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Childhood emotional neglect can quietly create deep guilt and shame about having feelings.

Suppressing emotions often begins as a child’s solution to feeling like a burden.

Feeling that something is wrong with you may come from emotional absence, not personal failure.

Learning to accept your feelings can begin to loosen long-held guilt and shame.

Childhood emotional neglect happens when your parents fail to respond enough to your emotions as they raise you.

Adults who were emotionally neglected in childhood can be quite perfectionistic and hard on themselves. But for many, it does not stop there.

Why? Because the messages of childhood emotional neglect run deep. They go to the heart of the child and stay there for a lifetime. They not only damage your ability to understand and trust your own feelings, but they also damage your ability to understand and trust yourself.

The messages of childhood emotional neglect are like invisible infusions of guilt and shame that happen every day in the life of the child.

The First Guilt/Shame Message of Childhood Emotional Neglect

No one wants to see your feelings.

When, because of emotional neglect, children receive the message from their parents that their feelings are a burden, excessive, or simply wrong, they take a highly effective, adaptive action. They naturally push their emotions down, under the surface, so that they will trouble no........

© Psychology Today