IN SEARCH OF LOVE
Childhood is a tricky time. As is parenting. And while the vast majority of parents do the very best they know how, sometimes it just isn’t enough. Sometimes the scars last a lifetime.
Physical neglect might be more obvious to observe. A lack of basic needs like food, clothing, housing or physical safety is more easily recognised. Very difficult to recover from and frequently ignored in society. But still, quite clear to witness if you’re looking. If it is witnessed.
Childhood emotional neglect is hidden
A lot of statistics lump all childhood abuse and neglect under one big statistical banner – which brings us the fairly shocking number of one in seven Australian children suffering the trauma of abuse and neglect. Abuse and neglect both have life-altering consequences – although they often go hand in hand, they are not the same thing.
Abuse is defined as an act of commission and neglect is defined as an act of omission in the care leading to potential or actual harm. [National Library of Medicine]
In other words, abuse is something that is done and neglect is something that isn’t done. Abuse might be physical or sexual. Neglect might be an absence of food, clothing, housing or in my case, emotional support. There is often a lot of crossover between abuse and neglect. I have only experienced childhood emotional neglect.
I grew up with abundant physical safety. All my physical needs were met. Although food was bountiful in our household, beautifully cooked and presented by my mother, I was placed on a permanent diet from the age of three weeks old to try and modify my body’s natural size and shape. Because my mother wasn’t comfortable with it. She meant well but her concern and obsession with my weight created lifelong eating disorders for both me and my sister. But all in all, there was good food available in my house. All our physical needs were met.
Love however, was non-existent
In hindsight, I can recognise that my parents and grandparents loved me. They just had no idea how to express it or show it in any way at all. My mother died a painful death from breast cancer at the age of 65. By the time she died we had healed a lot of our fractious relationship. After she died there was a message she’d left for me that said, “Thank you for your friendship.” It was the most loving thing she had ever done for me.
I spent my entire life feeling unloved by her.
My father was not demonstrative with his love but his eyes showed care more than my mother’s ever did. He was a happy man. Before he died at age 87 he said he was sorry we’d never been a family that showed love. He told me he was proud of me and that he loved me. It was the only time in all my years that anyone in my childhood family said they loved me. Just the one time. Right before he died. My very last words to him before he slipped into a coma were, “I love you dad.”
Childhood emotional neglect involves overlooking and dismissing some or all the emotional needs of a child — whether deliberately or inadvertently. [Psych Central]
Criticism is hard to take at any time, but constant criticism is soul-numbing. My mother was hypercritical. My father balanced the scales to some extent but because I grew up in the seventies and he was a professional musician, quite often he was absent. He could be a hands-on dad but the vast majority of the parenting was left to my highly anxious, highly critical mother. She had three children all of whom were quite a handful in their own way and it can all be summed up as she didn’t really cope well.
There was no emotional support at all. I remember learning to hide all my emotions because they were too much for her. Tears weren’t allowed. But even being excited was frowned upon. I learned to become extremely contained. And as my natural tendency is to be highly emotional, there was a lot of containing to be done. But I did manage it for almost five decades.
All my chickens came home to roost in 2015
When life became emotionally very difficult it turned out I had never learned any emotional skills at all. I had used eating disorder behaviours my entire life to numb things away. And if I’m being perfectly honest here, once I escaped my home environment and got myself to university, my life became fairly cruisey. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary to stress about. I found a career and got married and had kids and really it all just went quite well for quite a few years.
But life eventually throws curveballs to all of us and I didn’t know how to catch them. My demise began. Emotions overwhelmed me and I had no ability to adapt. I started to self-harm, my eating disorder escalated, and a lifetime of repressed suicidality started creeping to the surface. I ended up in the psychiatric hospital three times.
It took five years of psychological and pharmaceutical therapy to recover. But here I am today. Very well and recovered. One of the biggest things I discovered during all my therapies however was that a lack of love and care throughout my childhood had a long-lasting impact on me that I was having to come to terms with in my middle years.
I spent my entire life searching for love
I married a very good man when I was 26. He is definitely a good man. Loyal and patient and supportive. He shows love by cooking dinner and building stuff and fixing cars and being a hands-on dad and sharing in household tasks and agreeing to all my spontaneous requests to do this that or the other. And above and beyond all else, by being the person who stood by me through thick and thin. In my very darkest hours. But romance is not his thing. He is more of a practical kind of man. And there is an awful lot to be said for practicality, but having experienced a lifetime of emotional neglect and hypercriticism from my mother and grandmother, I ended up like a big sandy desert, desperate for demonstrative love. He wasn’t often able to meet those needs.
Then I met a girl who met those needs and I drank greedily from her fountain of love. It was so beautiful and refreshing to finally receive that kind of love I had never experienced in my life. We shared a lot in common and we fell in love. It was all terribly beautiful. But also terribly complicated as I was married at the time. My two relationships crossed over in a very complicated manner, although nothing was ever in secret. But she also had her own issues and eventually our relationship ended. At the same time I ended my marriage. It was all very sad. We were all very sad.
I am still very sad
I will most likely have a level of sadness for the rest of my natural life now. Having being starved of love as a child has made me crave it as an adult. My two relationships – and I have been so nervous about emotional connections that I have only ever had two relationships – but they have been very different and given me very different wonderful things. I have been greatly loved in two very different manners. Having grown up without love I am grateful for any kind of love.
Because of the childhood emotional neglect, I have emotional dysregulation, which I’ve worked hard to learn to manage. And I am well now. I am doing very well. But the grief I am experiencing after the end of these relationships will sit with me until the end of my days. I have giant scars on my heart now. They will be there forever.
I don’t think the effect of emotional neglect can be underestimated. It leaves you starved of affection and struggling to recognise how to deal with emotions. All the emotions on that enormous emotion wheel feel unmanageable. The sad and the mad and the glad. It’s all too much. But life is sad and mad and glad so somewhere along the way we have to learn how to adapt. It took me more than five decades but I am adapting. I have tasted great love in different forms now. I may never taste it again, but I know what it feels like and for that I will always be grateful.
