On Neglect
neglect is a void, an absence. It's not about missing what you wanted, but what you needed emotionally to reach maturity, equipped to learn handle the world and all that's in it. It often shows up as ''cluelessness'' about life. The tough thing about emotional neglect is that it is so hard to identify because it's something that's not there. It's not an item, it's a void. It's so hard to identify empty space.
Think of it this way…
Modern relationships and parenting require a greater level of sophistication than in any previous generation, especially when compared to the days when we were living in an agricultural world. From present day advertising and other media, many people are convinced that happiness in relationships is an entitlement and an expectation. Few skills are taught in high school or college about negotiating satisfaction in relationships, and our parents cannot teach us what they never learned. Many people end up feeling cheated in their relationships, as though promised to be happy and then fooled.
In a sense, people are fooled. Many individuals request hypnosis in an effort to recover lost memories, fishing for the possibility that memories of trauma have been suppressed. There are certainly cases where traumatic memories have been repressed, and they can be emotionally re-associated to develop a healing, emotionally relevant narrative. More often, however, there are individuals who have no memory because there was so little emotional connectedness and mentoring to remember. The sense is of a routine of daily life, but a also sense of emptiness encompasses everything. There's emotional distress, often a sense of feeling lost or without value, but not much remembering "where or when" it came from. If the essential emotional needs of impressionable children are ignored, and the void seems ''normal'' in that it cannot be identified, then could you recall the consequence and what would you call it?
For example, many men complain, between the lines, that they have little sense of manliness, worthiness, direction or feeling of competence. Reference Jack Nicholson's character Robert Dupea in the movie Five Easy Pieces. Separately, the same men report little or no emotional connection with a consistent father figure, and they see no connection with their unidentified void. Many women complain of the same feelings of unworthiness, unlovability to men, and that they have little sense of a standard to distinguish mature men from immature men. The same women often report little or no connection with a father figure.
“The longer I do this work, the more impressed I am with the ubiquity of a certain kind of people who characterize their childhood years as unremarkable. They will tell me that they were ok, or normal, or even fine. But when I ask ‘What was your father like’, they will admit there was no man available..." An extremely interesting and crucial fact concerning the emotional development of boys in particular, but to some extent girls as well, is that previous generations of men never considered that they had a role to play in bring up children beyond that of providing for their physical needs and perhaps setting rules of behavior. They were not aware of boys' need for warmth, closeness, total acceptance from the father- that the least important and possibly detrimental role was that of father the disciplinarian. There are many ways of setting rules; the growing child need not be intimidated by a parent and should not be in constant need of avoiding disapproval. Many people carry this need into their adult lives because it was so deeply ingrained in childhood...”
— John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind, pages 99-100