Emotional Neglect Creates Insecure Adults

Have you ever wondered how emotional neglect can affect a child’s entire life? Well, the fact is that it can actually make them very insecure adults.

Want to know why? Read on and we will try to explain.

Self-confidence and self-esteem

Self-confidence and self-esteem are incredibly important. They greatly help us avoid problems when we interact with people around us.

They help us to value our own rights. We do not have to be passive or aggressive to achieve this. We do this by respecting other people’s rights.

Although it seems like something that should be quite simple, it is not always so easy.

Most people are not as independent as they should be, sometimes hardly at all. To try to find out why we often need to look back on our own childhood.

People who grew up in a home that was dominated by emotional neglect have never managed to develop self-confidence or self-esteem afterwards.

By emotional neglect we mean in this case when other people ignore our feelings.

Emotional development in the shadow of emotional neglect

Here are some characteristics that indicate a good self-esteem:

Judge for yourself

You have the opportunity to assess your own behavior and take responsibility for your actions. What we mean here is that you have the right not to have to explain your actions.

You also have the right to judge whether you really want to accept responsibility for solving other people’s problems. You also have the right to change your mind, make mistakes and say “no”, etc.

Express your feelings

It has become clear that people who have been brought up by parents or guardians who felt that expressing feelings was something negative are more likely not to be aware of their own rights.

If your parents ignored your thoughts or punished you for having your own opinions, you subconsciously believe that your feelings and needs do not matter.

Emotional neglect creates insecure adults

To see if this is the case in your life, ask yourself if people have said phrases like these to you: “You can not let others know how you feel or what you really think” or “Whatever you do, do nothing which causes inconvenience. ”

If the answer is yes, it has almost certainly been your parents or guardians who have said it.

Even if you are not aware of it, they are incorporated into your subconscious and they still affect your behavior, even though you may already be an adult.

So, what is emotional neglect?

Emotional neglect, when it comes from parents, is the inability to respond effectively to children’s emotional needs.

One of the most important tasks of parents is to validate their children’s feelings. To show them how they can be channeled effectively. Parents should be the emotional reference point for their young children, because they turn to us for help in all aspects of their lives.

If parents cannot recognize these feelings, the child will not know what to do, because he or she has learned to believe that what he or she is thinking or feeling is not right and proper.

As a result, the child does not trust his feelings or instincts. The child has a very low self-esteem when it reaches adulthood. In addition, it is common for adults who were brought up in this way to find it difficult to express their feelings in an independent way.

All this means that they usually go to either one extreme or the other. Either they let people trample on them or they relate to others in a really aggressive way.

The importance of developing one’s self-confidence and self-esteem

You can develop your self-confidence and self-esteem at all stages of life, but especially during childhood. It is worth knowing how to recognize your own feelings and how to name them.

You need to learn to understand how you feel and why in order to handle your emotions better.

You should also be aware of your own rights. That you as a human being should be treated with respect.

Of course, it is also important that you know how to value the opinions of others.

You need to understand that you can disagree with others without judging or belittling them when they think differently than you do. Of course, this is exactly what you need to demand from others.

All this will help you develop a healthy self-confidence and a good self-esteem. Something that helps you understand that making mistakes does not mean we are worth less. On the contrary – mistakes can enrich us and help us grow as human beings.

By putting all these things into practice, we do not feel as threatened by others. We become free to live our lives the way we are truly meant to do.