Facing My Emotions
In late 2019 I began reading about a phenomenon called Childhood Emotional Neglect and thinking about its effects on my personality and my life. As is obvious from the name, it’s when a person grows up without validation of their emotions, causing it to be difficult to access, describe, and understand their feelings as an adult. More recently I have also been looking into and thinking about the ways my childhood experience was not just neglectful, but actively abusive. Not in big, loud ways: there was rarely any screaming or physical violence, but in small, insidious ways: dismissing of my interests and aspirations, and a general lack of acknowledging me as a whole person with her own feelings and needs. I have been trying to address the effects this has had on me for… well, really since I started going to therapy as a teenager, but for a long time therapy was just looking at the symptoms and not helping me elucidate or analyze the underlying traumatic experiences. It’s been...