Have you ever felt like everything about your relationship looked perfect on the surface … but you were still unhappy for some reason? If so, you probably were in desperate need of repairing an emotionally neglected relationship.

An emotionally neglected relationship is one where one or both partners suffered emotional neglect in childhood. If you’re a child of emotional neglect, the effects on your future relationships can be devastating.

So why don’t we hear more about this? Because emotional neglect is subtle. It leaves scars that often remain unseen until they start to erode your relationship.

As a victim of emotional neglect, you don’t believe you can ask for what you want and need. So instead, you remain quietly unhappy in your relationships, only to express yourself in random moments of conflict, before you go back to being nice. Even worse, you might even believe your needs are so unimportant that you become a people pleaser, always rushing to satisfy others.

These patterns make it very difficult to walk away from a relationship that’s no longer serving you. Even if you feel 90% satisfied, you’re afraid to consider that 100% satisfaction is even possible.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Repairing an Emotionally Neglected Relationship

In this article, we’ll discuss what emotional neglect is, how it shows up when you’re an adult, and what it does to romantic relationships. I’ll also include a quiz where you can test yourself to determine if this is something that is relevant for you in your romantic life. And lastly, I’ll share action steps you can begin taking right away to improve your relationship, communication, and self-love.

What Is Emotional Neglect?

When you accidentally got hurt physically as a kid, you probably got attention — someone showed up to bandage your wounds, let’s say. But what about when you were hurting on the inside? Who showed up then?

Being emotionally neglected as a child means your parents or caregivers didn’t respond to your emotional needs. As Healthline rightly points out, this isn’t quite the same as child abuse, although the effects are certainly painful and long-lasting. While an abusive parent would have tried to hurt you intentionally, an emotionally neglectful one usually just failed to realize or act on what you were going through internally.

So let’s say, for example, that you cried to your mom about another kid at school who wouldn’t share his toys with you. If your mom was emotionally attentive, she would’ve acknowledged how sad that must have made you, and talked to you about that. Instead, imagine that she minimized your feelings by telling you to “stop crying” and “try harder to make friends next time.” This is emotional neglect. By ignoring how you really felt (or failing to elicit that from you) she didn’t give you the chance to further explore your emotions by validating your feelings.

After a while, you learned that your feelings weren’t important. So you stopped expressing them. What’s worse is that nobody else really knew how to help you, because emotional neglect is so easy to overlook. How can a teacher, counselor, or any other adult in your life really see the hidden feelings that you’re not expressing?

Thankfully these days, many people now understand the subtle signs of emotional neglect in children. But many of us still don’t realize what really happened to us until we become adults. And by then, we’re likely in a romantic relationship with absolutely no idea of how to deal with our emotions. In other words, we’re already in need of repairing an emotionally neglected relationship.

How Emotional Neglect Shows Up When We’re Adults

Emotional neglect in childhood rears its ugly head in many ways once we’re older. But most of the time, the attitudes and behaviors you develop because of past emotional neglect are so ingrained, you think they’re normal. But they aren’t.

If you’re curious as to whether you were emotionally neglected, I found this “top 10” list of characteristics on PsychCentral to be extremely helpful.

10 characteristics of someone who grew up with childhood emotional neglect

1. Feeling empty
2. Counter-dependence (fear of depending on others)
3. Lack of self-knowledge (you don’t really know your own wishes or needs)
4. Poor compassion for self (probably plenty for others)
5. Feelings of guilt and shame
6. Self-directed anger and self-blame
7. A deep sense of being flawed, or different from everyone else
8. Struggle with self-care
9. Challenges with self-discipline
10. Difficulties identifying, naming, and understanding how emotions work in oneself and others

Keep in mind: These attitudes and behaviors actually did work for you as a child to survive being emotionally neglected. There’s nothing wrong with relating to these characteristics. They simply become ineffective once you’re an adult. In fact, they probably had a profound effect on your life, and you never even knew it.

Your past childhood emotional neglect makes you struggle in areas that others don’t. For instance, you might find it hard to speak up for yourself, really push for your ideas, try new experiences, or take risks. And of course, you’ll find one thing to be hardest of all: having a romantic relationship.

5 Ways Emotional Neglect Challenges Relationships

I love Dr. Jonice Webb, author of Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. Her thoughts on the subject are so on point. Courtesy of a kick-ass piece she did on her website, here’s a look at five ways a relationship might feel to you if you were a child of emotional neglect.

1. One-sided

You can’t share your feelings or desires if you don’t even know what they are — and if you suffered from childhood emotional neglect, you probably don’t. This makes your relationship “lopsided” as one partner may be getting their needs met while you aren’t. It may even feel like the relationship is “all about them” and not you. How long can this go on? Your challenge is to learn to become more present in your relationship — to take up more emotional space — so you can feel like you matter.

2. Unsatisfying

You might look around at all your friends and think, “Why does everyone else seem to be so much happier in their relationships than I do?” Or you might have fewer relationships than others. Remember, your relationships are usually one-sided, which means you don’t get your needs met. No wonder you’re not satisfied! Eventually, you either leave the relationship, allow it to fall apart, or just never let it reach its full potential because you don’t offer your true self to the other person.

3. Draining

Relationships should feel blissful, inspiring, and energizing, but you actually feel drained after spending time with your partner. That’s because you spend way too much energy trying to please them and not yourself. Your one-sided relationship takes a huge toll as you basically pretend to be someone else the entire time you’re with them. After doing social activities together, you may literally feel tired — not physically, but mentally.

4. Lonely

You may not actually be alone, but you do feel lonely. Feeling seen, heard, and recognized makes us feel connected, so when we don’t have that, we feel emotionally isolated — even while in a relationship. Problem is, you’ve minimized your own emotions so much that you feel like you can’t ask your partner for what you need. You find yourself stuck in a catch-22.

5. Passionless

Your relationship grinds to halt because it no longer energizes you or the other person. Without you inserting your “true self” into it, the two of you can’t connect or grow. That lack of connection drains your passion for each other, so sex might even go downhill as well. Now, repairing an emotionally neglected relationship must become your top priority.

Emotional Neglect Quiz

Dr. Jonice Webb also has a great quiz on her website to help you understand whether you’re a child of emotional neglect. For example, consider these questions.

Do You…
(Answer yes or no)

1. Sometimes feel like you don’t belong when with your family or friends?
2. Pride yourself on not relying upon others?
3. Have difficulty asking for help?
4. Have friends or family who complain that you are aloof or distant?
5. Feel you have not met your potential in life?
6. Often just want to be left alone?
7. Secretly feel that you may be a fraud?
8. Tend to feel uncomfortable in social situations?
9. Often feel disappointed with, or angry at, yourself?
10. Judge yourself more harshly than you judge others?

The full quiz includes 20 questions. Any “yes” answers would indicate childhood emotional neglect, and the more yesses you have, the more you may be affected. You can take the whole quiz here.

So, Where Do You Go From Here?

If you’re in a relationship now and childhood emotional neglect still affects you, consider starting or revisiting couples therapy. This can be helpful in a couple of ways.

First, a therapist can help you see that your needs do indeed matter. For instance, let’s say there are rare moments when you do try to express your feelings, but your partner usually meets it with a threat like, “Well, there’s the door” or “Maybe we should just break up then?” This makes it even harder to tell your partner the truth, and so you eventually feel like they don’t really know you on a deeper level. But a therapist can stop them and say, “You need to respond to that; you can’t just move into threats.” This experience helps you see that your feelings do really matter and teaches you how to speak up for yourself.

Second, a therapist can hold you accountable for communicating and not avoiding a challenging conversation. They might gently remind you, for example, that “you also have to receive the feedback.” If you’re really committed to repairing an emotionally neglected relationship, this might just might transform your relationship, both with your partner and yourself.

Repairing an Emotionally Neglected Relationship: Wrap-Up

Instead of taking the steps of repairing an emotionally neglected relationship, maybe you’re just “going through the motions” because things don’t seem chaotic enough to justify a breakup.

You and your partner may still love and respect one another, making it even harder to commit to doing something as drastic as ending the relationship. Initiating a conscious uncoupling can also be overwhelming, and completely changing up your day-to-day living situation — your comfort, really — is scary.

But whether your emotionally neglected relationship ends or not, you have a right to ask for what you want. Your needs aren’t “needy.” They’re just needs. You are not broken.

Finding your way back to yourself is the most important thing. Learning to express your needs, speak kindly to yourself, and depend on others in a healthy way will help undo the damage from your childhood emotional neglect. This will lead you to a new relationship — or back to the old one in a way you never experienced before. Either way, wouldn’t that be a much better spot than where you are now?

As a dating coach, I’ve seen how childhood emotional neglect affects men who are looking for new relationships. These old thought patterns and behaviors don’t just die after childhood — as you’ve seen, they carry through into our adult lives and can wreak havoc any time we attempt to bond with someone else. Our personal growth and ability to create better lives depends on whether we can overcome these negative experiences and gain knowledge from them.

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