🥀The Silent Wound: Understanding Hidden Emotional Neglect

Many people wonder how someone who "had it all" growing up could still struggle deeply with emotional and mental health. As a society, we often equate a stable home, food on the table, and financial support with a happy, healthy childhood. But there is another kind of need that, when unmet, leaves wounds just as real as any physical hardship: emotional connection.

This is the hidden trauma of emotional neglect.

Unlike physical abuse or overt trauma, emotional neglect is invisible. It leaves no bruises, no headlines, no calls to the authorities. It is the absence of presence. The absence of attunement. The absence of being seen and valued for who you are emotionally. And often, even the people experiencing it don’t know it's happened.

I’ve lived through profound hardship. I endured poverty, homelessness, teen pregnancy, abuse, and divorce—all before the age of 20. I never attended high school, and by 15, I had already moved out on my own. Despite all of this, I went on to raise my son in Northern California, found love again, and built a life of strength and success. From the outside, I may look like the very definition of resilience.

Yet, it was only recently that I realized I had also been a victim of emotional neglect. Though my life was filled with struggle, it was the lack of emotional connection and support that cut the deepest—and stayed hidden the longest. No one was there to protect me, to validate my feelings, or to create a safe emotional space for me to grow. By 13, I was emotionally alone.

This realization helped me understand something that had always perplexed me: why so many people who seem to have it all still fall apart emotionally. I used to think, "How can you be so broken? You had food, a home, a family." But now I understand—many of those people, though materially supported, were also emotionally abandoned. And unlike me, they hadn’t developed a deep connection to their inner being to carry them through.

When I worked in housing, I saw this play out over and over. Residents who had lived on the streets were given homes and stability, but often still struggled emotionally. Why? Because while shelter is critical, emotional connection is just as essential to well-being. Without it, we become unmoored. As humans, we need to feel seen, heard, and safe.

I now see that a big part of my role—whether in my personal life or in my work—has always been to be a safe space for others. I often became the emotional support system I never had. This wasn’t just a job to me; it was a calling. I became someone who could hold space for others because I had finally gotten to a place where all of my basic needs were met—and I had done the inner work to survive and thrive.

Emotional neglect may be silent, but its effects are not. When we finally recognize its presence, we begin the most important work of all: re-parenting ourselves, grieving what was lost, and offering the compassion we never received to our own inner child.

If you resonate with my story, know this: you're not alone. And your pain is real, even if no one ever named it before.

You can thrive, not just survive. But it starts with being seen—first by yourself, and then by others.