Dilshad 0:03

This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. It's really funny to say, but this episode was given legitimacy by a burrito. As you all know, every episode I do, I'm always looking for signs and little cosmic winks from the universe, if you want to call it that, as to whether whether or not I should do the episode or what I should include in the actual episode content. And I was going back and forth with this particular episode about emotional neglect and childhood emotional neglect. And I was wondering whether I should include it or not, because the series was already very long. Whatever I had planned was already at four episodes, and now it's grown to six episodes in this series. And I just thought it would be too long. And I was wondering whether I should include this episode at all. And then the whole burrito incident happened, and I was like, okay, this is absolutely something that needs to happen because it was so on the nose. I cannot wait to tell you the story. But I just wanted to say, here we are, childhood emotional neglect as a topic in the self-abandonment series. So let's just take a step back for a second. Why are we even doing this series? I know I've said this multiple times, but I want to sort of show you a different angle of why talking about self-abandonment and knowing the patterns behind it is so important right now. It is so important right now because more than ever, there are just so many voices coming at us. So many. And it can get real confusing real quick when we can't hear our own voice first, or even the loudest than all the other voices. And self-abandonment, uh one of the aspects of self-abandonment anyway, is when we ignore our own voice or we just straight up don't hear it, and we sort of become a mishmash of everyone else's voices, and then we get confused. And it's so funny because one day I asked my intuition, I was like, why do people get confused? What is the root cause of confusion? And in this very zen uh way, my intuition said, uh, confusion is too many voices. And yeah, it's just a perfect saying, right? It's just that's exactly what it is. And one way to abandon yourself is to be constantly confused and then reach out to other authorities or other people for input when you don't have a strong center. Not that we shouldn't ask people for help, but it's different when we're trying to fill our center with the outside world versus being filled up from the inside ourselves and then going outside. This episode series, like I said, is for anyone who's asking or struggling with the question of who am I? What does my true authentic self even mean? What does it feel like to have a strong sense of self, a sturdy center? And we're talking about childhood emotional neglect and emotional neglect as a topic in this series, in this pattern of self-abandonment, because it's a chronic thing. It happens to almost everybody, and it is not about blame. We're not blaming our parents or our family or anyone else. This episode, like every other episode in the whole series and podcast, is about awareness of how patterns work and how they impact us. And it's true, hurt people hurt people. It's a very common saying, but that is what this episode is about. How hurt carries forward from one generation to another. But we first have to identify what that hurt is. So far, this series has covered a more personal dynamic that happens. We've talked about projective identification, empowered women, sensitives, empaths, introjection, the just world hypothesis. And these are internal, forward, external, biased kind of topics, right? Because it's a we talked a lot about what goes on inside just based on our pure psychology. But now we're kind of going into the outside world even more than we did in the previous episodes, which is how does another person's behavior impact us in a particular way that leads us to consistently and chronically self-abandon ourselves. Or rather, that was grammatically incorrect, just self-abandon. So you can see this as concentric circles and spheres of influence. And now we're going into a more outside sphere of influence that then impacts us on the inside. And that sphere of influence is what happened in our childhood, specifically around emotional neglect. And this series is going to cover these wounds that mostly everyone suffers from. So that's why it's included in this series because there are many causes of self-abandonment. But if you dig under the surface, the most common root causes are what this series will cover. Everything we cover in this series are the root causes. One of them or all of them are the root causes behind why you self-abandon. Because we're going for the most common ground, we're going for the most general ground. And then of course you can take it and see how it applies to you personally. We're five minutes in, and I haven't defined childhood emotional neglect for you. So let's just define it real quick before I tell you the burrito story. Childhood emotional neglect is a parent's failure to adequately respond to a child's emotional needs. And this definition, and most of the research in this episode, is taken directly from a very important work by Dr. Jonas Webb in her book Running on Empty, Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. So I highly recommend reading that book if you want to. You don't have to, but because I'll give you other resources if that book is too much for you. But basically, that's her definition. Because unlike physical abuse, childhood emotional neglect is an act of what is left out rather than what was included. It's defined by what did not happen rather than what did. And it's one of the most underhanded forms of abuse. Even in adult relationships, you see this a lot. Physical abuse, you can see it, you can feel it, you know it. But emotional abuse, that is something that just is psychologically very damning. In childhood emotional neglect, specifically emotional neglect, we're talking about a lack of emotional support, a lack of validation, a lack of attention, and even just invalidation as part of emotional neglect. Emotional neglect in general is about when one person treats another person's emotions and emotional needs as though they are inconsequential, they don't exist, or that they're just a burden. And that's what we're really talking about right now. It can happen in any relationship, marital, familial, parental, friendships, and even workplace relationships. But we have to start, for the sake of this episode, with what happened in the original relationship, which is the parental-child relationship, and then we'll move on to a more general type of emotional neglect. But as you will see, understanding childhood emotional neglect will lead you to understand emotional neglect. When we look at a child, I want you to really look at what a child is. This is a being that is barely alive for maybe a year, two years, three years on this planet. They don't know the world like an adult does. They have no idea what's going on. They're looking at the world with wide open eyes. Their body is not developed, their brain is not developed. So they need a lot of input and support, more so than an adult might ever need. An adult might want it, but a child needs it because they physically do not have the capacity to advocate for themselves, to understand the world, to protect themselves. They physically do not have that capacity. They do not have the capacity to understand the world. And part of understanding the world is understanding their relationship to the world. Who are they and how do they interact with the world? And part of learning that is understanding their own emotional landscape. And that is what is lacking in a lot of parental-child relationships. It is a passive form of trauma. When parents do not respond or consistently invalidate their child's feelings a lot of times while raising them, it communicates to the child that their emotions are invisible or unimportant or even a burden to other people. These children, they will naturally start to put a wall between themselves and their feelings as a way to cope with the world, as a way to be good girl or good boy, or just be a man, even, you know? And this separation, this putting up the wall, that wall forms the basis of so many struggles that they will face throughout their adult life. And so now that we talked about that, I completely understand that even hearing that definition might sound like you're already very uncomfortable because you know this is going into territory that you have probably never even heard of or understood before. And if you're feeling that sort of hesitation, just know that sometimes we feel this anxious feeling, not because we're scared, but because we're excited to understand something, but we misinterpret it as fear because we don't quite understand that our body is reacting to this being as food. This is nourishment for our soul. And we're like, yes, yes, yes, finally, finally, give me food, give me food, right? And it's excitement, it's anticipation. And if you're feeling that, good, it's a good sign. Don't interpret that as something that is unnecessary because that's not what happen what's happening here. I want to give you a break from that a little bit and talk about the burrito story. We can kind of just laugh about how this came about. So, like I said, this episode was given legitimacy by a burrito. I was thinking about whether I should talk about this episode, whether I should include this in an already long series. And I was thinking about that, and I went to this burrito food truck here in Sedona, and they specialize in these organic burritos. So I went there, I bought a burrito, and while I was waiting for it to be made, I went to the salsa counter to fill up on the salsa for my burrito. And when I went to the salsa counter, there was a family sitting there. It was a long table with a big family sitting there. And as I walk up to the salsa counter, I hear the man behind me say, Yeah, they said children should be seen, not heard. And I was like, What? This is so on the nose. And I did not want to turn around and look at him, and I'm like, maybe, maybe I just heard what I wanted to hear. So I kept filling my salsa. And he said it again, yeah, that's what they think. Children should be seen, not heard. And I'm like, wow. I was literally thinking of doing an episode on childhood emotional neglect, and he literally picked up the most common phrase of emotional neglect, seen, but not heard. How insane is that coincidence, right? Then a week later, because I sat on this episode for three weeks before I'm recording it now. I'm in the gym, and one of my favorite uh gym instructors is there teaching the class, and she was telling this story, and I can't remember what the context was, but she says, I thought to myself, am I treating him like a kid? You know, am I babying him? And then I thought to myself, wait, he is a kid. He is a baby. And that's what she said. And I was like, oh my God. What an amazing thing to realize, and what an amazing thing to do for your child. And these two incidents together made me want to record this episode. Isn't that just such a beautiful synchronicity to happen? So yeah, here we are. Okay, back to childhood emotional neglect. The reason I also wanted to include this in the pattern of self-abandonment is because one of the symptoms of uh childhood emotional neglect in adults is the problem of legitimizing ourselves. We hide our light, so to speak. We question our own legitimacy. It also leads to a pretty significant, massive imposter syndrome. And it's almost as if you don't even legitimize yourself. You don't think you're a legitimate person. Because in order to know your own legitimacy, in order to feel your own light, you have to be in touch with your emotions. You have to be in touch with your feelings about a subject. And a lot of people will hide it or put it behind the wall. So they will put themselves on the sidelines, they will try to stay invisible, they will avoid conflict, and they will be afraid to rock the boat, or they will rock the boat too much as a form of hiding their light. And if at all, someone who's been through severe childhood emotional neglect or any childhood emotional neglect, if at all they feel their light, it will almost be as if by accident. It happened as a synchronicity rather than as a desire or as a welling up feeling that comes up inside of you. And I've seen this a lot when clients come for readings. It's one of the reasons why I will always focus on telling my clients what their strengths are, what their light is. And so many times when I do tell them that, it almost feels like they feel like I'm talking about an alien because they're so used to criticizing themselves or walling off their feelings, and they're so used to diminishing their own light. When they talk, when I talk about their strengths with them, they feel as though I'm talking about someone else, someone they might recognize or feel familiar with, but it's not them. And that's what I've seen the most as a symptom of childhood emotional neglect, and it's almost as if they abandon themselves or we abandon ourselves from our own light because we cannot legitimize ourselves. And the thing that makes childhood emotional neglect so insidious, there's no proof of it. There are no physical scars, there's no uh physical repercussion from childhood emotional neglect. Sorry. You had food, you had shelter, you maybe even had schooling, you had clothing. And yet there was a lot of physical care, but there was no emotional, mental, or spiritual care. And that's what a lot of people think parenting is, right? They think about just providing for their children physical, physical things. And a child needs so much more than that. Because, like I said, they're still developing. They don't understand the world the way an adult might. In fact, if you are very honest with yourselves, most adults don't understand the world. So we expect a lot from children and we don't provide what they need in order to understand the world. And what makes this even worse is because it does not feel like a trauma, it's hard to recall as an adult that it there was anything traumatic about the childhood. And sometimes an adult might grow up and see certain specific moments in time as okay, yeah, I can see how that was a trauma. But again, they will sort of illegitimize themselves and say, oh, it wasn't that bad. At least I was fed. At least I wasn't sexually assaulted, at least I wasn't XYZ. And so they minimize their own trauma because they don't see it as a trauma. Even some, I've seen this even with people who have been hurt physically or beaten. They say, ah, it wasn't that bad, you know, at least, at least I had food, at least I wasn't locked in a closet. That minimization, I feel like, is almost always a characteristic of someone who's been through a lot of trauma. When I was younger, I thought that people who've been through a lot of trauma talk about their trauma or they admit that they've had trauma. But actually, people who've been through a lot of trauma hardly ever admit that they have been, and they will almost minimize or reject or again abandon themselves by saying that they that, you know, there wasn't any dramatic event. So I guess there wasn't any trauma. And even the ones that had had a dramatic event, they say, I didn't have any trauma. And this is especially insidious with emotional neglect because it's not something that you can point at and say, here is my scar from it. But I will say that, and this is from my own observation, this is not from Dr. Jonas Webb, but I will 100% say that if there's been any type of physical abuse, there almost always has been emotional neglect. I think those two things go hand in hand. But the opposite is not true. If there's been a lot of emotional neglect, it doesn't always mean there's been physical neglect or physical abuse. That's been my observation, like I said. This is not Dr. John S. Webb's studies, but it has totally been my observation with every client and my own personal experience. And now because it's not registered as traumatic, and because it's not registered as traumatic, a child cannot recall it. And because it's happened multiple times over a long period of time, it's almost like a resting state. So, you know how people say, and you know, when I crack jokes on my episodes, I'm not trying to minimize what we're talking about, but I'm trying to just sort of hold the energy and the complexity of what I'm talking about. So please understand that even though I'm cracking jokes, I'm not necessarily trying to minimize it, but I am trying to give you synonyms that prevent you from going too much into despair and sort of seeing this from an objective point of view. Like I said, it happens so many times that it becomes your resting state. So you know how we have a resting B-I-T-C-H face? A resting bitch face. That emotional neglect becomes our resting neglect face. It becomes this is our resting state, is one of neglect. So we cannot register it as a trauma, really, because it's happened in so many small moments for so long. It's not registered as trauma. So the core characteristics of childhood emotional neglect is number one, emotional unavailability. Your caregiver might be physically present, but just absent in some way. Either they're uninvolved or they're detached or they're distracted, or when they do show attention, it's almost always the kind of attention you do not want, you know, because it's critical, it's mean, or it's dismissive. So it's emotional unavailability that also masquerades as emotional availability, but it's not emotional availability. It is more like someone who is just dumping their trauma on you whenever they see you. But it masquerades as care. And I'll give you a few examples of this in a second. The second characteristic is invalidation. So somehow your feelings were constantly dismissed, minimized, or criticized. For example, toughen up when you're in pain or when you're sad about something. Oh, and the third characteristic is unintentionality. Again, these three characteristics are taken from Dr. Jonas Webb. But unintentionality means it doesn't necessarily occur out of malice, although sometimes it does. It's mostly because the parents lack the emotional awareness to attune to a to to attune to a child. So emotional awareness is not there, they're emotionally immature themselves. So here's a few examples of how it can show up. Toughen up. You're making it up. You're pretending. All you want is attention. You just want attention. Do as I say. It's fine. I don't know what you're so upset about. Stop crying. Don't laugh. A pinch or a slap or big eyes when saying something, when a child is saying something. So, and the child is seeing all of these things or hearing all of these things, and they they're like, okay, according to my parent, this is wrong or bad somehow, but I don't know why. I'm not being explained to, I'm being ordered about. Respect your elders, even though a lot of the elders that you're being taught to see as an elder and respect are actually not people you respect or even consider as an elder. It often feels like you're playing house with these parents. You're just living together like roommates. And that's another feeling that you could feel with childhood emotional neglect. So, can you see the pattern of self-abandonment now? There's no discussion about your feelings. There's no explanation for why you're expected to do something. There's a lot of performance expectation. You're expected to perform. It's almost as if you are an actor in a role that has been given to you by the director, and the director being your parents, and you're just expected to perform that role. It's a lot of demands, not requests or negotiations, but demands. And again, this is a child, someone who's barely been alive, one, two, three, eight years on this planet. Think about how confusing life is in your 30s or 20s. Can you imagine what that's like for a child? There's so much inner turmoil when you're dealing with the world as an adult. Can you imagine what it's like as a child? You're expected to behave like an adult even though you're a child. Some of us are praised for being mature, sensible, quiet, never asking for much. And that's part of the whole children should be seen, not heard. And it's almost like you're an object of amusement, maybe, but never a human being that is respected and regarded and honored and cherished. Another example can be kiss your grandpa or grandma, even though the child doesn't want to. Hug this person. It's like this demands of affection from a child who you never asked whether they want to show affection or not. It's the expectation of performance rather than emotional care. And if the child doesn't do it, what happens to them? They're misbehaving in some way. They're bad children because they didn't behave the way you wanted them to behave, and exactly the thing that they by you I mean the parents, but you know what I mean. They didn't behave exactly that way. They didn't do it exactly the way it needed to be done. And now you grow up and you abandon yourself. So let's say that you didn't perform excellently at something, then you call yourself stupid, or you say that you are weak for even feeling that way. Now you might say, now that was a very small example. The example of a demanding of affection from a child. But this can be applied in so many different situations. I'm just giving that one as a very common one that I've seen so many parents do. Now you might say, Doshad, this is how every child is raised. What's the big deal? That's the problem. This is how a lot of children are raised, and those children become adults. Adults who are disconnected from their feelings and their emotions and look around you at the world right now. People who are disconnected from their feelings, their emotions, their deep inner core, they either become extremely depressed, sad people or megalomaniacs. I'm not saying that childhood emotional neglect almost always leads to narcissistic abusive people, but I will make a statement and say childhood emotional neglect almost always leads to a sad adult. Almost always. So if you look around you, a lot of people are just children in an adult body acting out their traumas for this very reason. Here's another example. I see this as an adult. And this is such a funny example, and I hope you can appreciate it for what it is. But where I see this the most is in dog training. When I got a dog, by the way, I explained this somewhat in episode 20, The Magic of My Dog Soulmate Azar, and the dignity we find in animal companionship. So you can just look up that title on any podcast player and you'll find it. When I was trained to have a dog, okay, so I adopted my dog, and the second I adopted him, no, no, actually, I started fostering dogs first. And as I'm fostering dogs, I was given a guide as to how to properly foster a dog, how to train them, etc. And I followed that guide because what did I know? Until I got my dog, and I started looking at him, and I realized that a lot of the training that I was trying to do with him did not work. There were things he was just naturally good at, like crate training or sitting and doing basic command stuff, like sit, lay down, etc. But there were other things that he was just not good at, which is walking on a leash or just walking on the street in general. It was just not his thing. And so many people had a reaction to that because according to them, a dog should like going on walks. And some people said, and I quote, just tug the leash and pull him and just make him go on the walk with you. Some people said, Oh, you know, just if he doesn't want to go on the walk, just find something that he would like to do instead, like uh go for agility training or something like that. Some other people said, get a muzzle or get a specific shock collar so that you can shock him every time he does not, every time he pulls on the leash, and that will make him stop pulling. And I just want to say, can't you tell exactly how this person was raised by how they reacted to the way my dog should be trained to walk on the leash? You see, everybody had an opinion, but very few people were actually looking at my dog. My dog is someone who likes peace and quiet. He is not an excitable dog. He likes his little dog bed, he likes staring out into the sky and in the into the into the distance. You know, when we go on a hike and we sit down, all he likes to do is perch himself on the rock and stare off into the distance. This is a monk-like dog. This is a dog who is extremely intelligent, but has very specific needs on who he wants to interact with and who he doesn't want to interact with. He is an introvert. My dog is an introvert. So forcing him to go on a walk, shocking him when he's already such a sensitive boy, is not the way to do things. This dog needs a better environment, a quieter environment for him to walk. And surprise, surprise, he loves walking on a hike. He loves doing hikes. He loves being off-leash and going into the woods, into the forest. He's excellent at recall and all these other things. He just does not like walking on the street with cars and noises. And that was all he needed. He just needed a better environment for him to walk in. He did not need to be shocked. He did not need to be pulled or yanked. He just needed an environment that was catered to him rather than forcing him to cater to the environment. Do you see how childhood emotional neglect plays out in how people treat their dogs now? Because I saw it most clearly, even in my, even in my reaction to my own dog, I saw my own emotional neglect playing out in how I treated him. And so the first two years of our relationship were awful because I just was doing everything that I was taught until I realized what I needed and what he needed the most was to build a bond between us. He needed to know that I was his safe place. And so I spent more time playing with him. I spent more time cuddling with him. I spent more time listening to his body. If he didn't want to be touched, I didn't touch him. I wouldn't force my affection on him. I wouldn't pet him if he didn't want to be pet. I would pet him under the chin because he preferred that over his head. These are all the things I wish I would have done from the moment I got him, as opposed to trying to train him to make him a better fit for the world instead of just adapting the environment slightly to match his needs. So that's just an example of how that plays out. I'm trying to connect all the patterns and the dots for you here. So here are some of the symptoms you can experience from childhood emotional neglect. And again, this is not something that happens in isolation once or twice. It happens consistently in small moments for a long period of time, especially in your younger years. I'm talking even before the age of 10. So these symptoms, by the way, are taken directly from Dr. Jonas Webb. I hold absolutely no copyright on that. It's just, I need to talk about it with you so that you can recognize what these things are because once you know what it is, you can address it, right? So I'll give you my own perspective on them where necessary, but I do want to list off the symptoms as Jonas Webb, Dr. Jonas Webb, has described them. So first one is the feeling of emptiness. It's almost like a sensation of being numb or hollow, or having the sense there is something missing. This also leads to a feeling of there's something being wrong with you and you can't identify what it is. I physically experienced this as a deep, dark black hole around my solar plexus chakra or solar plexus area on my body. It's just that it was like I was hungry all the time. There was like a bottomless pit of just hunger that could never be satiated. The second symptom is counterdependence. You have an intense aversion to asking for help, a deep fear, even of relying on other people. And you had this hyper-independent self. And I think that a lot of the strong independent woman archetype that's come out in the last few years are women who have felt so neglected in relationships that they have forced themselves to be hyper, hyper-independent to the point now where they physically cannot ask for help or rely on other people. That was my observation, by the way, not Dr. Jonas Webb, but there's this the basic symptom is a fear of asking for help and a fear of relying on other people. Now, my personal observation is that this doesn't come necessarily from a fear of being seen as weak, although that might be part of it. It's mostly a fear of relying on someone and then having them hurt you because you relied on them or having them make you feel like less of a person because you relied on them. So do you see I'm connecting the dots now for you between empowered women, projective identification, and now childhood self-ab uh childhood emotional neglect. So we're connecting the dots, okay? All right, the third symptom is unrealistic self-appraisal, meaning you cannot identify your own strengths. Now, according to Dr. Jonas Webb, she says you can not accurately identify your own weaknesses. But I think, I think people with childhood emotional neglect can very identify, very accurately identify their weaknesses to the point of over-identifying with their weaknesses. So I think that's more true. But she says that you have difficulty accurately identifying your own strengths, weaknesses, and what your true passions are. The fourth symptom is a lack of self-compassion. Whoo, this is a big one. Forgiving, you can forgive others semi-easily, but you hold yourself to impossibly high, perfectionistic standards. You have the fifth symptom, guilt and shame. This is really ugly guilt and shame. Really toxic guilt and shame. You feel fundamentally flawed, or you have unreasonable guilt when prioritizing your own needs over others' demands. This is very important. Your needs over others' demands. The next symptom is you have a lot of self-directed anger and self-blame. You direct a lot of your frustration inward and you're really harsh on yourself, then the situation warrants. At this point, I should probably mention the episode that we did on meeting the mother. This was episode 46, and we did an episode on how we need to install and plant the eternal, internal mother. And I talk about the heavy criticism that was my inner mother's voice and how we can transform that. Now, you might not identify that as your inner mother, you might identify it as something else, but it's basically a hypercritical, extremely cruel inner voice. And that will be a good episode for you to listen to. Again, you can just put that in the search bar in any of your podcast players and go listen to it. I will list out all the referenced episodes and any of the references I mention in this episode in the description. Just know that. But I just want to put this out there so that you know where to go and not think that this episode is the only episode you can get. Okay. And what's really good about that episode, by the way, is that I give you a ritual to do around this extremely critical, mean and cruel voice inside. So that's wonderful. The next symptom is the fatal flaw symptom. You have this secret belief that if people really knew you, if they really saw you, they would reject you or think that there's something really wrong with you. And I think this comes from, this is my belief, by the way, this is or my observation, is that I think this comes from the fact that you experienced some really intense events in your life. And maybe you did a bunch of things that were not exactly kosher when you were a child. And those things led you to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with you because you did those things. You were mean to animals, or you were cruel to other people, or you lied, or you cheated, or you stole when you were a kid. And that has led you to believe that there's something really wrong with you. What you don't realize as an adult is that you did those things because you were trying to cope. You didn't see it as a coping mechanism. You saw it as a sign of your ugliness. The next symptom is you have difficulty nurturing. You can afford emotional support, comfort, and care to other people, but giving it to yourself, you're close to zero. You can even give it to an animal, especially now as an adult or a stranger, but you cannot give it to yourself. Another symptom is really poor self-discipline. You struggle to motivate yourself to do things that you don't want to do, which can really lead to some disastrous consequences. Like I've seen people not want to pay their taxes because it's just cumbersome and you can't motivate yourself to do it. For me, when I was trying to fill out my company expense reports, so when I go traveling, I need to submit an expense report. And there have been multiple expense reports that I have simply not filed or gotten my money back simply because I could not motivate myself to do those expense reports, even if it meant getting my money back. And so you can have discipline issues like this. And I won't even call it discipline. I would call it the inability to get dopamine from taking care of yourself and doing things that actually benefit you. And so I think that this is also related to ADHD. I think Gabor Mate covers this in his work, ADHD and trauma. I'm not saying that childhood emotional neglect always leads to ADHD, but I do think that motivation and the motivation to take care of yourself is just not there after going through childhood emotional neglect. And the last symptom is alexithemia. Alexithemia. I don't know how to pronounce that, but basically it means a really deep difficulty in recognizing, understanding, and even putting your own emotions into words. You just cannot do it. And so these are the effects, the waterfall effects of childhood emotional neglect. Can you see how the feeling of emptiness, the aversion to asking for help, the lack of self-compassion, the guilt and shame, this feeling of there's something wrong with you? Can you see how that's almost like a push towards consistently and chronically abandoning yourself? Can you see that? I hope you can. So at this point you might be thinking, okay, Dalshal, I've had enough of listening to the problem. What is the solution? Well, why don't you tell me? You know, it's it's so easy, yet it's so difficult, right? If you have trouble with your emotions, what are you gonna do? You're gonna listen to your emotions. And this is one of the things that scares me about AI and people asking help from AI because when people go to AI for a solution to their problem, it's not necessarily that AI sits there saying, Hey, let's go deep into your feelings and help you identify, recognize, and process a feeling. It just gives you a solution. So it feels like you solved the problem, but actually you just made it bigger. Listening to your emotions can be as simple as just asking yourself every one hour, how am I feeling? You put an alarm on your phone, or maybe if one hour is too much, every five hours, every six hours, how am I feeling? What am I thinking? What am I doing? Those three questions, when asked in tandem, can really help you parse out how you're feeling. It is that simple, but it does require conscious effort. And again, like I said many times, I will do an episode purely on the solution to self-abandonment. So don't worry. I am not leaving you ha hanging with all this negativity. And honestly, is this really negativity? Is it negativity or is it awareness of the negative patterns? Right? It's not about negativity for the sake of negativity. It's not trauma porn, as some people might say, but it is negative pattern recognition so that we can just absolve it. Now, do I think there's a golden nugget that'll solve all your problems? But no, obviously. But I do think there is a golden path that leads to a place where you are comfortable in your own skin. You might have to deal with discomfort from time to time, but your baseline has changed to one of comfort within yourself, a strong sense of self. That's what we're going to. Okay. I thought it would also be helpful for this episode, now that you can recognize what happened inside of you, to also recognize what was outside of you so that you can see the pattern more clearly. Because I talked about all the symptoms inside of you, but what are the types of parents that do this childhood emotional neglect? I think that it's really important to identify the types of parents. And again, this is taken directly from Dr. Jonas Webb's work. Did I say Dr. Jonas Webb? Yes, okay, good. Yeah, I thought I said something else, but yeah, that's her name. Here are the types of parents that often do the emotional neglect, the childhood emotional neglect. And what I want you to also hear with this is how these are also people who grow up and become parents themselves. So they're not just your parents, but you know, the children of these parents who performed the childhood emotional neglect grow up to become adults and parents and teachers and coworkers and boyfriends or girlfriends, right? So you can see this not just in your own parents, but also as general emotional neglect performed by the other adults around you. Even you can probably see it in yourself. But for now, let's just focus on the parents that were around you. So category one, basically, Dr. Jonas Webb separates the types of parents into three overarching umbrella terms. Number one, the self-involved parents. Number two, the struggling parents, and number three, the well-meaning yet neglected themselves parents. The self-involved parents are basically just extremely self-involved. They are just preoccupied with their own needs or they are just putting their own interests first, and they lead with control. And they just have a general lack of capacity to empathize with the child. So the first type of parent, as you might have guessed, is the narcissistic parent. This is someone who views their child basically as an extension of themselves. You know, the ones who keep saying their child is a mini-me. Not that I'm saying that that's always a bad thing that people say, but that's how they view their child. They just view them as a copy of themselves. These are the parents that name their child after a family name or someone else in the family, and not because they want to name their child something that's a wish or a dream for the child or who the child is necessarily, but they just want a copycat version of the child. And I'm not saying again that everyone who names their child after a relative or something is doing that, but it is a form of narcissism when they demand that the child caters to their ego, their needs, their opinions, their worldview, and make the parent feel special, prioritizing their own public image over the child's individuality. And you see this very often from my experience in South Asian cultures. It's the fear of public opinion or log kya kahinge, which is the Hindi term for what will people say. They are so obsessed with things like the outer world and how people will see them and therefore their family that they will squash any individuality in their child for the sake of prioritizing the image of their family, and that is to say, themselves. I highly recommend listening to episode episode number seven, listener QA, navigating what will people say, or in other words, Logia kehenge. It was a listener who asked a question about navigating that feeling of what will people say, right? Because it has been instilled into them as a child. So now they've grown up with the What will people say in their own mind? And they censor themselves. They are a narcissistic parent to themselves now. And we covered this in an episode at length. And I highly recommend you listen to that one. It's a good one. Okay. The second type of self-involved parent is the addicted parent. They're addicted to something and they're consumed by it. And it makes them unavailable. So whatever the substance is, alcohol, drugs, whatever. Now, here's what I am seeing personally in the world today. I am seeing addicted parents addicted to their phones and technology in general. I've seen it so many times. I go to restaurants, I go to coffee shops, and the parent is on the phone, and either the child is also encouraged to be on the phone, or they're just ignored while the parent is just scrolling on social media or playing games on their phone or something. So that's the addicted parent. The third type is the authoritarian parent. This is again something I feel like it's very common in South Asian cultures. It's demanding unquestioning obedience and respect at all costs. But the respect is not real respect, it's just compliance. They view their children's differing opinions as a threat. Boundaries are a threat. Emotional reactions as defiance. They don't see that as their child's nature coming out. They see that as a threat to their own safety or a threat to their own sense of self. And they see it as someone who is disobeying rather than someone who is coming out of their shell. Now, the episodes I would recommend for this is episode 43. It's the art of being visible, slowly, gently, peacefully healing the visibility wound. Because I think what an authoritarian parent does over time is that it makes the child feel unsafe to be seen. Because anything that differs from another person's opinion means that they will be hurt or they will be neglected or abandoned or rejected. And so I think the art of being visible is a really important episode to combat that. Again, you can search for these episodes in the podcast player. As I think about it, episode number one, Quiet Ways We Undermine Our Dignity and How to Resolve It, Ritual of the Dignity Abuser, that's also a good episode to help combat the effects of an authoritarian parent. Because again, we're talking about that inner voice that becomes authoritarian and cruel and kind of like a despot in our own minds. And it really abuses our dignity. And I think that is a really good episode to listen to too. Because again, I want you to be aware of things, but I also want you to have more support as you recognize these patterns. That's the only reason why. Again, I'll list them in the description. And the fourth type of a self-involved parent is the sociopathic parent. Now they're driven purely by power and control. They are manipulative and they will often use gaslighting and shaming to literally break down the sense of self that a child has. So they are actively teaching you to abandon yourself. And I've seen this a lot with parents who deny that they ever did anything. They conveniently forget what they did to their child. And there's this guy on Instagram, I forget who he was, but I watched his video and he was saying, I don't know whether he studied predators or he just studied sociopathic hunters or whatever. And he said that the way these people hunt is that they don't hunt for people who are weak necessarily. They hunt for people who are trained to abandon themselves. The perfect victim for a predator is someone who is used to giving up their power, who is used to not having a sense of self, and they become a perfect victim to a predator. They are trained from birth to dismiss their own needs. So they grow up thinking that they're not important enough. So that makes them the perfect candidate for a predator of some kind, whether it's a sexual predator, a abusive predator, whatever it is. And I thought that was the perfect video for what we're discussing today, and what we just said about the sociopathic parent. Those are the types of self-involved parents that emotionally neglect their child. Now, the category two is the struggling parents. They want to be emotionally present, but they lack the time, energy, or just the bandwidth to do so. The depressed parent is one of those types of parents. They're battling some kind of mental health struggle, depression, grief, or just their emotional energy is depleted. So they just don't have the bandwidth, even if they want to be there. I have personally seen this with women who have struggled with postpartum depression, and now they just can't be there for their child, and they're not getting the support they need. So they're just a depressed parent and they're chemically imbalanced and they physically cannot be there for the child. They might want to be, but they're just not there. And that is systemic, right? That is a symptom of patriarchy and medical gaslighting and the medical industry not taking an interest in women's health. So it's not necessarily their fault, right? We're not blaming this parent. But we still have to acknowledge the impact it's had on the child. The second type is the overworked parent. They just have a really hard job or they have multiple jobs, they have financial challenges, they are caring for other people, they're just working so much that they're just exhausted and they can't dedicate the time that a child needs to their feelings, right? The feelings is the last thing this parent cares about because they're just trying to keep a roof over your head. And the last type of a struggling parent is the physically present but emotionally absent. So they're always around, but they're just disconnected. This is when you can feel like you're playing house with the parent, like they're a roommate. They just, for whatever reason, they will just not engage in any kind of emotional interactions that are meaningful or validating. Maybe they were themselves neglected as a child, and so they just don't know how to do it. Or they they had a parent that treated them a certain way, so they're just copying what their parent did. And then the third category, which was the well-meaning yet neglected themselves parents, these parents really love their children deeply and they think they're doing the right thing, but they emotionally neglect their children instead because they themselves never received emotional validation in their own upbringing. That type of parent is the achievement-oriented parent. They focus heavily on their child's accomplishments, perfections, and success, and they measure love by literal report cards or trophies. And they just miss the essence, the nature, the self of their child. So you can see how you would abandon yourself with a parent like this, because your self is formed by all the selves that you were rewarded for, but not necessarily the self of who you are. A good episode for this, by the way, is episode 44. Do you feel like you have to earn love? I think if you listen to that episode, it will give you so many things and so many rituals on how to really sink into the feeling of love as its own reward and not as something you have to perform for. In the culture I grew up in, I only saw children, I saw a lot of children only being given love when they chose professions like engineering or becoming a doctor or something like that. You know, it was they were celebrated, put on a pedestal, even, even though I could clearly see that these children were not suited for those roles. They wanted to be artists, they wanted to be travelers or something, but yet they conformed to a societal expectation because they were only given some kind of care or attention when they performed in the right way. The next kind of well-meaning yet neglected themselves parents is the workaholic parent. They really think that if they just give their children lots of wealth or provide them with a roof over their heads and a big closet and lots of things, they will be taking care of their child. So they've substituted emotional connection with financial support, which of course a child needs that, but they don't need a lot. If you really look at children, they don't need a lot. Unless, of course, they're very specific special needs. That's different. But most of the time, children don't need a lot. The next type of parent I've seen a lot of lately is the permissive parent. They just don't set boundaries, they don't deliver consequences, they don't have any kind of structure. So the child is kind of left like this feral little creature. And of course, we want the wildness in our children, but we don't want them to think that they can just jump off a cliff and there will be no consequences, you know? And it kind of feels like a lot of parents that I've seen lately are just overly permissive. They allow their children to just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, be whoever they want, but they don't teach them that there are consequences to those actions. And then the last type of well-meaning yet neglected themselves parents, and the last type of parent that you might see in this pattern of emotional neglect is just the blissfully unaware parent. They believe their child is completely fine because they've been provided with everything food, clothing, and a house, but they have no emotional awareness and they cannot recognize when their child is experiencing some kind of turmoil. I've seen this a lot with mothers and sons. They think their son is okay because their son is doing well, or their son is just polite on the surface. But what they cannot see is the identity crisis that their sons are going through because a lot of them cannot see that their son is struggling with how to be a man in this world. They will just think, oh, my son is doing fine because he's a good guy and he does his homework and he goes to bed. So he's a great son, you know? And I think that this type of parent wants to believe that their child is okay. So they will believe in it at any cost. And I'm not saying that's the only type of blissfully unaware parent. I'm just giving you an example of how I've seen this play out. So I gave you all those parents, the many archetypes of these parents, so that you can see what's going on in the pattern, right? Now, I've given you some episodes to listen to as supplementary episodes. And even if some of them you think don't apply to you, I would still recommend that you listen to them. Again, I'll list them in the description. And I do know, I am so well aware that such a short episode on childhood emotional neglect is doing it injustice. It really is. But the purpose of this episode is awareness of childhood emotional neglect as a pattern, as a meeting point in the web, in the pattern of self-abandonment. It is something that all people, almost all people, have gone through. It is common and it's often at the root of a lot of self-abandonment issues that we face. Now, if you want scholastic reading about this issue, you can read, like I said before, Running on Empty, Overcoming Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Dr. Jonas Webb. The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller is another good one. If you have ADHD or suspect you have ADHD, I would also recommend the book on ADHD by Gabor Mate. I don't remember the title of that book, but it's a good one. And then another book that's on the scholastic side is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Dr. Lindsay Gibson. And those are some scholastic books, and less scholastic but still relevant is The Highly Sensitive Person, How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine Um Aron, I believe, is the author. And the reason I recommend this book is because a lot of sensitive children, chances are, if you are a sensitive or an empath, like we discussed in a previous episode, your sensitive nature was not understood, it was not celebrated, and it was not catered to. So that is why if you read this book, I think it will help you. One episode I did not mention from my own podcast is simple grounding practices that bring you back without force. It's episode 17. I think that's a good one in general because whenever you've gone through childhood emotional neglect and you are consistently abandoning yourself, having a strong sense of grounding really helps with that. So I think that should be the baseline for all of us. In fact, once I focused on my type of grounding or my kind of grounding, I felt like I could accept more of myself and I could also accept other people in this really equal way, in this really honoring way, both honoring myself and other people. And I do emphasize the point of grounding that I like. That's what the the that's what's different about this episode is that it's grounding that you will like. You will want to do it. It's not those typical grounding methods, take three deep breaths in and three deep breaths out. That never works for me. So I am not teaching you that type of grounding. So I really think that will be useful for you. And a really huge shout out to the 11-part series on childhood emotional neglect on the Back from the Borderline podcast. I believe her name is Molly, and she did a really good job covering it in 11 episodes. I'm only covering it in one. I do think that this episode is a really good baseline for you to take and work on. But if you need more and you like audio versions of it and discussion around it, I do think the Back from the Borderline podcast, Childhood Emotional Neglect, is a good series to listen to. My lovelies, I really hope that you have begun to have some compassion for why you are the way you are. This is the third episode in this series, and we've covered so many things that are insidious, that are under the hood, so to speak, that are not immediately obvious. So I hope you can see that, and I hope you can really have some compassion for how you came to be who you are. And I hope you can see that your coping mechanisms were just that. You were just trying to cope, and now those coping mechanisms are not working as well as they used to. Because now you've moved from survival to thriving. You're worried about dignity, not so much about who's gonna put food on my table, right? You've maybe or maybe you're still there, but you're also worried about dignity. And that that question of dignity, I mean, we need to start with compassion first. Can you see that? Can you see all the different pieces in the pattern and the fabric of life that seem to almost pull you away from yourself, that literally cause indignity. So can you just have compassion for yourself? Can we return to a place of love where we realize that we're dealing with a lot, other people are dealing with a lot, but we're also dealing with a lot, a lot of things that we can't name, but now that we're naming, and now we're bringing to our awareness, and therefore we can learn to live in the world as best as we possibly can with the strongest sense of dignity possible. I hope you can say that. And if you can't, just trust me, you can see that. You will see that as we go through this series. And so, my lovelies, I came up with this blessing on the spot and it just poured out on me, so I'm so excited to leave you with this blessing. I may have to say it a few times because it's so juicy. Okay, may your dignity alchemize the lead of the neglect you endured and turn it into the gold of self-belonging. May your dignity alchemize of turning the lead of the neglect you endured into the gold of self-belonging. Oh my god, so good, so good. May you okay, I have to say it one more time. May your dignity perform the beautiful alchemy of turning the lead of the neglect you endured into the gold of belonging to yourself. Oh my lovely, so much love to you. Until next time. Bye.