Emotional neglect looks like many things. The lack of quality alone time with oneself can cause many emotional and physical problems in your life.
Intro
Let’s take the story of a girl named Grace to narrate what emotional neglect looks like.
She’s a 17-year-old college student in her first year.
Grace is naturally an introverted person, shy and quiet. However, she believed her introverted nature was wrong.
Before starting college, Grace promised to break free of her introverted shell and live her “best life”. Thankfully, she managed to make 1 great friend and made.
She met a guy named Lancelot, 23. He was the opposite of everything she was and for some hormonal-Wattpad-infused reason, she decided to follow his ways, and live his life. After all, being an introvert is “uncool” and she was on a mission to break free from being an introvert to a free social high-flying bird.
Lancelot became her stylist, what to wear, and what to not wear. He also became her accountant, dictating the right things and the right time to buy them. A new name to introduce herself as because her real name wasn’t cool enough. He became her manager and social director. Her master.
She even lost the only friend she had, and this hurt her feelings a lot but she believed in “love”. Her naivety made her believe his decisions to be in her best interests. So she let everything happen.
Although at every point of bad decision-making, she would have doubts, the doubts would raise their heads but her master quickly saw the doubt before she could manifest it, and suppressed it with carefully curated and mastered words, it worked like hypnosis.
Those suppressed doubts keep compounding with every bad decision. Self-hate started creeping in like a slow infection. Then slowly she helplessly watched as her life kept turning in the worst direction possible.
She could recognize that she was in the worst possible place, but didn’t know how to leave. In academics, she was failing. State of her finances was run down, and her physical health was declining. She was a mess and she wanted help.
What Emotional Neglect Looks Like
Emotional negligence is a pattern of disregarding your personal feelings, by your doing or by other people. When you disregard and ignore how you truly feel and brush off your truth to the side, you’re neglecting your emotions and living in a lie.
Chiefly, emotional neglect is toxic to your well-being. It can lead to a rabbit hole of emotional disorders and mental illnesses.
You may never grow emotionally if you don’t consciously address your challenges. From the story, we can imagine what things Grace experienced in the course of trying to be who she wasn’t.
Neglecting her the warning signs, and herself, and depending wholly on someone she knew for a short time, to make important life decisions for her.
How does the body manifest emotional neglect?
Emotional neglect looks simply like abandoning yourself. But it’s deeper than that. It manifests as outbursts such as;
Tantrums
On the whole, you fall into bouts uncontrollable of anger and frustration. When you oftentimes find yourself yelling over the simplest argument or discussion, the simplest things trigger you to tell in an angry response. That is one of what emotional neglect looks like.
Verbal abuse
You’re very quick to say hurtful things to yourself and to other people. Insults, humiliation, silent treatment, ridicule, etc.
Aggression
When your ignored feelings begin to embody violence. You have deep feelings of physically hurting yourself and others. Aggressive responses, feelings, and reactions can also be signs of emotional neglect.
Recklessness
Neglecting your emotions also shows up as reckless living. Doing things without caring for the consequences of the obvious damage you’re causing to yourself. Or damages that your actions could cost you.
Snooping around to tender your insecurities.
You’re always snooping around for things to nurse the doubts and insecurities in your mind instead of addressing the doubts in your mind. This is an ugly effect of emotional negligence. It breeds negative emotions like jealousy which you can’t break out of.
Emotional neglect looks like Constant self-doubt
You don’t trust yourself to make decisions that are for your benefit, you don’t believe in yourself, you don’t believe in your choices and you leave that up to others. etc. Whenever you make a choice, you discard it immediately as junk. This is a sign that you’re ignoring your emotions. You’re disconnected from yourself.
Effects of emotional negligence on your personal well-being:
Harbored emotions will not let you grow to your full potential.
One sad effect of emotional negligence is that it hampers your personal growth and development journey.
You block a lot of positivity by neglecting your emotions. It doesn’t allow you to move from situations. Moreso, you’re left in denial and a constant web of lies.
You force yourself to believe the lies because of the uncertainty of what to do with the truth. One lie leads to another and another and you find yourself living in a tangled web of deceit. Accepting what’s allotted to you, is not what you deserve. Never what you want, because you’re not growing for yourself, you’re growing for someone else. You’re attached to their definition of yourself so you never even think to define your own self.
Emotional neglect compounds anxiety
The lies, denials, and doubts compound making you live in constant apprehension. You’re always living in fear and this harbors your productivity.
Your body reacts to anxiety, and you start feeling unhealthy, lack sleep, lack of attention to yourself, lack much-needed peace, and lack of attention to your diet, and your life, you find yourself panicking more often, you feel detached from yourself, slowly losing yourself with each passing day.
Read: What is self-love?
Hurried wrong decisions:
When don’t spend time addressing your emotions, you tend to make very hurried decisions. Especially really the bad ones. You don’t think or calculate, you just do it.
Because when you actually spend time with yourself, you will most likely make more rational decisions
You know in your heart you should stop and think but you don’t want to back out and disappoint others or the false pressure you’re placing on yourself. Then follow up by living in regret of your bad decisions. These bad decisions might not just have temporary effects, they might affect you a lot in the long term.
Neglecting your emotions makes you unconsciously leave your emotions to the mercy of others. You’ll feel exactly how other people want you to feel, believe exactly what they want you to believe, and do exactly what they want you to do.
When you give someone else the power to control you, you become a slave to their self-interests. What a sad way to live!
Therefore, You’re made to believe that everything they do is for your interests, just like in the case of Grace.
She was made to believe that she would never find a better place or position in life. That what she’s going through is normal, it’s for love. After all, love was never promised to be easy.
Her mind was fuelled with toxins. With no one to talk to about how she felt. Nor did she know to talk to herself and digest her feelings.
Low self-esteem
When you neglect yourself, you gradually slip into an unknown character in your world. You’re unable to think of yourself except through another person’s mind.
Undeniably, you’re locked in a defined box and never given the key to go out. Emotional neglect causes you to think of yourself as unworthy, less beautiful, unacceptable, and at the mercy of others. Not knowing yourself makes you feel lucky to be accepted by those who are using you. It makes you repeat the lie that they told you just to convince yourself.
Unhealthy lifestyles
Negative self-talk, people-pleasing, and overthinking. Shooting yourself in the foot for others, substance abuse, addiction. As well as lack of an emotional support system leads to unhealthy emotional dependency. The list of things that could go wrong when you neglect yourself is extremely long and ranges from physical, and social to mental effects.
Be the friend you need and save yourself from the hell you may be heading. Seek help when you need to. You should never take yourself for granted because that would lead others to take you for granted.
Spending purposeful quality time with yourself means you a conscious effort to pay attention to every emotion that passes through you, acknowledge them, sort them out, and move on. You create time and space and just relax and patiently.
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