The double whammy: being a Highly Sensitive Person and experiencing childhood emotional neglect
We all want to be understood, loved and prized. As children, as adults. So it’s devastating when your reactions, worries and emotions are treated as if they’re too much, need knocked out of you or don’t matter. Especially as a child.
And it’s particularly confusing and lonely-making when amongst those who treat your emotions this way are a parent or caregiver. Which makes it a double whammy, and its own kind of trauma with its own kind of grief.
Therapist and author Jonice Webb calls parental failure to respond enough to a child’s emotions and emotional needs Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN). Neglect is a powerful word, but when emotional needs aren’t being attended to, then they aren’t being cared for – which is one definition of neglect.
CEN comes in many forms. Like telling you to toughen up, rather than understand what you’re feeling. Not having interest, time or energy enough to help you work through your emotions. Not checking what’s wrong when you withdraw because you’re struggling and needing help. Turning what you’re worried about into what you should be grateful for.
These sorts of responses are damaging for any child. And they’re absolutely devastating for a Highly Sensitive child who is wired to need emotional understanding and validation. What makes it worse is that CEN is so hard to name and can sound trivial if you try.
This lack of emotional attunement may not be intentional e.g. parents may be overwhelmed themselves; they may want to avoid their children experiencing difficult emotions; they may be doing their best with a job they weren’t trained for; or they may be replicating the way their emotions were dealt with by their own parents.
But none of this diminishes the impact. What starts in childhood lives on in adulthood: not feeling safe to express emotions; inability to trust emotions; disconnection from what is real; unfulfilled potential; little sense of boundaries about what’s OK and not; problems establishing and maintaining emotionally healthy relationships.
The good news is that you can overcome the HSP/CEN double whammy. Just as realising you’re an HSP helps you make sense of your experience and move forward, so does learning about CEN and its impacts. That’s why this website exists and Webb does her work (including about the effect of CEN on HSPs).
Understanding the nature and roots of your emotions and reactions brings relief, forgiveness and self-compassion. You have never been wrong or flawed or broken. You are not the responses that you received in the past and maybe still do from some people now.
You have emotional sensitivity that the world needs. Especially right now. Don’t change who you are. Be who you are. And beat that double whammy.
