Conforming to rational models of thinking. The idea that our feelings get in the way of being rational and making sound decisions dominates some people’s thinking and makes them suppress their feelings. However, all our feelings, including negative ones like anger, anxiety, or depression are part of our true selves and need to be addressed instead of suppressed.
• Death awareness. At a certain age, all of us get struck by the realization that we and everybody else we know and love will die. This can cause us to adhere to certain ideologies or belief systems, present in our culture or family, that provide comfort and relief from fear of death.

What Are The Signs Of An Inauthentic Person?

It’s quite common for people to take on inauthentic characteristics, attitudes, or behaviors because they feel pressured by others or believe it might help them achieve a certain type of success. We focus on appearances and in doing so we might lose our way and harm both ourselves and those around us.

You can recognize inauthentic people by some of the following behaviors:

• Showing off and being full of themselves.
• They are judgmental and manipulative.
• Hiding their true emotions behind aggression.
• Not admitting their flaws and mistakes.
• Constantly seeking attention.
• They’re people pleasers.
• Demonstrating unrealistic perceptions.
• They’re cynical with a hostile sense of humor.
• Inconsistent.
• Snobby about people they’re friends with, or tend to surround themselves with people they can easily manipulate and exercise their authority over.

How Do You Know You’ve Become Self-Authentic?

This is not an easy question to answer because self-authenticity can mean different things to different people. However, being self-aware, getting to know yourself, and allowing your behavior to reflect those feelings without the need for external validation is an effective way to begin the process of becoming self-authentic. It means caring for yourself and not looking for something outside of yourself to complete you.

What are the traits of an authentic person? You can consider these general guidelines to see if they apply to you and your behavior:

• Being accepting of yourself and other people.
• Being honest.
• Having a healthy ego.
• Admitting and accepting your mistakes and learning from them.
• Living by your principles. 
• Having a realistic perception of reality.
• Being emotionally mature.
• Being considerate to other people.
• Setting boundaries.
• Not feeling threatened by others and their success.

PIVOT Relationship Building Skills Workshops Help Achieve Self-Authenticity And Healthier Connections With Others

Achieving authenticity is certainly not an easy task. It can cause pain and trigger hostility in those who “enjoy” your façade. Some people may distance themselves from you and this may feel like a loss, however, feeling better about yourself is a priority. Living your truth needs to actually have a positive effect on your relationships – the healthy ones, that is.

If you’ve spent a substantial portion of your life adhering to social norms and ideals, it may take considerable effort and commitment to begin the journey to self-authenticity. This might be a long and challenging process, but you don’t have to do it on your own.As your transformation might cause some turbulence when it comes to relationships with people in your life, PIVOT’s relationship advocates can help you navigate these challenging times. Professional guidance is also available through relationship-building skills workshops, which can lead you to achieve fulfilled, happy, and healthy relationships as a new and empowered you.

While the terms neglect and abandonment may sound quite similar and are sometimes used interchangeably, there are significant differences between these two types of behavior that may cause physical and emotional harm to the child or person at the receiving and of it.

When it comes to abandonment issues in childhood, adulthood, and relationships, this term is generally used for describing perpetual thoughts or behaviors driven by fear and anxiety that someone you care about will reject or leave you. On the other hand, emotional neglect involves consistent ignoring or lack of response to any emotional expressions, as well as intimacy or interaction-seeking behavior.

Children, in particular, need the presence of a stable adult figure that will provide consistent attention and affection besides otherwise interacting with the child. Not having these basic needs met can lead to various emotional issues in adulthood.

What Is Considered Emotional Abandonment?

Abandonment issues present a type of anxiety disorder that can encompass a range of behaviors rooted in an irrational fear of loss in different relationships. People experiencing these types of challenges usually struggle with an overwhelming fear that the people they’ve grown attached to will leave or reject them. This compelling sense of being rejected, excluded, or left behind can develop due to continued exposure to an unreliable or absent parent or caretaker.

If you find you’re often battling these feelings in your relationships, it’s quite possible that they originate from your childhood. Unresolved child abandonment problems can come bubbling to the surface due to multiple triggers. There are various reasons for having such feelings and fears as an adult, but some of the most common ones are:

• Not receiving adequate affection and love, or being abandoned by a parent (this includes a difficult divorce).
• Experiencing the death of a close family member or a dear friend.
• Being put in situations that require adult behavior and responsibilities during childhood.

The death of a close family member can be particularly traumatic for children as it is usually the first time they become aware of mortality and begin to question their own. Another typical trigger for these fears is experiencing the divorce of one’s parents. Particularly if one of the parents leaves the family and starts a new one. Children can take this quite badly and suffer the consequences of these events and the feelings they cause for the rest of their lives.

What Are The Signs Of Abandonment Issues In Adulthood?

Abandonment issues may surface later in life in the form of fear of losing your romantic partner or fearing the death of someone you love, without a specific, objective reason. The most common signs of abandonment issues in adults usually include:

• Attaching to people too easily and quickly, whether it’s a new friend or a romantic partner.
• Staying in unhealthy relationships that may involve verbal or physical abuse because being alone seems worse than being in an unhealthy relationship.
• Alcohol or substance abuse, or other types of risky behavior.
• Being a “people pleaser” and going out of your way to do what makes other people happy, disregarding your own needs and feelings in the process.
• Being envious of other people’s relationships and wishing to have what you perceive they have, a perfect relationship.
• Being unable to tolerate longer periods of separation, like when your partner needs to go on a business trip or go out with a friend group without you.
• Being too controlling in every aspect of your relationship, setting rigid standards, and making people in your life live by them because it keeps you safe from losing them.
• Unreasonable jealousy and constant thoughts that your partner is being unfaithful to the point of obsession.
• Not being able to trust other people, including even those closest to you, for example your best friends and family.
• Sabotaging your relationship yourself or choosing emotionally unavailable partners. You might do this to “beat them to the punch.” You set up the relationship to fail so you don’t have to suffer the pain of disillusionment after you get your hopes up.

How Is Abandonment Different From Neglect?

As opposed to neglect that stems from carelessness or not knowing any better, abandonment generally does involve the intentional desertion of a person or a child by someone who was responsible for caring for them. Abandonment may place children at serious risk of physical harm if there’s no other parent or caretaker to assume these responsibilities.

However, even if abandonment doesn’t appear to pose any immediate physical risk to the child’s (or adult’s) wellbeing, it can cause severe emotional distress and pain that can grow over time and develop into a wide range of damaging behavior patterns in adulthood.  In #HealthyAdult I tell my story of losing my father at a young age and although I had a “new” father a year later, the felt sense of loss remained in my body for many years – especially becasue my mother changed by that trauma too and was not the same. To the outside world it appeared as if everything was fine.  Inside the four walls of our home, it was not.

In childhood, those feelings may manifest as intense isolation or other sudden changes in behavior, while in adulthood they can take the form of more severe outcomes that influence one’s ability to form and maintain healthy emotional relationships. Hence, riding the Crazy Train, another analogy that many of our clients can relate to.  Whether you avoid attaching or anxiously attach, there is a seat on the train for you if you do not get help. 

What Are the Consequences Of Emotional Abandonment?

As a response to those feelings and thoughts that may or may not be based on truth, you may have trouble dealing with the fear of abandonment and act insecure, jealous, controlling, or even emotionally manipulative. This could be a behavioral pattern you learned from adults as a child, or one you developed later in life as a coping mechanism and response to rejection.

Some of the most common consequences of emotional abandonment may manifest as:

• People-pleasing. This can be both mentally and physically exhausting and cause you to invest too much of your time and energy into helping others- therefore, neglect your own needs.
• Feeling resentment towards people in healthy/happy relationships.
• Insecurity and self-doubt. These two feelings are related: insecurity means that you lack self-confidence, and self-doubt makes you have negative thoughts about yourself and think that that’s how others perceive you too.
• The need to be physically near your partner. You easily fall into negative thought patterns and feel like you’re incapable of being without your partner or another person you’ve grown attached to.
• Becoming depressed and acting irrationally. You constantly worry that your partner is cheating on you and keep checking on them. This type of jealousy is irrational and usually provoked by your own feelings of not being good enough.
• Constant suspicion that people in your life are not being truthful can lead you to thoughts and actions to convince yourself that pushing them away is the right decision.

PIVOT Helps Beat Negative Thoughts And The Feeling of Abandonment in Your Relationship

If you’re struggling to cope with abandonment issues in your relationship, it’s quite possible that you’re unwittingly harboring certain unresolved emotional problems. Fortunately, even though achieving a healthy state of mind requires a lot of work, professional help is available to guide you through it, every step of the way. This type of coaching can provide you with the tools you need to form and maintain healthy relationships with people you care for.

You can start your journey with the guidance of caring and experienced PIVOT relationship advocates, who can help you discover why you have these feelings, and work towards changing your negative thought patterns, and subsequently, your behavior. If you recognize abandonment issues as the true cause behind your romantic relationship problems, Glass House relationship coaching retreats for individuals can help you achieve self-authenticity and mental wellness to overcome them.

Childhood emotional neglect is a form of child abuse that encompasses a range of behaviors that can be far less obvious than wounds caused by physical abuse. Children can be hurt by their parents or caretakers in ways that don’t include afflicting physical pain and injury.

As terrible as physical abuse is, emotional neglect can be just as damaging and leave significant consequences that continue to follow the neglected child into adulthood and influence their lives in many different ways.

As a form of emotional abuse, child neglect occurs when parents or caretakers fail to acknowledge their child’s emotional needs and appropriately respond to them. This lack of attention to a child’s emotional needs can lead to a variety of negative psychological effects.

Self-isolation, fear, and distrust are some of the most common ones, and in a lot of cases, they translate into lifelong psychological issues. These problems can manifest in many ways, including; educational difficulties, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and trouble forming and maintaining relationships.

What Are The Forms of Child Neglect?

Neglect, as a form of child abuse, involves not meeting the children’s basic needs: physical, medical, educational, and emotional. Physical abuse is just one type of child abuse. Emotional abuse or neglect can inflict just as much damage. Since the signs are not always as obvious, other people may be less likely to notice and intervene.

It’s important to note that some parents don’t mean to harm their children intentionally, they simply might not know any better due to their own upbringing. Both neglect and abuse can be a cycle that repeats for generations. This is called generational trauma which is the transmission  (sending down to younger generations) of oppressive or traumatic effects of a historical event.

Parents who have been victims of abuse or neglect themselves might not even realize they’re doing it; they simply don’t know a better way to parent. Some are struggling with mental health or substance abuse disorders. However, this type of behavior doesn’t happen only in a certain ‘type’ of family or community. It crosses all economic, racial, or cultural borders. 

There are different forms of child neglect and not all of them have to be present at the same time. Generally, ignoring a child’s needs or not paying enough attention to them and leaving them unsupervised can lead to dangerous situations. Even though small children can lack the capacity to understand that there’s something wrong, this type of behavior can still make them feel worthless and unloved, and leave deep, lasting scars and emotional harm that follow them into adulthood.

Neglect can involve a lot of different behaviors, or lack of behavior, which makes it hard to notice. However, in broad terms, there are generally 4 types of neglect:

• Physical neglect involves denying a child the most basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing. This also includes the lack of proper supervision to keep the child safe. Protecting a child from physical harm starts during pregnancy.
• Medical neglect is also a particularly harmful one since it can result in grave consequences to a child’s health or even their life. A child needs proper health care and dental care. Some parents fail to notice or react to their child being sick or hurt or might ignore medical recommendations for various reasons.
• Educational neglect is pretty straightforward to understand, it simply means that parents fail to ensure that their child has access to proper education.  It also includes tending to learning disabilities that go undiagnosed or untreated. 
• Emotional neglect can be a quite complicated one to both define and notice. In the simplest of terms, an emotionally neglected child doesn’t receive the nurture, attention, and stimulation they require. This usually involves ignoring their needs for affection and attention, but it may go as far as humiliating or intimidating them.

What Are The Examples Of Childhood Emotional Neglect?

Even though child neglect can often go unnoticed, the ongoing failure to satisfy the most basic physical and emotional needs usually has some obvious telltale signs. There are ways to notice that a child’s basic needs are persistently not met.

The most obvious examples and effects of neglect on child development include:

• Lack of adequate supervision, or being left alone at home.
• Loss of parent due to death, addiction, mental illness, etc. with no help or support.
• Parent not seeing what the child needs and parenting from a place to selfishly get their own needs met.
• Constant signs of hunger or tiredness.
• Poor personal hygiene.
• Unclean or worn-out clothing.
• Untreated medical problems or injuries.
• Being subjected to frequent or unfair punishment.
• Not showing any affection.
• Speaking to a child in a way that makes them feel worthless.
• Dragging them into a challenging divorce.
• Overdisclosing information that is too advanced for a child.
• Parentifying them at a young age to care for other siblings and/or discharge emotions onto them as if they were the spouse of their parent.
• Not allowing the child to express their views or feelings.
• Preventing the child from engaging in usual social activities, leading to poor social relationships and skills.
• Exposing a child to seeing or hearing the abuse of someone else.

What Are the Long-Term Consequences Of Child Neglect?

All types of abuse and neglect leave lasting scars. Childhood neglect is linked to physical, psychological, and behavioral consequences. They could be independent of each other but are usually interrelated.

Scars of emotional neglect aren’t physical unless they involve injury or self-harm as a very severe consequence. Another way that neglect may cause physical consequences is by inhibiting the development of the child’s brain, leading to psychological issues.

However, emotional scarring also leaves lasting effects throughout one’s life because a child’s sense of self gets damaged, influencing future relationships, and their ability to function in various social environments.

The most common consequences of emotional neglect that carry over to adulthood include a wide range of feelings deeply rooted into one’s personality. A person suffering from the long-term effects of child neglect might be able to understand some of the circumstances or elements of their upbringing that caused them to feel or behave in a certain way, while others can be deeply hidden and subconscious.

The most common long-term consequences are usually:

• The feeling of emptiness and no sense of purpose.
• Not being able to identify or express your own emotions.
• Attachment difficulties and fear of depending on other people.
• Strong fear of rejection.
• Low self-esteem and self-doubt.
• Feeling “different” from others, and having poor relational skills.
• Lack of compassion for both self and others.
• Constant negative feelings like shame, guilt, or self-blame.
• Not being able to stand up for oneself and be assertive.
• Suffering from mental health issues, most commonly anxiety, depression, or posttraumatic stress.
• High-risk behaviors, like alcohol and drug abuse, criminal behavior, or unhealthy sexual behavior.

How Does Child Neglect Affect Adulthood?

Unfortunately, the emotional neglect someone has been exposed to during childhood isn’t something they can simply grow out of and move on. Its effects are lasting and strongly influence a person’s life, worldview, and relationships with others, mainly romantic partners, family, and friends.

Consequences of neglect in early childhood lead to:

• Lack of trust and relationship difficulties. Learning to trust people is crucial for maintaining healthy adult relationships. Adults that were neglected as children might not know what a good relationship is.
• Feeling “worthless” or undeserving. These feelings are extremely hard to overcome if you grew up with them. They may cause a lack of ambition, neglecting your education, or settling for less because you don’t believe you deserve more.
• Emotion regulation issues. People who were neglected in childhood may have difficulty identifying their emotions or feeling safe to express them. This is why they bottle down and suppress their true personality, views, and emotions until they burst out in unexpected ways. Anxiety, depression, or anger are common mental health issues that may lead to alcohol or drug use to escape painful feelings.

When it comes to forming relationships with other people, particularly romantic ones, the consequences of child neglect can present a specific type of challenge. People who suffered emotional neglect as children have difficulty trusting other people, so relying on their partners or depending on others can make them feel uncomfortable and cause fear or anxiety.

PIVOT’s Here To Help You With The Negative Consequences Of Childhood Emotional Neglect With Expert Intimacy Coaching

Being or becoming aware of the damage childhood neglect has caused doesn’t mean you can just snap out of it. It’s difficult to unlearn all the patterns of behavior and feeling whose seeds were planted so long ago and are now deeply seated in every part of your being. When it comes to achieving healthy romantic relationships, resolving these issues and finding your authentic self are crucial. It takes compassion and willingness, as well as professional help to begin unpacking the damage that was done to you so long ago. Emotional intimacy coaching is an integral part of the healing process. It helps you adopt new ways of thinking and deal with your unresolved feelings. Let our PIVOT relationship advocates guide you along the way to new and healthy behavior patterns. With the PIVOT process, behavioral change is possible!

Emotional neglect in adult relationships can result from certain behavior patterns learned during childhood. Since primary family systems generally serve as a model which individuals measure their future adult relationships, childhood neglect can often leave permanent scars and distort one’s view of the world, their place in it, and their relationships with other people.

If maintaining romantic relationships seems challenging and you feel like you can’t achieve happiness no matter what you do, it might be useful to start looking for common denominators of your discontent. You could be choosing partners who exhibit the same type of behavior towards you, or you may feel trapped by a pattern of behavior that makes you put your own needs aside.

Whatever the case, if you lack intimacy in your relationship, it may be time to think about the actual causes behind your challenges and find out how to make the necessary changes to step into a more fulfilled partnership.

What Are The Examples Of Emotional Neglect?

As opposed to abuse, emotional neglect isn’t something that happens to a person, it’s about the absence of the actions which would fulfill your emotional needs. People need to feel seen, loved, cared for, and to know that they matter. When it comes to romantic relationships, providing these needs to one another requires emotional intelligence. Some people pick up these needs when they are young if they’re lucky enough to grow up in a loving household. Sadly, that’s not always the case.

If emotional awareness, validation of your feelings, and the ability to talk about them weren’t present in your childhood, you might not have learned those skills at a young age and are sometimes unable to identify and express your feelings in a healthy manner. You might not even expect those who love you to show interest and concern about your feelings and provide you the space to express and discuss them. The lack of such an awareness may prevent you from having emotionally enriched and connected relationships with life in general.

In such cases, one or both partners involved in a relationship often miss essential emotional cues and fail to notice and respond to each other’s needs. When this is a consistent pattern of behavior, left unaddressed for too long, it may cause considerable damage to the relationship and can require a substantial effort to repair. And, a repair you might not perceive as worthwhile due to your own lack of self esteem.

What Does Being Neglected Mean?

There’s significantly more research on child abuse and neglect, but the main signs of emotional neglect in adult relationships are similar for both children and adults, so they can be used to recognize this issue in adult relationships as well.

If you’re trying to figure out the reasons behind the problems present in your relationship, look for the most common signs and examples of emotional neglect in an adult relationship.  Ask yourself:

• Does your partner minimize, dismiss or ignore your feelings?
• Are you being mocked or criticized whenever you open up about your feelings or show vulnerability?
• Are your emotional needs for reassurance and comfort dismissed as childish or unimportant?
• Do you feel like all your painful experiences are downplayed, even when you’re obviously having a tough time?
• Are you expected to put aside your feelings, even during hardships, and go on like nothing’s wrong?
• Are you missing attention, affection, and validation from your partner?
• Do you feel lonely or alone in your relationship?
• Are you being made fun of or disparaged when you reach out for help or support?
• Do you get cold and disinterested reactions from your partner?
• Do you stifle your discontent and tolerate unfair treatment or lack of respect?
• Are your needs and requests often ignored?
• Do you miss intimacy, closeness, romance, and other positive interactions with your partner?
• Is your partner frequently giving you the silent treatment to manipulate you into changing your behavior or as a form of “punishment”?

What Are The Negative Psychological Effects Of Neglect?

These types of behavior are naturally perceived as rejection and being an adult doesn’t necessarily help you rationalize your feelings or the causes that drive your partner’s behavior. When it comes to emotions, our brains may jump right back into that “abandoned child” mind frame.

This happens because situations like these cause our brains to react as they would to a physical injury. Since the same pain receptors activate, we may feel intense fear and, naturally, the need for protection and comfort. This type of reaction has been described by certain neuroscience studies that point to the immense power of emotions and the way we deal with them. Aside from our subjective feeling of (un)happiness, fostering negative emotions was proven to be detrimental to our physical health and connected to numerous health problems.

If your partner fails to provide the much-needed care and attention, this perpetuates the cycle of neglect and may cause a lasting feeling of abandonment and unworthiness. Not feeling worthy of your partner’s love and attention for prolonged periods can cause severe psychological effects and disorders.

Some of the most common effects of emotional neglect include:

• Restlessness, anxiety, depression, or other more severe psychiatric disorders.
• Mood swings, sudden outbursts, and difficulty regulating your emotions.
• High-risk behaviors, including substance use disorder, or other types of addiction.
• Lack of confidence and low self-esteem, feeling insecure and unlovable.
• Fear, shame, guilt, anger, or other negative emotions.
• Heightened self-criticism and a negative self-image.
• Hiding or burying your emotions, not being able to open up to anyone.
• Inability to form close relationships due to trust issues.
• Poor social skills, inability to ask for help or accept it when offered, or difficulty setting boundaries.
• WIthdrawal into solitude and avoidance of social situations.

How Do You Cope With Neglect In A Relationship?

Unfortunately, if you feel neglected and unloved for a long time, and your partner fails to notice and respond to your feelings, this might permanently damage your relationship. If you start feeling that you can’t rely on your partner, there are steps you could take to try and salvage your relationship by raising awareness about the issues that are causing your unhappiness.

Mending romantic relationships that have been going in the wrong direction for too long is certainly a challenging task, but not an impossible one. When you start examining your feelings more closely, you can begin to understand what’s wrong instead of avoiding or dismissing critical issues.

This process can be painful for both partners, but if you’ve been neglected for a long time, concentrating on your own well-being and validation of your feelings is a priority. Once you both recognize your own and each other’s patterns of behavior that have led you to this point, you can choose to put in the necessary effort and change them. Or not.  The most important thing to do in the long run is to reparent those parts of self that were neglected and choose partnership from your Healthy Adult self. Our #HealthyAdult book can help you understand more of what this article is saying and can be found on Amazon. 

PIVOT Can Help You Overcome Abuse & Neglect With Expert Relationship Intimacy Coaching

If you feel ready to try to revive your relationship or tend to your own well-being and self-authenticity, there are ways to get professional help and support. You can let PIVOT’s relationship coaches lead you towards your set goals after they help you decide what they are. Whether you choose one of the empowering Glass House retreats, personalized individual sessions, or relationship intimacy coaching, you’ll be in safe hands. When you engage in PIVOT, there are two facilitators for each couple to assure everyone is fully seen, heard, and supported.  Our couples intensives can significantly change the direction of your relationship and begin to create a deeper level of understanding and connection. Finding the will and strength to change is an attainable goal! 

When it comes to romantic relationships some people tend to repeat the same patterns of behavior and make similar choices to the ones that had already proven themselves detrimental to both their well-being and their relationship. So why do so many of us keep making the same mistakes?

Most of our adult behaviors and feelings frequently stem from certain unresolved issues that punctuated our childhood. The challenges of many romantic relationships often arise from unconscious childhood neglect. Those who grew up with consistent emotional neglect and experienced it as “normal” at an early age might have difficulty connecting intimately to other people in general, particularly in romantic relationships.

Although it doesn’t make sense to keep staying in relationships that make us miserable, some of us keep tolerating diverse types of neglectful behavior even in our adult life because it’s familiar if that’s what we learned through the family dynamics of our childhoods.  Simply put, we are drawn to whats familiar regardless of merit.

What Is Considered Neglect?

The word neglect almost instinctively makes us think of an abandoned child. But neglect doesn’t necessarily refer to a lack of food, shelter, or clothing. Those are the most severe and evident types of neglect and the most usual forms of child abuse, but children can also be deprived of other basic needs that involve lack of attention and affection.

Emotional neglect during early childhood can be a particularly crucial factor in an individual’s ability to achieve healthy adult relationships. The reason for this is children subconsciously adopt damaging behavioral patterns as ‘normal’, and shape their ideas and perception of themselves and others according to these patterns. This can influence their attachment style formation, and subsequently their behavior patterns in adult relationships.That is why in the PIVOT process we use the term #HealthyAdult. We WANT people who had complex childhoods and feel like they struggle in relationships that there IS a solution. 

Attachment style is a frequent topic of conversation when relationships aren’t working out, as it strongly influences the choice of a life partner. It’s often cited as a root cause of some relationship difficulties, so by recognizing their attachment patterns people can discover what made them relate to others in certain ways and why.

What Are the Different Types of Neglect?

Emotional neglect is often misunderstood because it’s not as evident and clearly defined as abuse, the signs of which are easily identified and noticeable. While physical abuse is about what was done to someone, emotional abuse is often about what wasn’t done. It’s about everything that’s missing, such as a failure to provide a child (and later, a partner) with attention and behavior that corresponds to their emotional needs. Often, adults who were neglected in childhood have unrealistic expectations of their partners.  Wanting their partner to “right” the “wrong” that was done to them. 

There are diverse types of neglect, both in children and adults, but they translate quite clearly from the early stages of life to adulthood. Generally, there are six main types of neglect during childhood which can carry the most impact on our adult lives:

• Physical neglect occurs when children are denied basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter.
• Medical neglect is when they don’t receive the necessary and timely medical care when ill or injured.
• Supervisory neglect happens when parents or caregivers fail to protect their child from being harmed.
• Environmental neglect usually refers to unsanitary or otherwise inappropriate living conditions that may lead to illness or other harm. This is considered by some experts to be a form of physical neglect.
• Educational neglect is denying children access to education and not helping them when the educational demands are complex for their specific learning challenges.
• Emotional neglect:  All the above types of neglect may strongly influence a child’s development into an adult battling various psychological issues. However, emotional neglect is the one we’re exploring, as it may directly correlate with the development of a wide range of difficulties and problematic patterns in our adult relationships and attachment styles, and potentially lead to an attachment disorder.

Individuals experiencing childhood neglect may keep having the same feelings even as adults when they enter romantic relationships, and they may find themselves craving attention. Recognizing the origin of these intense feelings and types of neglect in adults are particularly important steps towards learning to deal with them and making significant changes to behavior patterns.

What Are the Signs of Neglect in Your Relationship?

When it comes to neglect in adult relationships, it’s important to keep in mind that emotional neglect may not be as evident as abuse because it’s not about what happens – it’s about what’s missing. In a romantic relationship, emotional neglect can appear in the form of continuous failure to notice a partner’s feelings and respond to them appropriately.

This can make us feel invisible and unworthy of care, and even make us neglect ourselves. Some people could experience serious depression or engage in high-risk behaviors, either to draw attention to themselves or to escape unpleasant feelings.

The most common signs of neglect in a relationship may include:

• Having a tough time expressing your feelings, or even identifying them.
• Having trust issues.
• Not being able to experience sincere empathy.
• Frequently feeling guilt or shame.
• Excessive worry or fear.
• The constant need to please people.
• Persistent feelings of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and lack of joy.
• Feeling disconnected from yourself and others.
• Anger directed both at oneself and others.
• Perfectionism.
• Excessive fear of failure.
• Not being able to ask for help. 

All these feelings may point to the fact that your attachment needs aren’t met. The need for attention and the feeling that you matter aren’t something you ever “grow out of”.

How Can You Tell That It’s Time to Seek Help?

Most of the feelings listed above may culminate over time and lead to actions and behaviors your relationship might not survive, or if it does, it can do so by potentially causing great damage to your mental health. Think about these types of behavior and whether they’re consistently present in your relationship:

• You confide in people other than your partner, usually friends or family members.
• You feel like you’re “alone” in the relationship.
• You don’t engage in any social activities together.
• You prefer spending time alone to spending it with your partner.
• When you try to talk about the issues that are bothering you, your partner shuts down or ignores you.
• You keep suppressing your feelings.
• You frequently feel powerless and overwhelmed.
• You feel like you can’t act naturally and be yourself around your partner.
• You delay making important decisions, like having children or setting any long-term goals.

If emotional neglect is the type of behavior you became accustomed to during childhood, you may have been suppressing your emotions for too long to even be aware that you’re doing it. Studies show that these issues might lead to mental illness and substance abuse. However, they are certainly preventable with the right kind of help.

Trying to recognize these signs in your relationship is only the first step. Finding the will and strength to change may prove to be a challenging task for many. This is where help from others is of immense value.

PIVOT Workshops Can Help Build Trust in Your Relationship and Break the Cycle of Emotional Neglect

Changing the behavior you’ve been learning all your life as a way to ease your discomfort and unpleasant feelings may not be easy, but it’s certainly achievable. One of the ways to begin to deal with these feelings and behavioral patterns is by taking part in a Glass House workshop and starting to build trust in your relationship. PIVOT relationship advocates can provide the support and help you need to address the damaging behaviors. As you progress and feel the ability and strength to stop the cycle you’ve been trapped in, true change can finally happen.