Story childhood emotional neglect

[AmanSilvers]

Just a note before this to say I am starting therapy soon so I haven't yet had a chance to talk about this in the proper environment.
and for anyone who has seen my previous posts, I got rejected for the job but I'm not surprised or bothered by it

This topic has always felt embarrassing to me. It feels excessive to say that my parents neglected me as a child, but the more I think about it, the more likely it seems.

While there are lots of potential examples from my childhood, there is one that stands out to me:

I was about 10 years old and had gotten into the car with my mother when she noticed the unmistakable scars on my wrists. Her response to me read as only mild concern. She suggested that I write in a diary instead of cutting myself. I shrank back into my seat, and said I would. Of course I didn't. I kept slicing away. My mom never even suggested that I get professional help or anything even close.

To me as a child, this felt like success. To me as an adult, I am utterly horrified. I can understand her initial reaction, to not be sure what to say or do, but to then never do anything more? I am in my early 20s, so it's not like information was sparse.

I had interactions with my siblings and classmates where they seemed more concerned than my mother ever did.

I desperately wish that I could go back in time and somehow get my kid self into therapy with someone good. I think if that sort of care was taken when the signs were abundantly clear, then I would not find myself on this website today.


If you have any thoughts or stories of your own, I'd love to hear them.

 

[black_iris]

i can relate, both my parents worked full time jobs growing up and i didnt talk to them much. i am also an only child so i didnt have a sibling. i had a few friends growing up but not close enough to have playdates with. i didnt have a babysitter to socialize with either or hobbies/sports. i was pretty depressed as a kid and i got bullied a lot for having naturally red hair.

my parents only started worrying when my grades dropped and i became a truant in 9th grade. but my dad was facing bigger health issues, so that kind of overridden their concerns for me. i would go to my school therapist in elementary school all the way to highschool.

when i told my parents how i felt after a very obvious attempt to ctb, they didn't believe me and thought i just wanted attention. my mom was particularly shocked, but shes always cared about me more than my dad has

some of my friends in middle school and highschool were concerned about me but they never tried to stop me.

as for self harm, my parents never noticed because i cover the marks pretty well.

 

[itsitbit]

:( I'm so sorry your mother never helped you! Mild concern with zero followup is an incredibly irresponsible and uncaring response imo, I also feel horrified just reading about this. I feel like I can relate to a shifting of views from childhood to adulthood; there were a lot of circumstances in my childhood where I felt really pleased and even proud of things that, when I look back on them, now realize were awful situations for a kid to be in. It's terrible because children are just trying to navigate painful situations they have no control over, to the best of their abilities, without any guidance... and they just think that's how the world is. It's unfair and as an adult I often look back and feel grieved at how unfair it is, because those circumstances should not have happened in the first place, and the adults in my life that I was wholly dependent on completely failed me.

Looking back on the past also fills me with this urge to somehow go back and fix things, like if I could intervene I could save myself, or make the situation change... it hurts a lot to think about, because I feel like for me personally there is still this sort of bizarre remorse and responsibility I feel for my own upbringing even within this fantasy. Like, my parents didn't do anything to help me but if I could just go back in time and take care of my own self, everything would be "resolved"... Even as a child, I felt deeply ashamed of how bad I was at taking care of myself in various ways, at my own irresponsibility, and how I couldn't do anything right, but that just isn't a child's job. Children are supposed to be looked after and taken care of, and have their needs met (all of them, physical and mental and emotional), and they cannot provide all of that to their own selves.

I understand it feels embarrassing and excessive to describe your parents as neglectful (I feel similarly about my own) but I think that they were, and I'm so sorry you weren't given proper care and left to struggle on your own. Coping with self harm is difficult even as an adult, it's horrifying to me that you were just left without any support dealing with that as a little kid. There's just so much wrong there- not with you-- but your parents really just let you suffer alone with obvious distress resulting in physical wounds, that's such a painful and lonely situation to have grown up in.

Sorry for my long post lol but thank you for sharing your story, I hope therapy goes well for you when it starts !!!

 

[westerly_merlin]

I hope therapy works for you, mine gave me a better understanding of why I feel the way I do about myself.

Physically abusive father and a self focussed mother was such a poor start in life. I learned coping mechanisms and detaching from emotions. It worked for years until, it didn't, and became very self destructive.

Now been in therapy for a year and I have a better understanding of the "why" but still struggling to engage with my emotions and love myself.

 

[Kamaainakupua]

Thank you for sharing your story with us. Our pain is relative, and for you to recognize it as neglect is something to be proud of, not embarrassed.
"Compare and despair", something I heard a lot when I first started getting help in group therapy settings.
By that, they meant that each person's story is unique, that we should identify with and find commonality, rather than rank or gauge the amount of pain/neglect/abuse etc. in our stories compared to others. The fact that you are posting this story in a forum specifically for people with thoughts of self-harm is a good indicator that your "neglect" was bad enough to get here.
My own story of how my mother "did her best" begins after some childhood trauma, followed by my parent's divorce. I have an older sibling who was too much trouble for my mother to handle, so I went to live with her and her new boyfriend. The story took place after she had moved out, but before the divorce was finalized, so I was just visiting. My dad had dropped me off, and my mom and I were watching an old black and white movie on TV, when the phone rang, and her boyfriend convinced her to meet him at this bar. I was maybe 11 years old at this time. It was late, and she didn't want to leave me alone in this new place the first time I'd been there, so she took me with her, driving out to a dive bar in the middle of the red light district. Because I was underage, she told me to stay in the car, get on the floor of the backseat, and hide under my coat, so no one walking past would see me and report her, or try to kidnap me. I stayed hidden for 6 hours, crouched down over the hump in the floor in the back seat, until the bar closed, and my drunken mother came out and drove us back. I called my father the next morning, and asked him to pick me up. My mother never mentioned that night, and I'm not sure she even remembered it, but I did.
I was able to forgive my mother years later, because she recognized that her "best", had not been very good at all, and my forgiveness came from realizing thst she, too, had had a hard childhood, much worse than mine, and she really didn't know how to do any better.
I hope you find peace here, and that the pain of these experiences gets washed away by the love of a new family here at SaSu.