What is Emotional Abandonment?
Emotional abandonment in some ways is self-explanatory in the sense that the words describe precisely what I am trying to convey, which is: being completely on your own to experience your emotional life without any support.
The reason why this is worth talking about is because not having support with this part of life as a young child is actually traumatic.
I understand that for many people that is a statement that they would roll their eyes at, but there is mountains of research to support the idea that one of the key tasks of early childhood development is learning how to manage emotions and to learn what it means to exist in a social world.
While some people might read the words “emotional abandonment” and be like, yes, that is spot on how I felt as a child and for many others they might be confused and wondering if this applies to them. Here are some common experiences that you might have if you were emotionally abandoned as a child:
You have never felt close to your parents. Not even as a small child.
Your parent leaned on you from an early age to discuss their problems, not yours.
You didn't talk to your parents when big things happened, even significant milestones, things you know other kids would have shared.
You engage in people pleasing behaviors.
If you had a problem, your parents were not the ones you went to.
You have trouble identifying and naming your emotions.
It’s difficult to create fulfilling and intimate relationships because it's hard when you get close to others.
You have an extremely hard time stating your needs and setting boundaries.
You have a hard time identifying even what your needs are.
Some of the key things that having emotional support as a young child will teach us are:
The ability to regulate our emotions. This means we learn how to calm down when we are angry, how to cope with sadness and other negative emotions. For very young children we initially do this via co-regulation with a parent or caregiver and eventually we can learn to self-regulate. Unfortunately some people assume kids are ready for this much younger than they are, so it’s possible to have had a parent who initially was very responsive to you, but forced you to begin self-regulation before you were developmentally ready to do so.
The ability to learn what a range of emotions looks like. This means that we see our parents model a healthy range of emotions be it happy, calm, joyful, angry or sad. We don’t only need to see positive emotions. In fact, healthy parenting looks like showing our kids that angry and sadness are okay as long as we they aren’t expressed in ways that are scary to our little ones. It also means that we don’t blame our children for our emotions or make them somehow responsible for managing them. This also feeds into the first item on our list, which is that you then model what it looks like to regulate your negative emotions in healthy ways.
That it’s okay to have and express our emotions! This comes from both modeling by caregiving and supporting the expression of emotions in kids. One classic behavior technique that this eliminates (in my view) is giving children time-outs if they are experiencing negative emotions. Unfortunately this technique teaches kids that it’s not okay for them to express themselves and that they can’t expect support when they are struggling the most. The dividends for supporting your children through the wild ride of their emotions is that you are also supporting their entire sense of self and self-worth. If they are valued and supported by their primary caregivers, they will be able to interalize that experience and that sense of confidence with carry with them into the world.
So, if you are on the other side of this in adulthood, the converse of this list can apply to you. You might have hard time regulating your emotions. You might not understand what a healthy range of emotions looks like. You might have a really hard time with expressing your emotions and even feeling your feelings. None of this means that you might not be successful; in fact, depending on how you adapted many of these behaviors can be rewarded in our professional lives. In fact, you might believe the ability to not get emotional at work is your superpower — but then you get home at night and things fall apart. There are so many ways for this play out, be it through substance misuse, the inability to be in an intimate relationship or suddenly becoming overwhelmed by the emotional demands of having children. Whatever it might be, it probably doesn’t feel good to you and you aren’t sure of where to go from here and frankly, you might not even be sure you have a problem worth fixing. The truth is that only you can decide if it is worth fixing — however, I can assure that you it is possible to unearth your emotional self in a way that is a plethora of emotions: often sad, but mostly empowering. Living a full life with the breadth of emotional experiences is most definately worth it.