Childhood Trauma & EMDR

Emotional & Physical Neglect, Rejection and Abuse

You look like you have it together. So why is it so hard to know what you feel and need?

From the outside, you may seem confident, capable, and successful.

But inside, you may spend a lot of time wondering if you're doing something wrong.

You worry about disappointing people. You over-explain yourself. You feel guilty when you say no. And when someone is upset with you, it can feel almost unbearable.

Maybe you find yourself thinking:

“They're going to be mad at me.”

“Maybe I'm being too sensitive.”

“I should just go along with it.”

Sometimes, when someone asks how you feel, you genuinely don't know.

You can recognize that you learned to minimize your needs, keep the peace, or pay close attention to everyone else's emotions. But you may still wonder:

“Was my childhood really that bad?”

You love your parents. You know they had their own struggles. Maybe there wasn't obvious physical abuse or one big event you can point to.

So you feel guilty even talking about it.

Maybe you tell yourself:

“Other people had it so much worse.”

“I shouldn't be affected by this.”

“It wasn't all that bad.”

But you can also recognize that you were often left alone, minimized, manipulated, or made to question your own feelings.

And somewhere along the way, you learned to pay attention to everyone else before yourself.

Maybe you learned to keep the peace at the cost of yourself.

When someone is angry or disappointed with you, you may find yourself ruminating, worrying, shutting down, or trying to appease them.

You might apologize even when you're not sure you've done anything wrong.

You might explain yourself over and over, hoping they'll understand.

You might know that you need to set a boundary, but the guilt comes almost immediately.

And sometimes, you may realize that you don't even know what you want. Not because you don't have feelings. But because you've spent so much time learning to notice everyone else's feelings first.

Over time, it can become difficult to recognize what you're feeling and needing.

You may struggle to communicate what you need in your relationships. You may feel unseen or unknown, even by the people closest to you.

And that can be incredibly lonely.

What if there's a reason you learned to respond this way?

Emotional neglect doesn't always look like someone intentionally hurting you.

Sometimes it looks like growing up with a parent who was struggling with substance abuse or their own mental health issues and didn't have the capacity to consistently notice or respond to your needs.

Sometimes it looks like having your feelings minimized, dismissed, manipulated, or questioned.

Sometimes it looks like learning that keeping someone else happy was safer than expressing what was happening inside of you.

These experiences can shape the way you relate to yourself and others long after childhood is over.

The people-pleasing, over-explaining, shutting down, and difficulty knowing what you feel may have once been ways of protecting yourself.

They aren't character flaws.

And understanding that can change the way you see yourself.

You don't have to keep abandoning yourself to keep other people comfortable.