How bad does childhood emotional neglect feel when it's not repressed?
November 27, 2024 2:00 AM Subscribe
I have been treating cptsd with various therapies for a couple of years and feel like I'm slowly coming out of a freeze response. I've always repressed a lot of emotions and now that I'm dissociating less the feelings that are coming up are terrifying. My question is how to deal with the part of me that's convinced things couldn't possibly feel this bad and is either disassociating again or preventing me from taking things slow when I need to?
I have accepted that I have cptsd because the symptoms I'm experiencing -- emotional flashbacks, structural dissociation, freeze response etc all match so closely that it seems like it couldn't be anything else. However, while I can point to a slow drip of stress I experienced as a kid no individual memory is particularly bad. I had one very immature and emotionally distant parent and I felt responsible for my other parent, who I got the sense was stressed all the time. I have the feeling both parents experienced a lot of shame, though it wasn't acknowledged at the time. I always had the sense that it was important to be very controlled and not show my emotions. Still, no one was in physical danger, and I was physically very well cared for by the more responsible parent.
I can sort of intellectually understand that a young child is helpless enough that circumstances which wouldn't feel dangerous to an adult can still feel mortally dangerous to them. Also, that emotional distance at that age reads as an existential threat. But still, it feels like as I'm disassociating less I've unlocked some feelings of fear that just feel SO big. Like, the world is a terrible dangerous place and I couldn't possibly survive if I acknowledged things were as bad as they are levels of fear. I keep relating to stories of people being captured or tortured because that feels like the level of danger I'm remembering, and then feeling completely crazy because nothing particularly bad happened to me. It feels like something has to be wrong with me to be feeling like this.
Are these feelings real? Or at least an accurate memory of how I actually felt? Is emotional neglect just that scary to a kid? Or have I somehow gotten into my head and made stuff up for attention? It just feels like no one taught me how to do emotions and now I'm doing emotions wrong.
I feel like if I was able to accept that this was actually a way I felt at some point I'd be able to process it and move on, or at least know to take a break when I'm feeling like this. I do have tools for how to take a step back and emotionally regroup when I'm feeling overwhelmed which I could use, but I'm still stuck at 'no surely not, this can't be happening so I'll just pretend it's not real'. Can you help me, I don't know, emotions better?
I have accepted that I have cptsd because the symptoms I'm experiencing -- emotional flashbacks, structural dissociation, freeze response etc all match so closely that it seems like it couldn't be anything else. However, while I can point to a slow drip of stress I experienced as a kid no individual memory is particularly bad. I had one very immature and emotionally distant parent and I felt responsible for my other parent, who I got the sense was stressed all the time. I have the feeling both parents experienced a lot of shame, though it wasn't acknowledged at the time. I always had the sense that it was important to be very controlled and not show my emotions. Still, no one was in physical danger, and I was physically very well cared for by the more responsible parent.
I can sort of intellectually understand that a young child is helpless enough that circumstances which wouldn't feel dangerous to an adult can still feel mortally dangerous to them. Also, that emotional distance at that age reads as an existential threat. But still, it feels like as I'm disassociating less I've unlocked some feelings of fear that just feel SO big. Like, the world is a terrible dangerous place and I couldn't possibly survive if I acknowledged things were as bad as they are levels of fear. I keep relating to stories of people being captured or tortured because that feels like the level of danger I'm remembering, and then feeling completely crazy because nothing particularly bad happened to me. It feels like something has to be wrong with me to be feeling like this.
Are these feelings real? Or at least an accurate memory of how I actually felt? Is emotional neglect just that scary to a kid? Or have I somehow gotten into my head and made stuff up for attention? It just feels like no one taught me how to do emotions and now I'm doing emotions wrong.
I feel like if I was able to accept that this was actually a way I felt at some point I'd be able to process it and move on, or at least know to take a break when I'm feeling like this. I do have tools for how to take a step back and emotionally regroup when I'm feeling overwhelmed which I could use, but I'm still stuck at 'no surely not, this can't be happening so I'll just pretend it's not real'. Can you help me, I don't know, emotions better?
Best answer: Are these feelings real? Or at least an accurate memory of how I actually felt? Is emotional neglect just that scary to a kid?
Yes.
Your imposter syndrome feelings are also typical of someone who has experienced trauma, and in my experience, the closer you come to recognising what happened to you, the stronger those "maybe I'm making this up for attention" feelings will be.
After all, a typical part of emotional neglect is being told that expressing your feelings or having needs is you "just trying to be special" or "just wanting attention" as if those things are bad, and not totally valid and healthy, human needs.
posted by Zumbador at 4:06 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
Yes.
Your imposter syndrome feelings are also typical of someone who has experienced trauma, and in my experience, the closer you come to recognising what happened to you, the stronger those "maybe I'm making this up for attention" feelings will be.
After all, a typical part of emotional neglect is being told that expressing your feelings or having needs is you "just trying to be special" or "just wanting attention" as if those things are bad, and not totally valid and healthy, human needs.
posted by Zumbador at 4:06 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
Best answer: I don't see any reason to doubt that those were the feelings a child in the situation you describe could have had. They don't seem outsized or unbelievable or "crazy" to me, as a somewhat parentified child of parents who had no idea how to talk about feelings.
Sure, it's possible that as you keep doing your work in therapy and just the general work of living and growing as a person developing more perspective on your past, you'll eventually end up framing some of these feelings differently to yourself. But even if that were true it wouldn't mean that you're making anything up for attention or that you're doing emotions wrong now. You were as a child, and are now, doing the best you could to understand your world and your emotional landscape with the tools you have.
You're doing great. I'm sorry this is so hard, but it sounds like those "take a step back and emotionally regroup" coping methods might be just the thing to try right now.
posted by Stacey at 5:01 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Sure, it's possible that as you keep doing your work in therapy and just the general work of living and growing as a person developing more perspective on your past, you'll eventually end up framing some of these feelings differently to yourself. But even if that were true it wouldn't mean that you're making anything up for attention or that you're doing emotions wrong now. You were as a child, and are now, doing the best you could to understand your world and your emotional landscape with the tools you have.
You're doing great. I'm sorry this is so hard, but it sounds like those "take a step back and emotionally regroup" coping methods might be just the thing to try right now.
posted by Stacey at 5:01 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Best answer: When my child was three, they saw on television a cartoon car "shocked" and then it exploded. My child screamed. They looked like Shelley Duvall in The Shining. Then they cried for an hour. The feelings of childhood are incalculable, boundless, and weird.
>I feel like if I was able to accept that this was actually a way I felt at some point I'd be able to process it and move on, or at least know to take a break when I'm feeling like this.
You think if you were able to accept that this was actually a way you felt at some point you'd be able to process it and move on, or at least know to take a break when you're feeling like this.
My experience with childhood emotional neglect is similar -- not awful, but through chance and design, I ended up the lowest rung on the family caring ladder. After some stabs at therapy for specific situations, I "caved" and did some trauma work. Like you I had a very difficult time admitting there was any. That seemed ... selfish, attention-grabby, a waste of resources.
The therapy was a group. Like your freeze response, I have a kind of black wall -- just no access to speech, word formation, feelings, descriptions, etc. So it was amazing to see, in a controlled environment, other people have feelings. One set of exercises was checking in with what your inner kid needed and wanted. (I had done 'inner child work' before but I was about to learn it had been very mental vs. emotional.) I could hear about the experiences and see, literally in front of me, as other people raged and cried and made demands. People had experienced abuse, hatred. The inner kids in the room wanted love and safety. The cause and effect was very helpful to see. My kid? My kid didn't need anything. My kid needed to make sure everything was tidy and get A's in school. Wasn't that great? I was done! (Adult me was mortified by the way, that I was trying to compare my story to some of the ones in that room.)
It took me an embarrassing number of sessions to see that my world was reversed. My kid didn't need anything because my kid had been trained and trauma'd into not needing anything. And my 'work' was me, the adult me, letting the kid in me know that yes, I "have the tools" to handle things but also that means, that kid now gets to feel things. It doesn't matter at all if you have the tools and the skills and the years of therapy behind you if you don't also allow yourself the messiness of feelings (and the feelings of others, even scarier!), knowing the protective embrace of your capable adult self is there to carry you through whatever it is you must get through. But you are allowed to get through things while having emotions.
So all that -- still theory for me at that point. I got it, but having feelings was (honestly, is) still difficult, scary. What's safer? Feeling things about universally tragic and sad things. This may be where you are. I do now break down more easily. IG posts about the mystery of humanity - crying. Two minutes into the new documentary on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - recognizing signs of panic attack. I think it's a way we let our bodies practice feeling things in a safe way, as a helpful step. These are things everyone would have understandable feelings about. Better yet, these are feelings we can actually share with others. That begins to create a layer of positive experience with having feelings. Here I am having feelings with others, the same feelings, and it's safe. We don't have to be alone in feeling shame of how we acted at a party or that we yelled at our kid (that comes later :)). So I see where you are as a natural step. It's unrealistic to jump from neglected kid to perfectly manicured feeling expression. Having the big feelings about things like this is a step along the way. The great thing is that it also opens room for positive feelings too. Jumping out of your seat to dance in front of the tv every time Snoop Dog shows up on screen during the Olympics. Having a meandering conversation with a stranger in line. Telling people on the street how awesome they look.
posted by Yoshimi Battles at 5:19 AM on November 27 [25 favorites]
>I feel like if I was able to accept that this was actually a way I felt at some point I'd be able to process it and move on, or at least know to take a break when I'm feeling like this.
You think if you were able to accept that this was actually a way you felt at some point you'd be able to process it and move on, or at least know to take a break when you're feeling like this.
My experience with childhood emotional neglect is similar -- not awful, but through chance and design, I ended up the lowest rung on the family caring ladder. After some stabs at therapy for specific situations, I "caved" and did some trauma work. Like you I had a very difficult time admitting there was any. That seemed ... selfish, attention-grabby, a waste of resources.
The therapy was a group. Like your freeze response, I have a kind of black wall -- just no access to speech, word formation, feelings, descriptions, etc. So it was amazing to see, in a controlled environment, other people have feelings. One set of exercises was checking in with what your inner kid needed and wanted. (I had done 'inner child work' before but I was about to learn it had been very mental vs. emotional.) I could hear about the experiences and see, literally in front of me, as other people raged and cried and made demands. People had experienced abuse, hatred. The inner kids in the room wanted love and safety. The cause and effect was very helpful to see. My kid? My kid didn't need anything. My kid needed to make sure everything was tidy and get A's in school. Wasn't that great? I was done! (Adult me was mortified by the way, that I was trying to compare my story to some of the ones in that room.)
It took me an embarrassing number of sessions to see that my world was reversed. My kid didn't need anything because my kid had been trained and trauma'd into not needing anything. And my 'work' was me, the adult me, letting the kid in me know that yes, I "have the tools" to handle things but also that means, that kid now gets to feel things. It doesn't matter at all if you have the tools and the skills and the years of therapy behind you if you don't also allow yourself the messiness of feelings (and the feelings of others, even scarier!), knowing the protective embrace of your capable adult self is there to carry you through whatever it is you must get through. But you are allowed to get through things while having emotions.
So all that -- still theory for me at that point. I got it, but having feelings was (honestly, is) still difficult, scary. What's safer? Feeling things about universally tragic and sad things. This may be where you are. I do now break down more easily. IG posts about the mystery of humanity - crying. Two minutes into the new documentary on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - recognizing signs of panic attack. I think it's a way we let our bodies practice feeling things in a safe way, as a helpful step. These are things everyone would have understandable feelings about. Better yet, these are feelings we can actually share with others. That begins to create a layer of positive experience with having feelings. Here I am having feelings with others, the same feelings, and it's safe. We don't have to be alone in feeling shame of how we acted at a party or that we yelled at our kid (that comes later :)). So I see where you are as a natural step. It's unrealistic to jump from neglected kid to perfectly manicured feeling expression. Having the big feelings about things like this is a step along the way. The great thing is that it also opens room for positive feelings too. Jumping out of your seat to dance in front of the tv every time Snoop Dog shows up on screen during the Olympics. Having a meandering conversation with a stranger in line. Telling people on the street how awesome they look.
posted by Yoshimi Battles at 5:19 AM on November 27 [25 favorites]
Best answer: I have CPTSD related to my negative childhood experiences, and I wasn't even abused or neglected. Some therapists were convinced that I must have been abused, but I've worked through it with several and all of the experiences that made me feel the worst are ones that most people would actually enjoy! This is definitely related to my autism, and I still find strong "positive" situations like birthday parties to be extremely frightening and I will dissociate during them. This is very embarrassing because if I try to explain it to most people it just sounds like I'm lying to get attention. So my experiences are similar to yours but not the same.
The emotions I experienced as a child were absolutely real even if they don't make sense. Emotions are often very weird, even for "normal" people. Your emotional memories are also real, but they are probably not 100% accurate to how you felt at the time. All of our memories change over time based on how we think about them later. Given your description, it sounds like your current emotional reaction is a combination of the actual strong distress you felt at the time, and your embarrassment and confusion about those memories. That combination is really disturbing as they kind of multiply each other.
You might be able to kind of separate those emotions by trying to deal with the components separately. I am much less embarrassed about my weird childhood emotions than I used to be, and writing posts like the you just did definitely helped me to accept it. As you get more comfortable with your current emotions that lead to the repression, it will get easier to deal with the memories. I've also heard EMDR therapy is good for this but I never tried it personally.
posted by JZig at 6:31 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
The emotions I experienced as a child were absolutely real even if they don't make sense. Emotions are often very weird, even for "normal" people. Your emotional memories are also real, but they are probably not 100% accurate to how you felt at the time. All of our memories change over time based on how we think about them later. Given your description, it sounds like your current emotional reaction is a combination of the actual strong distress you felt at the time, and your embarrassment and confusion about those memories. That combination is really disturbing as they kind of multiply each other.
You might be able to kind of separate those emotions by trying to deal with the components separately. I am much less embarrassed about my weird childhood emotions than I used to be, and writing posts like the you just did definitely helped me to accept it. As you get more comfortable with your current emotions that lead to the repression, it will get easier to deal with the memories. I've also heard EMDR therapy is good for this but I never tried it personally.
posted by JZig at 6:31 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
Best answer: Sometimes we recall a distressing childhood experience, we are recalling our emotions, but also the hurt is compounded by our adult awareness of how the adults in our lives let us down at the time. You might feel grief and anger over these situations that you didn’t feel as a child. It is totally real and not made up.
In my experience there is no way through these emotions except to feel them, knowing that they will pass and giving yourself compassion.
posted by mai at 6:52 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
In my experience there is no way through these emotions except to feel them, knowing that they will pass and giving yourself compassion.
posted by mai at 6:52 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Best answer: How bad does childhood emotional neglect feel when it's not repressed?
I'm just going to focus on this a bit but touch on your other questions.
Emotions are not fact, they are feelings. You can't take an emotion and then retroactively measure what happened by that emotion. You've probably had the experience where something you would normally brush off suddenly hits wrong and your emotions flare up. Sure, we can say to ourselves as adults "that bothered me more today because I'm also stressed about 80 other things."
But the emotion just is. You feel it how you feel it when you feel it. One of the roles of parenting is to reflect those feelings back to the child and say like "wow, you're really angry" (validate); "do you need to hit a pillow?" (give the child a way to express it) and ultimately, help them not strike out with it or whatever ("we don't hit" "we don't scream at people".)
Fear is one of those! My 13 year old just recently developed a fear of my husband and I dying and part of my job is to reassure him that we have a guardian for him, insurance, extended family. It doesn't make his fear less forceful, but it helps him contextualize it. Then he can say to himself, okay, I will be okay.
But the goal is not to stop him feeling that feeling.
The thing about dissociation is that for whatever reason you develop ways of not experiencing both feelings (depersonalization) or experience (dissociation). My guess is it's because your parents couldn't help you contextualize it.
So, you ended up with dealing with emotions or memories or situations sort of like making a wall or a dam. For you, you've gotten the taste of one big emotion behind that wall - crushing, existential fear.
The thing is, maintaining that wall costs energy. It means you have spent time keeping that wall up. So it may be that you experienced one big wave of fear; it may be that every time you felt that fear in your life - a thousand cups of water - you kind of shoved it in the same space. I think of it like having a finger in a dam. You can't actually walk away and see the whole world around you, on an emotional level. You're just always holding onto that wall, and so you don't get that the river is just one river and there are mountains and - whatever, the analogy is breaking down. I hope you get it.
Anyways, to me what you're doing now is you're looking for reasons to keep your finger on that leaky dam. "Nothing that bad happened, I shouldn't feel this way" is just a way of saying "I don't want to feel these feelings."
So my advice is, don't look to contextualize the feelings first. Let yourself feel them. Later all the context you need is "these are feelings from the past. Nothing bad is happening right now."
posted by warriorqueen at 6:53 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
I'm just going to focus on this a bit but touch on your other questions.
Emotions are not fact, they are feelings. You can't take an emotion and then retroactively measure what happened by that emotion. You've probably had the experience where something you would normally brush off suddenly hits wrong and your emotions flare up. Sure, we can say to ourselves as adults "that bothered me more today because I'm also stressed about 80 other things."
But the emotion just is. You feel it how you feel it when you feel it. One of the roles of parenting is to reflect those feelings back to the child and say like "wow, you're really angry" (validate); "do you need to hit a pillow?" (give the child a way to express it) and ultimately, help them not strike out with it or whatever ("we don't hit" "we don't scream at people".)
Fear is one of those! My 13 year old just recently developed a fear of my husband and I dying and part of my job is to reassure him that we have a guardian for him, insurance, extended family. It doesn't make his fear less forceful, but it helps him contextualize it. Then he can say to himself, okay, I will be okay.
But the goal is not to stop him feeling that feeling.
The thing about dissociation is that for whatever reason you develop ways of not experiencing both feelings (depersonalization) or experience (dissociation). My guess is it's because your parents couldn't help you contextualize it.
So, you ended up with dealing with emotions or memories or situations sort of like making a wall or a dam. For you, you've gotten the taste of one big emotion behind that wall - crushing, existential fear.
The thing is, maintaining that wall costs energy. It means you have spent time keeping that wall up. So it may be that you experienced one big wave of fear; it may be that every time you felt that fear in your life - a thousand cups of water - you kind of shoved it in the same space. I think of it like having a finger in a dam. You can't actually walk away and see the whole world around you, on an emotional level. You're just always holding onto that wall, and so you don't get that the river is just one river and there are mountains and - whatever, the analogy is breaking down. I hope you get it.
Anyways, to me what you're doing now is you're looking for reasons to keep your finger on that leaky dam. "Nothing that bad happened, I shouldn't feel this way" is just a way of saying "I don't want to feel these feelings."
So my advice is, don't look to contextualize the feelings first. Let yourself feel them. Later all the context you need is "these are feelings from the past. Nothing bad is happening right now."
posted by warriorqueen at 6:53 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
Best answer: Even perfectly well adjusted and neurotypical kids can have huge and frightening emotions about things like
- their friend can't come round to play right now because it's bedtime
- the cup is blue
- they can't have the toy they want at the store
- they asked for pancakes so someone made them pancakes
Sometimes those emotions are really surprisingly strong - kids can scream in raging anger or abject terror about random things for a really really long time! This is so normal that people call it the "terrible twos", although it doesn't stop on their third birthday by any means.
Often the emotions relate to being over tired, hungry and/or surprised suddenly. And little kids know so little about how the world works and have such little control over it that it's very easy for them to be surprised by something we think is obvious and normal but that they didn't expect at all - much like you would be if you parachuted suddenly with no phone or money into a country where you don't know the culture or speak the language.
Adults with childcare experience learn to "foreshadow" things that are going to happen soon (good things as well as bad things) so that the change isn't surprising. And they learn how to make sure the kid gets enough sleep and food at the right times, which is surprisingly difficult, considering that kids are growing and changing the whole time and don't always want to sleep or eat when they need to. Experienced adults learn to help kids calm down from a tantrum, when less experienced adults might get angry at the child or ignore them.
I don't think it's at all surprising that parents that are a bit wrapped up in their own lives and maybe not paying attention or learning great childcare skills, would end up with a child who's traumatized by some of those big emotions, even though nothing that happened seems particularly distressing from an adult point of view.
posted by quacks like a duck at 7:04 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
- their friend can't come round to play right now because it's bedtime
- the cup is blue
- they can't have the toy they want at the store
- they asked for pancakes so someone made them pancakes
Sometimes those emotions are really surprisingly strong - kids can scream in raging anger or abject terror about random things for a really really long time! This is so normal that people call it the "terrible twos", although it doesn't stop on their third birthday by any means.
Often the emotions relate to being over tired, hungry and/or surprised suddenly. And little kids know so little about how the world works and have such little control over it that it's very easy for them to be surprised by something we think is obvious and normal but that they didn't expect at all - much like you would be if you parachuted suddenly with no phone or money into a country where you don't know the culture or speak the language.
Adults with childcare experience learn to "foreshadow" things that are going to happen soon (good things as well as bad things) so that the change isn't surprising. And they learn how to make sure the kid gets enough sleep and food at the right times, which is surprisingly difficult, considering that kids are growing and changing the whole time and don't always want to sleep or eat when they need to. Experienced adults learn to help kids calm down from a tantrum, when less experienced adults might get angry at the child or ignore them.
I don't think it's at all surprising that parents that are a bit wrapped up in their own lives and maybe not paying attention or learning great childcare skills, would end up with a child who's traumatized by some of those big emotions, even though nothing that happened seems particularly distressing from an adult point of view.
posted by quacks like a duck at 7:04 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
Best answer: Feelings can’t be wrong or right. They just are. You’re okay, no matter what you feel. It’s okay to have emotions that no one else would agree with. It’s okay! I promise there is nothing wrong with you.
posted by knobknosher at 7:12 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
posted by knobknosher at 7:12 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Best answer: healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors was recommended on an earlier Ask. it is worthwhile [g]
posted by HearHere at 7:24 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
posted by HearHere at 7:24 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
Best answer: oh hey I restarted therapy and am in a similar boat as you with the whole oh damn now I can feel things ow ow they hurt. So first off - ahhhhhh it really sucks, but it is a good thing to be able to feel because the nice feelings get really good too.
My understanding with the trauma and post-trauma reactions is that it's not so much the trauma itself but the amount of support you get after it that is the big factor in how you remember the trauma and how much actual damage it causes. A kid who has their favourite toy smashed in front of them is experiencing directed rage and loss for the first time and if they're not met with compassion and support, the is a huge trauma rocking their world. A kid who is slapped by one parent but then comforted and kept safe and backed up by their other parent can come to terms with that trauma.
Also, it's tough to let go of the qualification of trauma. We want to scale it so we can minimize it and also so we can justify to other people that deserve to be treated as someone in pain - often because we've been trained to dismiss and downgrade our pain to make other people comfortable. Quantifying pain outside of a hospital triage situation is completely and utterly useless. It is not a zero sum game. We have to keep reminding ourselves of that over and over, and it is so so hard. SO HARD. But your pain is pain. You are worth care. You do not have to be this height to take part. Just climb aboard.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:30 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
My understanding with the trauma and post-trauma reactions is that it's not so much the trauma itself but the amount of support you get after it that is the big factor in how you remember the trauma and how much actual damage it causes. A kid who has their favourite toy smashed in front of them is experiencing directed rage and loss for the first time and if they're not met with compassion and support, the is a huge trauma rocking their world. A kid who is slapped by one parent but then comforted and kept safe and backed up by their other parent can come to terms with that trauma.
Also, it's tough to let go of the qualification of trauma. We want to scale it so we can minimize it and also so we can justify to other people that deserve to be treated as someone in pain - often because we've been trained to dismiss and downgrade our pain to make other people comfortable. Quantifying pain outside of a hospital triage situation is completely and utterly useless. It is not a zero sum game. We have to keep reminding ourselves of that over and over, and it is so so hard. SO HARD. But your pain is pain. You are worth care. You do not have to be this height to take part. Just climb aboard.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:30 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
Best answer: Could a little bit of childhood neglect really fuck you up this bad? Maybe! But that's not really the point.
The feelings you are having now are from parts that exist now, and these feelings are actually separate from the memories that power them. It doesn't matter if these parts "felt" exactly the same way back then, it only really matters how these parts feel now. I have been doing an IFS therapy practice for a few years now, and I like to tell my doubting parts that we are not actually trying to reconstruct the past in some physically accurate way, we're using the stories of the past as a lens into the feelings of today. If those stories are not entirely accurate or completely well remembered that is ok, as long as the work is helping you to heal now. If the childhood memory of neglect causes terror today, that doesn't mean it caused terror back then, but it doesn't have to. The part that holds these feelings has been holding them so long, the feelings may have grown, or been modified by other experiences you haven't considered.
I'm sorry that those feelings are so huge and causing you to struggle. Continued therapy can help you manage today's feelings better, and medication is also a possibility. Consider "anxiety" as a dual diagnosis to "cptsd" but don't get too hung up on actual diagnoses, the goal isn't to "find out what you really have" the goal is to "help how you really feel".
posted by grog at 7:34 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
The feelings you are having now are from parts that exist now, and these feelings are actually separate from the memories that power them. It doesn't matter if these parts "felt" exactly the same way back then, it only really matters how these parts feel now. I have been doing an IFS therapy practice for a few years now, and I like to tell my doubting parts that we are not actually trying to reconstruct the past in some physically accurate way, we're using the stories of the past as a lens into the feelings of today. If those stories are not entirely accurate or completely well remembered that is ok, as long as the work is helping you to heal now. If the childhood memory of neglect causes terror today, that doesn't mean it caused terror back then, but it doesn't have to. The part that holds these feelings has been holding them so long, the feelings may have grown, or been modified by other experiences you haven't considered.
I'm sorry that those feelings are so huge and causing you to struggle. Continued therapy can help you manage today's feelings better, and medication is also a possibility. Consider "anxiety" as a dual diagnosis to "cptsd" but don't get too hung up on actual diagnoses, the goal isn't to "find out what you really have" the goal is to "help how you really feel".
posted by grog at 7:34 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Best answer: However, while I can point to a slow drip of stress I experienced as a kid no individual memory is particularly bad.
People associate “trauma“ with a single large event, but it doesn’t have to be. A long period living under stress (physical or mental) can achieve the same result as far as PTSD is concerned.
Like, the world is a terribl[y] dangerous place and I couldn't possibly survive if I acknowledged things were as bad as they are levels of fear.
The world *is* a terribly dangerous place. There are many existential level threats which most people avoid and in some cases deny exist. The problem with PTSD is that the priority is the same whether you are drunkenly walking across a highway or crossing at the light. You may get hit by a car in either case, but one is much much more likely than the other to end that way.
One of the most powerful exercises I did while getting through that was to write everything down. It became a giant list of potential disasters.
After going through that process and relieving the huge effect that fear had on my daily life, my childhood trauma feels like: sadness. Sadness for myself, sadness for my parents. We are the victims of victims and I know my parents did the best they could given their own path through life.
There are days when I still don’t feel like dealing with the remains of the trauma, but they are exceptions. Having removed the nameless fear the whole thing seems much more manageable.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:28 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]
People associate “trauma“ with a single large event, but it doesn’t have to be. A long period living under stress (physical or mental) can achieve the same result as far as PTSD is concerned.
Like, the world is a terribl[y] dangerous place and I couldn't possibly survive if I acknowledged things were as bad as they are levels of fear.
The world *is* a terribly dangerous place. There are many existential level threats which most people avoid and in some cases deny exist. The problem with PTSD is that the priority is the same whether you are drunkenly walking across a highway or crossing at the light. You may get hit by a car in either case, but one is much much more likely than the other to end that way.
One of the most powerful exercises I did while getting through that was to write everything down. It became a giant list of potential disasters.
- I’m late to work, I lose my job, I end up homeless, and die on the streets.
- I’m late to work, I lose my job, I get in a car accident with no health insurance, I’m saddled with medical debt for the rest of my life.
- The war in Ukraine expands, nukes come in to play, I’m forced to survive in a post apocalyptic world
- The next Covid comes along and kills 1 in 5 people, all of my friends are dead, society is in tatters
- etc, etc, etc
After going through that process and relieving the huge effect that fear had on my daily life, my childhood trauma feels like: sadness. Sadness for myself, sadness for my parents. We are the victims of victims and I know my parents did the best they could given their own path through life.
There are days when I still don’t feel like dealing with the remains of the trauma, but they are exceptions. Having removed the nameless fear the whole thing seems much more manageable.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:28 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]
Best answer: I have diagnosed CPTSD + dissociation and I have a theory about this that grows out of my own personal experience and the significant amount of reading I’ve done, but I am not a professional, so take this for what it’s worth.
PTSD, as commonly understood, arises when you have a single experience so terrible, and so out of the realm of ordinary experience, that it floods your coping mechanisms, and you cannot process it. You carry the feelings around, “alive” with you in the present, re-experiencing them until you find treatment and social support that will give you the tools you need to cope with, understand, and process what you couldn’t bear to experience at the time.
CPTSD arising out of childhood abuse and neglect is different. It’s not about a single extreme experience; it’s about the backdrop of ordinary experience and the tools we get to cope with them. To a child, who has nothing to compare it to, a moment of terror from a nightmare is not qualitatively different from a moment of terror from a bomb dropping. What is different is the reaction of the adults around them. When the child is scared by a nightmare, the healthy adults around him stay calm and warm, they “hold” his fear, they teach him practical tools for dealing with nightmares but also, more importantly, they remain emotionally present, loving, and unafraid in the face of his terror, and they teach him his fear is manageable and not itself something to fear.
But if, because of their own trauma, the parents react to the child’s fear of nightmares the way they would react to fear of a bomb dropping—either mirroring it and amplifying it, or numbing out and ignoring it, leaving the child to deal with it alone—the child will never learn how to process his fear, to integrate it into normal life. Every ordinary bad feeling will be processed like extraordinary trauma, dissociated away to be dealt with “later,” during a time of safety and support that never actually arrives.
It’s my personal belief that this is how intergenerational trauma perpetuates itself. Some massive emotional injury occurs—maybe on a societal level (my grandparents on one side of my family were genocide survivors) or on an individual level without societal support (my grandparents on the other side were orphaned/abandoned in early childhood). The survivors go on to have children, but they stay in emergency mode long after the actual danger has passed, cut off from pain that they find too intolerable to experience. Thus, they inadvertently pass this mode of dealing with emotions along to their children, in the form of emotional neglect. They teach them to treat ordinary pain with the tools they themselves used to cope with extraordinary suffering—dissociation, addiction, rage, etc. And in fact, if those children grow up without intervention, they can go on to raise their children the same way, so that the trauma response perpetuates itself long after the actual trauma has passed from living memory.
Can I prove this? No I cannot. But thinking about it this way has given me a way to both honor my own feelings and take my suffering seriously, white also finding genuine compassion and love for my own parents, and huge gratitude for what they, despite their failings, were able to give me that their parents could not give to them.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 8:41 AM on November 27 [22 favorites]
PTSD, as commonly understood, arises when you have a single experience so terrible, and so out of the realm of ordinary experience, that it floods your coping mechanisms, and you cannot process it. You carry the feelings around, “alive” with you in the present, re-experiencing them until you find treatment and social support that will give you the tools you need to cope with, understand, and process what you couldn’t bear to experience at the time.
CPTSD arising out of childhood abuse and neglect is different. It’s not about a single extreme experience; it’s about the backdrop of ordinary experience and the tools we get to cope with them. To a child, who has nothing to compare it to, a moment of terror from a nightmare is not qualitatively different from a moment of terror from a bomb dropping. What is different is the reaction of the adults around them. When the child is scared by a nightmare, the healthy adults around him stay calm and warm, they “hold” his fear, they teach him practical tools for dealing with nightmares but also, more importantly, they remain emotionally present, loving, and unafraid in the face of his terror, and they teach him his fear is manageable and not itself something to fear.
But if, because of their own trauma, the parents react to the child’s fear of nightmares the way they would react to fear of a bomb dropping—either mirroring it and amplifying it, or numbing out and ignoring it, leaving the child to deal with it alone—the child will never learn how to process his fear, to integrate it into normal life. Every ordinary bad feeling will be processed like extraordinary trauma, dissociated away to be dealt with “later,” during a time of safety and support that never actually arrives.
It’s my personal belief that this is how intergenerational trauma perpetuates itself. Some massive emotional injury occurs—maybe on a societal level (my grandparents on one side of my family were genocide survivors) or on an individual level without societal support (my grandparents on the other side were orphaned/abandoned in early childhood). The survivors go on to have children, but they stay in emergency mode long after the actual danger has passed, cut off from pain that they find too intolerable to experience. Thus, they inadvertently pass this mode of dealing with emotions along to their children, in the form of emotional neglect. They teach them to treat ordinary pain with the tools they themselves used to cope with extraordinary suffering—dissociation, addiction, rage, etc. And in fact, if those children grow up without intervention, they can go on to raise their children the same way, so that the trauma response perpetuates itself long after the actual trauma has passed from living memory.
Can I prove this? No I cannot. But thinking about it this way has given me a way to both honor my own feelings and take my suffering seriously, white also finding genuine compassion and love for my own parents, and huge gratitude for what they, despite their failings, were able to give me that their parents could not give to them.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 8:41 AM on November 27 [22 favorites]
What some people call "emotional neglect", others might call "my caregiver doesn't love me and when I express my upset they get angry at me", or "my caregiver would rather I die than love me", or "my caregiver is trying to kill me in the most deniable, gaslighty, confusing way possible".
It's normalized for parents to be emotionally abusive with their kids and we excuse it with words like "distant", "cold", "absent", "neglect", when really these are manifestations of an extremely direct and precise psychological attack, carried out within a campaign of deniability, labelled as "love". Read about the still face experiment and consider how unnatural and violent it is to deny a child's bids for attention -- to hear them and choose not to respond, as if the child is not really there. The upbringing that most people experience is a form of severe psychological torture. The battle happens in your infancy when your parents punish you for asserting your needs and eventually overpower you into a kind of numbed, dissociated compliance. In a way it's a lot easier if your parents beat you because then you have the scars to prove the intent.
If it helps, consider that dissociating as an adult is a consequence of severe childhood trauma, in the same way that having no leg as an adult is a consequence of someone cutting off your leg as a kid. Like, you may not remember how it happened exactly but you were born with two legs and now you have one. How did you get from a fully expressive newborn infant to a dissociated, confused, mixed up adult? If you can imagine a cat, imagine what you would have to do it to make it dissociate. How much you would have to torture it so that it stopped feeling and crying out in pain. So much so that it forgets that it is even in pain and asks questions like yours when the pain starts to re-emerge.
posted by PercussivePaul at 4:37 PM on November 28
It's normalized for parents to be emotionally abusive with their kids and we excuse it with words like "distant", "cold", "absent", "neglect", when really these are manifestations of an extremely direct and precise psychological attack, carried out within a campaign of deniability, labelled as "love". Read about the still face experiment and consider how unnatural and violent it is to deny a child's bids for attention -- to hear them and choose not to respond, as if the child is not really there. The upbringing that most people experience is a form of severe psychological torture. The battle happens in your infancy when your parents punish you for asserting your needs and eventually overpower you into a kind of numbed, dissociated compliance. In a way it's a lot easier if your parents beat you because then you have the scars to prove the intent.
If it helps, consider that dissociating as an adult is a consequence of severe childhood trauma, in the same way that having no leg as an adult is a consequence of someone cutting off your leg as a kid. Like, you may not remember how it happened exactly but you were born with two legs and now you have one. How did you get from a fully expressive newborn infant to a dissociated, confused, mixed up adult? If you can imagine a cat, imagine what you would have to do it to make it dissociate. How much you would have to torture it so that it stopped feeling and crying out in pain. So much so that it forgets that it is even in pain and asks questions like yours when the pain starts to re-emerge.
posted by PercussivePaul at 4:37 PM on November 28
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However, something a therapist once told me might be helpful for you too: that all fear is fear of death. If you work through all other ostensible objects of fear, at the base will be fear of being obliterated. As you identify, for a child the kind of mental strategies we develop to cope with this fear of obliteration haven’t developed, so we are even more at the bleeding edge of something happening = I’m going to die. As well as physically and emotionally being in a state of complete dependence. So to me it makes sense that you gravitate towards stories of trauma which explicitly contain this existential threat to life and limb, because your protective-strategy-enabled adult brain is unable to really go to the place of “emotional neglect = death”, it seems too dramatic and is too painful to accept, so you brush it off as “not that bad”. I don’t have advice where to go with this, other than trying to grapple with the real fear, which is mortality. Accepting and loving your child self’s mortal terror as real. Finding a way to be with the pain of that, the fact your parents failed you in that way, and the effects the trauma has had on your life.
Fwiw buddhist practice and specifically Vipassana meditation really “unlocked” a lot of feelings about emotional neglect and abandonment, on a physical level, and also gave me a framework to tolerate and “metabolise” those emotions.
posted by Balthamos at 2:37 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]