How do I know if I was emotionally neglected?

[Intro] Hello and welcome to Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host Corinne Powell. I'm so glad you're here.

No matter what type of day you're having, you're always welcome. I like having you around. This space is especially designed for the person who goes about life focused on everyone else while neglecting their own needs.

The person who says yes when inwardly they want to say no. The person who is frustrated at all they do because they don't receive much in return. If that's you, I'm going to put out some great ideas on how you can change those patterns and get unstuck.

Life isn't meant to be tolerated. It should be enjoyed. So let's get to it.

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Corinne Powell: Hello friends, I'm so glad that you've decided to join me again and I am very happy to be with you. How's your summer going for those of you that are in the US? We're in the middle of summer and I know for myself it's a bit exhausting and it's a bit of an adjustment because my work schedule is different. My days vary in different sort of ways and I have the kids that I'm wanting to do things with, but also needing to balance it with what I need to do for myself and for work. And we have some vacations planned, but you know how it is being a parent, a vacation isn't necessarily the same as a child experiencing a vacation. 

Anyways, overall, I'm doing well, a bit tired for sure. But doing well and I hope that you are too. Of course, you know how it goes with me. No matter how you're doing, I'm interested to know. I don't need you to show up just doing well. I don't need you to show up and put aside how you're really doing. You know how that goes when there's some people you need to be around and you don't feel safe enough to just show up however you are. Or if you do show up not in a great mood, they are going to try to help you. Help you feel better. They put a positive twist onto your situation instead of just letting your situation be whatever it is.

And I'm just going to jump from that right into today's topic of conversation. And I really do wish that we could just be sitting across from each other in my living room or at a coffee shop or outdoors and just chatting. But, you know, this is our next best situation because here we are. We can't all do that right now today, but we can all connect in this way.

So we'll make the most of it. So I wanted to chat about this idea of trauma that is actually not recognized as trauma, complex trauma. And oftentimes it shows up in a typical parent-child relationship. A parent's overwhelmed, a parent's stressed, a parent is exhausted and the ways they start interacting with their child is not in the best interest of the child. So the parents triggered and then they're interacting with their child from that triggered state. Instead of getting regulated themself, coming back to this grounded place of “I do not need to let my emotions take over how I interact with you”.

Because our emotions are wonderful, but sometimes our emotions can do damage. It doesn't mean the emotion is the problem or that it's wrong. It just means we need to be able to navigate having those emotions and still being able to show up and interact in a way that isn't damaging to the other people around us.

And I want to tell you a little bit about my childhood to give you a window into what is this complex sort of trauma I'm talking about. I also want to mention that trauma is not just the event itself, it's how we experience it. So for one person, they may be traumatized by something that someone else isn't. It reminds me of a car accident me and two of my kids got into about six years ago. And I felt truly okay, not just physically, emotionally. I was okay. I was okay in it. I was okay coming out of it. And some friends of mine were concerned that maybe I wasn't really okay. Maybe I was suppressing some of the emotion I was feeling. The thing is, a car accident may be considered traumatic, but it doesn't have to traumatize someone. And in that instance, I was not traumatized. No, I've had other car accidents in the past that have actually been traumatic. But this one in particular wasn't. 

And so it's important to not just assume someone's been traumatized because they went through a traumatic experience. At the same time, it's important to know that someone could be traumatized even if the experiences they went through didn't seem traumatic.

So I was one of six children. I was right in the middle, the third born, the firstborn girl. So I have some of those firstborn tendencies. Grew up with a mother and a father in the home. My dad worked full-time. My mom was a full-time stay-at-home mother. She also homeschooled us. She was very, very busy with all of her kids. She had been a registered nurse previously but put a pause on working while she was raising and teaching us children. We grew up in an apartment complex. We fit a family of eight into a three-bedroom apartment. And growing up, I didn't know how tiny that space was. It was only becoming an adult and recognizing that the square footage in that home is half to a third of the square footage I've had in some of my homes that I've owned. And my dad loved working with wood. He's great as a carpenter.

And so he was able to build things that allowed us to have bunk beds and all sorts of extra shelving and storage throughout the house where this tiny apartment really held a lot because of what he made of it. And whatever is our normal growing up will feel exactly that to us. It will feel normal, because we don't know any different. So I truly only knew what was my normal. I didn't realize what the other options could have been for us.

So we grew up in close quarters, but we had lots of friends to play with. Living in an apartment complex was a wonderful thing for a child. Having friends that would knock on your door and ask you to play, going outside to ride your bikes, and having endless amounts of people to be able to enjoy playing with. Again, that we did. We enjoyed playing with our friends in the neighborhood. We enjoyed riding bikes and going on all sorts of adventures.

The thing that I want to highlight is this idea of emotions and emotional needs being overlooked and unnoticed. You see, growing up in the home that I did, there were emotions present, but not the full range of emotions.

And the full range of emotions wasn't tolerated. So I had a parental figure who was very angry and I learned to walk on eggshells. I learned to do what I could to avoid the angry outbursts. I had a parental figure who was very passive and more like a doormat where maybe things were going on that this parental figure wasn't happy with, but they didn't know their power. They didn't know what they could do about it to affect change. So no change occurred. And as a child, I know I felt sad, but I don't remember having people meet me in my sadness, having parental figures notice I was sad, sitting with me, asking me about my sadness, how I was doing, what was going on in my inner world, and helping me move through that sadness to return to a place of joy. 

In fact, it would have been hard to live in a place of joy because the environment I was in was not one that was full of joy. It was full of stress, arguments, chaos, depression. Those were some of the things it was full of. That doesn't mean I didn't have really happy times. In fact, as I graduated out of high school and started on my healing journey, I said I had a good childhood. I didn't realize what I missed out on. I didn't realize what it could have been. I didn't realize what my experiences had really done to me and how they had impacted me. 

I also didn't know it was possible to live in a state of joy, happy to be alive. I only knew what it was to get by each day, to just get up and manage through the day. To wake up feeling a sense of dread over what the day would hold and to just get through the day, not being excited about it, but knowing there were good things in life, being grateful throughout it, recognizing the positive things, capitalizing on them, actually minimizing the other emotions that were present because thinking that positivity was the spin that I needed to take on everything.

It even feels convoluted to talk about it because it's a jumble of things. I would get stuck in disappointment and didn't know how to get unstuck. Something would happen and I would be so upset about it. I would feel so much disappointment and I would just stay there in that place. I did not know how to return to this place of joy, this place of feeling that that happened and it's...it's no big deal now. Like I'm past it. It's all right. It's not that I didn't acknowledge what happened. It's just that I was able to move through it. I didn't know what that experience was like. I didn't know how to move through my emotions. I knew how to get stuck in them. And got stuck in the ones that are the low vibe emotions, the anxiety, the depression, that sense of sadness and overwhelm. That's what I knew. That's what I knew how to get stuck in. 

So I had to learn to meet myself in these places of sadness my inner self. And I had to learn how to attune to myself because I did not have a parental figure when I was young. Attune to me, to notice me as I was feeling those emotions, to sit with me, to acknowledge them, and to help me move through them. It's a practice that I do with my own inner child now and with my children and with the children I come in contact with.

When I have the opportunity, I see somebody overlooked in their sadness. I often will acknowledge that I see them. I might just go over and put a safe hand on their shoulder. I might say, how you doing? I might just connect with them in some sort of way to acknowledge that I do notice them, even if I'm not addressing exactly what's going on, because it kind of does depend on the situation. That is so impactful as children, every child deserves to be noticed to be attuned to, to be met in their emotions.

Every child deserves this experience of knowing that somebody wants to be with me no matter how I'm doing. It's okay if I'm angry. It's okay if I'm upset. It's okay if I'm disappointed. They will be with me. They won't try to help me move through it for the goal of moving through it. They will sit with me in it. And in fact, that will be my means of moving through it. So the goal isn't to sit down with a child and to say, they're super disappointed right now. They're really sad. They're upset. I need to help them get to this place of joy once again. No, no, no, no, no. The goal is to sit with them and to notice, to be able to get an understanding. “Hey, I notice you seem sad. What's going on?” Is there anything you want to talk about? Just sitting with them. Asking questions depending on what the situation is Depending on the child This isn't a formula a one -for -all formula

This is actually about you and I getting to understand the heart of ourselves and other people so that we know how to empathize. We know how to meet people in their places of pain, help them feel loved and understood, and help them work through that pain to come out of it to this place of, all feels right with the world again. Because all will not ever be right with the world. But when we can feel that all is right with the world, we can move through life a lot better off. Codependency would say, well, see, never, everything isn't all right with the world. So I shouldn't be all right then. And to that I ask, so is it better that if someone else is unhappy, you're unhappy too? Or if we recognize they're in a place of pain, we touch in with their pain, but we don't have to become the pain. We don't have to become what they are. We're allowed to be ourselves and they're allowed to be themselves. 

So when you sit and you attune to the child, it's not about taking on their emotions. Being grounded yourself and then coming alongside that child to support them. When that doesn't happen, when a child is sad and runs off to the room and nobody notices, nobody goes and checks in on them, nobody helps them to come back to this baseline of joy, these events on repeat. Build up and they're stored in the body, the body remembers and it impacts that person. And it's this complex sort of trauma that is less recognized, but deeply painful, deeply impactful. And whether you're listening and you're considering your own life, your own childhood, or you have children yourself and you're considering the ways that you interact with them. If you are looking for support in this area, if you're feeling that, you know what, I think there are ways that I was emotionally neglected as a child. I was overlooked. My parents had too much going on. They had their own traumas. They had their own emotions. They didn't know how to move through. So they didn't know how to support me. And you want that support. I am here to help you. That is what I specialize in.

Or perhaps you're thinking about the way you're parenting your children and you're sitting there saying, I want to do differently. I want to be able to attune to my child. I want to be able to break this cycle so that they do not experience some of what I perhaps experienced. I can help you with that as well. It all starts with us. When we figure out how we can support our own inner self, our own inner child, it becomes very natural to know how to support another child. And there are ways, very practical ways, that you can start this process.

So if you're interested, please reach out to me. You can either schedule a discovery call or you can just send me a message any way you know how to reach me on my social platforms or via email corinne, C -O -R -I -N -N -E at changeradically.com is the email address. And I would be honored to support you. It is my passion and my life's work to help stop this cycle of emotional neglect, trauma that is experienced that is not recognized as easily, as some of the larger, more overt traumas, but very important nonetheless.

And as we wrap up from my heart to yours, I'm so sorry for the times when you weren't noticed in your emotions. When your sadness, your disappointment, your anger was overlooked or was told to be turned off, or the plethora of other things that you could have experienced in your emotions. And my heart hurts with you because I know how devastating that can be. Your emotions aren't bad. It's very normal to feel intense emotions and you deserve to get unstuck. You deserve to be able to feel them and move through them within that natural 90 seconds. To be able to come out on the other side, feeling ready, ready to enjoy life again. I hope you'll reach out if you want help in that way.

And until next week, I'm wishing you all the best.

[Ending] We've come to the end of another episode. I'm so glad you stuck around. As you consider what you've heard, what's the one thing that especially resonated with you? What's one way you can start to implement change into your life? Too much too soon isn't sustainable.

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