I wanted to make sure we were all tracking the results of recent episodes on somatization – especially, in the throat. If you’re like me, you’ve been listening along and finding the results interesting… but we’ve not discussed them in concert so they haven’t added up to a definitive answer.
So today, let’s do a little summary episode making sure we don’t lose the thread as we trace it from childhood to adult psychosomatization.
For the nerdos, we’ll cover three research papers to expand into new, deeper, territory, give you some reflection about neglect experiences, and validate how strongly emotions matter in the effort to stave off physiological destruction.
For the rest of us, let’s enjoy an easy-breezy summary for the summer solstice. Dive into the research bonus if you’re feeling extra curious.
And here we go.
VICTIM’S VOICE
So the “victim’s voice” – the vocalization patterns that prior perpetrators can pick out - may be marked by qualities like slow speed, monotony, un-emotionality, and perturbations in soundwave.
Those perturbations or vocal inconsistencies can be called jitter and shimmer, and they’ve been found to correlate with insecure (anxious and avoidant) attachment, as well as shame.
But, interestingly, diminished voice intensity corresponds with only anxious attachment.
And, meanwhile, despite this anxious labeling, voice dysfunction ISN’T linked with anxiety, itself. Or, with guilt.
So, insecure attachment and shame uniquely affect the throat compared to avoidant attachment and guilt. From one study, anxious attachment, but not avoidant attachment or generalized anxiety, seems to have the greatest effect. Anxious attachment may uniquely cause dangerous signals to be transmitted through the voice.
ANXIETY AND SHAME
And I thought it was a good idea to talk about the connection between anxious attachment and shame to try to make sense of it. Because experientially, the two are difficult to separate.
To switch up how we normally speak about it, anxious attachment is like a pre-emptive association with negative emotion.
We don’t KNOW that a negative thing is happening within a relationship, but we respond internally (and perhaps externally) as though it is evidentially taking place.
What is the evidence?
Our expectations based on previous experience and resulting emotions ABOUT those expectations, which are rolling out like it’s 4am at a bakery, making the assumptions appear very real.
But in fact, they are only half-baked.
Before we know if someone is ignoring, leaving, or trying to harm us… we’re quite certain that they are. Because our mind tells us it’s likely, per what we’ve lived through before, and because our body is ringing with emotions that align with the resulting emotions OF those past experiences. Making it seem like a no-brainer. THIS is reality, even if it hasn’t observably shaken out yet. (They’re abandoning, rejecting, lying to us). We might feel like this constantly, as a steady state, without requiring any significant occurrences to set off the spiral.
At face value, anxious attachment “is about the other person and how they’re treating us in the relationship.” At real value, anxious attachment is about fear that oneself is not valuable enough to be treated well in relationship.
And shame?
Is similar. It’s a pre-emptive engagement with negative assumptions that can be chronic. And, just like with anxious attachment, those negative assumptions ultimately are about the worth of the self.
Shame tells us “you fucked up socially, you’d better fix this or you’re at risk of excommunication.” But when we’re persistently shameful, we’re applying this message before any fuckup has occurred.
The mistake we fear we’ve made? Is perhaps unknown. A generalized sense of having biffed it, through potentially unnamed action and consequence. And therefore, persistent shame is really about fearing that we’re not good enough. We’re somehow flawed or broken. We’re a burden to everyone – not because we’re trying to be – but by birthright or innate quality.
In both cases, then, we have a messed up relationship with our self. We assume we’re a thorn in the side or an unwanted component of the lives of the people around us. We have a diminished, probably quite rude and damning, self-view.
Is it surprising, then, that shame and anxiety come with voice irregularities and diminished intensity?
Or does it make sense that a cumulative doubt of one’s relational value – how much other people want to have and keep you around – would correlate with uncertain and defeated voice qualities?
To me, it tracks… and also reveals why these voice qualities (slow speech, monotone, unemotional, unintentional vocal variations) are detected as signals of a good victim.
If we assume the worst about ourselves – that we are valueless or repulsive, and on the verge of being abandoned, disposed of, left behind or pushed away – then we’re excellent material for abusing. We WON’T estimate we have other relationships to lean on. We WILL estimate that whatever maltreatment we receive is just and inevitable.
And, as we stated, we’ll do so pre-emptively, before the abuse even begins, so we’re ready to accept it once it starts raining down. We might even feel comforted by it, because our expectations are becoming reality.
“We knew it! we were right all along to feel as terribly as we did.”
So, a victim’s voice might indicate anxious attachment and shame, specifically. Both of which are sturdy steppingstones linking past abuse experiences with the modern day, which predators could be able to discern and realize they can utilize.
Ultimately, because both probably correlate with what?
Childhood trauma; abuse and emotional neglect
Childhood emotional neglect affected overall and peak voice intensity.
And the authors suggested that it’s potentially because it correlates with withdrawal and a preference for an unstimulated nervous system. These are common methods of coping with emotional dysregulation when we haven’t been taught we can intentionally care for ourselves. Individuals try to hide themselves as a form of protection against acquiring any system-excitement. So the voice, itself, is a danger, and it may be silenced or subdued as a result.
All of this, of course, corresponds also with?
DEPRESSION AND PTSD
From childhood abuse, we grow to be disempowered – in voice and behavior – constantly or cyclically in life.
When we learn that we can’t live life to the fullest or we’re “fundamentally built wrong” or “trying” results in punishment. When negative experiences and expectations pervade our perspective… when we learn that it’s better to pull back than venture forth…
We get depression.
Depression voice markers:
Pitch, resonance, harmonies, sentence duration are reduced – the voice is flat, short, predictable, there’s less expression using varied volume and intensity. And changes in word choice occur; simple sentences, frequent use of common words, and less diversity have been seen.
Similar to the victim’s voice, depression makes us less vocally expressive. Perhaps, in another attempt to hide ourselves and avoid challenge we don’t feel we can emotionally handle.
Meanwhile, assuming they can be separate experiences, PTSD markers include:
Language centering around death, negative feelings, anger, and the body. High word count and more complex grammatical structures are seen. We speak more words, for longer, and insert a lot of unnecessary “fluff” which can be overly descriptive or redundant.
And that’s not too dissimilar from the issue of fragmented speech. With PTSD symptomology, cohesion becomes a problem. We might jumble time stamps, fail to complete thoughts or sentences, or leap between topics – at least from an outside perspective. Plus, it’s still not uncommon for un-emotionality to be present.
These findings suggest that something else is taking place as the mediator between childhood maltreatment, depression, PTSD, and vocal changes. And you’ll probably remember that it’s also a mediating factor between childhood abuse and substance-related revictimization experiences:
DISASSOCIATION
In the case of PTSD, disassociation is an issue that both heightens the chances of developing a stress-disorder AND is an ongoing effect of the stress-disorder. Meaning, if we disassociate during a stress event, we’re more likely to suffer from mental, emotional, and physical dysfunction afterwards. And if that occurs (PTSD) we’re more likely to disassociate again and again, potentially for the rest of our lives.
This is where jumbled, incoherent, language and chronology make a lot of sense. We don’t have a single perspective to speak from.
Disassociation is also thought to be an underlying cause or characteristic of depression. If you can’t enact your will on the environment, why be present in it? We conserve energy and protect ourselves from pains by pulling back from life – by pulling back from being IN our lives, all the way down to our own thoughts, feelings, and body sensations.
Disassociation then shows up in the voice, as we try to speak from a semi-empty vessel, or a container that’s holding various unmatching, unintegrated, perspectives. Will we speak too much (PTSD)? Or hardly at all (depression)?
Research suggests it depends on which one we’re experiencing most strongly at any given time, assuming that the experiences ARE separate. Which is questionable, since PTSD is often mis-diagnosed as major depression; the two are challenging to untangle.
And.. we’re finally getting down to the point today… Both are enhanced by what type of childhood trauma, in particular?
EMOTIONAL NEGLECT
Remember this from our most recent epiode? Laryngo responders, on average, were shown to have more ACEs, more and more-severe childhood trauma events, and – most significantly – more childhood emotional neglect, compared to non-laryngo-responders.
So childhood trauma, abuse, and emotional neglect are connected to destructive and dangerous voice, language, and throat-responding outcomes that might bend the ear of predators around us.
And one other thing.
Hidden in the results section of that paper they said:
The DES includes subscales regarding absorption (eg, becoming overly involved in a memory or a movie), amnestic dissociation (eg, blocking out certain experiences or episodes), and depersonalization (eg, not recognizing oneself in the mirror).47-49 LR had higher scores than NLR on the DES total score, absorption, and amnestic dissociation. NLR scored higher only on the depersonalization subscale.
As we said earlier, disassociation was also correlated with risky behaviors that increase revictimization experiences. When we can’t handle our emotions because no one taught us how, we try not to experience them through unhealthy coping attempts including disconnecting from ourselves and engaging in substance abuse. These put us in harm’s way, without wherewithal to protect ourselves from present threats that we might otherwise recognize from personal history. Since we’re not attached to our own life timeline, we miss out on detecting the similarities with past abusers. Disassociation was found to be one of the most dangerous factors influencing unsafe behaviors and reduced pattern recognition.
AND remember that disassociation was also connected with what?
Victim’s gait.
When we’re not present in our own bodies, operating them centrally, and instead, we’re detached from ourselves… it can be read by predators. And when we’re operating our body in a similar fashion to our thoughts and words – incohesively – we get fittingly fragmented, inefficient, ungraceful movements from that body.
Post emotional neglect and post-disassociation, our speech and our physical mobility reflect each other. Revealing the state of our mind, which is, unfortunately, to outsiders, marked as “vulnerable.”
“We’re not even in our lives, brains, or meat jackets… feel free to use them as you’d please.” is the signal that we send – at least, to those who’ve been trained to spot it through predation or their own victimization experiences.
And:
TO TIE IT ALL TOGETHER
With disassociation being such a central feature of these somatization issues that lead to further harm, it makes a person wonder…
Does emotional neglect cause an individual to have no emotional regulation skills, based partially on the poor communications that go hand in hand with parental nonattendance?
Does this lack of emotional expertise while trapped in a helpless state (as a child), then, lead to disassociation and depression because the individual has no other method of handling external or internal threats? All they CAN do is try to flee the scene mentally and emotionally until the scene (hopefully) changes?
Without corrective experiences to teach that there are alternative, empowered, options available… does this action become rooted in the psychological and physiological responses of the individual? So that they respond as a child, as an adult? Withdrawing, subduing, hiding… or alternatively pretending that NO risks exist and they live in a consequence-free world…. Through voice, movement, and behavior?
And do those behaviors then put them at risk of encountering predatory individuals while signaling an internally childlike condition to them?
I have to think so. At least it’s one theory that connects these five or six papers together. Each, somehow, indicates the particular experience of childhood emotional neglect with disassociation and absence of learned emotional regulation skills as predisposing factors for somatization, and from there, identification as potential victims.
So?
To take a lesson away from all this?
Examine your relationship to childhood emotional neglect, specifically.
From there, identify what emotional skills you didn’t learn, such as compassionate self-talk or processing safely with others.
Realizing you don’t have these tools, pinpoint the ongoing connection between emotional overwhelm and disassociation in your own life. For instance, identify how you cope when you can’t comfort yourself or receive it from others? What behaviors take place? What sharks have previously entered the waters while you’ve not been fully immersed in your own pool?
Absorb the lesson that your learned survival response – disassociation – normally hides from you, dooming you to relive it pointlessly.
And try to break the pattern.
When big feelings come up, do something different. Talk to yourself nicely. Talk to people you trust. Work with embodiment practices. Revisit your autobiographical timeline. Stay away from fucked up core beliefs (negative self-schemas) that normally drive you to defeat. Insert calming, supportive, curious thoughts, instead. They can feel delusional because they’re so outside of your experience so far.
But that’s just the thing – you’ve not had the opportunity to behave differently and receive differently SO FAR.
When you’ve been basing your life on pre-emptive engagement with negative emotions like anxiety and shame – kickstarting the overwhelm that ultimately tumbles into the same behaviors as always – you’ll get the same behaviors from others, in return, as always. Those abusive behaviors, of course, will push you back into negative emotions like those associated with anxious attachment and shame.
And you won’t even notice the pattern as you disass away from the pain.
But probably wonder, eventually, why you seem to be marked, forever, as a victim.
And with that…
The nerds are going to cover three research paper excerpts today. Join in for the extended cut if you want to learn more about emotional neglect, disassociation, and depression.
Or get outta here and get practicing being kind to yourself. A scientifically-backed way to break this cycle, heal your emotional brain, and re-establish relationship to your body.
Thanks for being here. Hail yourself. Hear yourself. Heal yourself.
Or something pretty lame like that.
And I’ll talk to you soon.
OKAY LEARNING FANS. Let’s hit some papers and get more granular on the effects of emotional neglect versus abuse. I have three of them for you with selected excerpts to validate and extend what we’ve already been talking about today.
Before we hit the lit, let’s define this:
Primary Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) refers to a caregiver's failure to adequately respond to a child's emotional needs. It is a covert, often unintentional form of trauma where parents do not validate feelings, leading to emotional numbing, low self-esteem, and difficulty asking for help in adulthood
First up?
Like we said, emotional neglect leads to? Emotional ignorance – not for lack of character – but because we were never taught.
Emotional Clarity as a Mechanism Linking Emotional Neglect and Depressive Symptoms during Early Adolescence
Allison J Jessar 1, Jessica L Hamilton 1, Megan Flynn 2, Lyn Y Abramson 3, Lauren B Alloy 1
Journal of early adolescence
2017
And, in a somewhat unusual move, we’re starting with the:
Abstract
The present study examined whether emotional abuse and neglect differentially predicted decreases in emotional clarity, and whether emotional clarity, in turn, predicted increases in depressive symptoms. Participants included 204 early adolescents (52% African-American; 54% female; Mean age= 12.85 years) who completed four assessments with measures of depressive symptoms, emotional clarity, and emotional abuse and neglect. Hierarchical linear regressions indicated that emotional neglect significantly predicted decreases in emotional clarity, whereas emotional abuse did not. Further, mediational analyses revealed that decreases in emotional clarity mediated the relationship between emotional neglect and increases in depressive symptoms. The current study suggests that emotional neglect (more so than emotional abuse) may hinder an individual’s ability to identify his or her own emotions, which may increase the risk of depressive symptoms during adolescence.
No one responds to your emotions? You don’t either. So you don’t gain experience identifying, processing, or regulating them. The result? Depression.
But let’s learn a bit about the difference between emotional neglect and abuse.
Emotional Maltreatment
Emotional maltreatment is composed of two different domains: emotional abuse (EA), which consists of verbal assaults on an individual’s self-worth (e.g., “you’re worthless”) and emotional neglect (EN), which refers to emotional unresponsiveness (e.g., being ignored by a parent or a caregiver). Emotional maltreatment has been found to be more common than other forms of maltreatment, and as detrimental to mental health outcomes as sexual and physical abuse (Hibbard, Barlow, & MacMillan, 2012). Indeed, numerous studies have shown that emotional maltreatment throughout childhood can lead to increases in depressive symptoms and first onset of depressive episodes in adolescence and adulthood (e.g., Harmelen et al., 2010; Wright, 2008). Moreover, studies show that emotional maltreatment may be an even stronger predictor of depression than physical and sexual abuse (Gibb et al., 2001; Glaser, 2002), because the parent is directly supplying the child with depressive cognitions (e.g., “you’ll never amount to anything”; Glaser, 2002; Rose & Abramson, 1992).
Interesting line there.
In the cases of physical or sexual abuse or neglect, the child isn’t being directly provided damaging thoughts that will haunt them for the rest of their thinking lives. This is why emotional neglect and fucked up core beliefs go hand in hand.
And you’ll remember, those maladjusted negative self-schemas? Are suspected to be at the root of emotional regulation ineptitude and dangerous coping behaviors. One might even interpret depressive thinking as a dangerous coping behavior, meant to protect the child from getting their hopes too high. They say:
Although there is evidence that emotional maltreatment predicts depressive symptoms, the mechanisms through which emotional maltreatment leads to depression remain unclear. Investigators evaluating mechanisms have largely focused on cognitive factors, such as negative cognitive style, rumination, and hopelessness (Courtney, Johnson, & Alloy, 2008; Liu, Kraines, Massing-Schaffer, Alloy, 2014; Spasojevic & Alloy, 2002). For instance, Gibb and colleagues (2001) found that childhood emotional maltreatment predicted cognitive vulnerability and hopelessness, which in turn led to increases in depression. Additionally, negative self-associations, fear of criticism, and maladaptive interpersonal schemas also have been found to mediate the relationships between childhood emotional maltreatment and depression in adulthood (Harmelen et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2014; Wright, Crawford, & Del Castillo, 2009). Specifically, interpersonal schemas of shame and vulnerability to harm were found to mediate the relationship between childhood emotional abuse and neglect and subsequent depressive symptoms (Wright et al., 2009).
These bases of our thoughts, emotions, and self-impressions impact us forever.
And also:
childhood maltreatment has been found to alter brain development, with considerable research demonstrating that maltreated youth have reduced hippocampal volume (e.g., Teicher, Anderson, & Polcari, 2011), which is implicated in the development of emotional intelligence and competence
But if we’re emotionally neglected outside of an extremely young window of brain development, we’ll be okay, right?
Adolescence is a period of increased emphasis on interpersonal relationships, and parental-child interactions continue to be a potent predictor of adaptive functioning (Bradford, Vaughn, & Barber, 2008). Thus, familial emotional maltreatment may continue to be detrimental to adolescent development. Additionally, adolescence is a period of unique risk for the development of depressive disorders, and stressors that occur during this period may be especially damaging for youth, as emotional and cognitive development is still continuing (Pine, Cohen, & Brook, 2001; Steinberg, 2005).
No, perhaps, adolescence is a prime time for cognitive damage, due to the complex relational changes taking place AND the sense of self that’s developing in this period. So, when we discuss emotional wellness, we’re also discussing schematic wellness – positive assumptions about the world and the self - or lack thereof.
All of which might be based in:
Emotional Clarity
Emotional clarity (EC) is a dimension of emotional intelligence that refers to the ability to understand, identify, and differentiate one’s emotions (Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995). Several studies have demonstrated that individuals with greater emotional clarity exhibit lower levels of anxiety and depression, higher levels of social functioning, and have more adaptive coping styles (Extremera & Fernández-Berrocal, 2006; Gohm & Clore, 2002). Specifically, Gohn and Clore (2002) found that those with higher levels of emotional clarity engaged in more active, planful coping and positive reinterpretations of events.
They hypothesize that if we don’t know what we’re feeling, we don’t know how to be dealing. And instead, we’re likely to fall into a pit of depression.
But what did they find?
DISCUSSION
This study supports Linehan and Kehrer’s (1993) theory that in emotional neglect (and not emotional abuse), the parent or caretaker ignores the child’s emotions, thus failing to instill the ability to label emotions and trust his or her own emotional responsiveness as valid interpretations of events.
Specifically, the results of the current study suggest that deficits in emotional clarity may serve as one pathway through which emotional neglect leads to increases in depressive symptoms. Our findings also indicate that emotional neglect may lead to depression through a different mechanism than emotional abuse. Whereas prior research has demonstrated that hopelessness, negative cognitions, and rumination mediate the relationship between emotional abuse and depression, but not between emotional neglect and depression (Courtney et al., 2008; Hamilton et al., 2013; Spasojevic & Alloy, 2002), this study demonstrates that deficits in emotional clarity may be a mechanism specific to emotional neglect. These findings support the theory that youth who experience emotional neglect may fail to learn how to understand and differentiate their own emotions and the emotions of others, as their caregivers are not sufficiently attending to their emotions and affective responses (Stern 1985).
The findings, then, suggest something interesting…
Emotional neglect is the same as emotional punishment.
Emotional abuse might not be as damaging as emotional neglect – because (in quotes) “at least” those who were “emotionally abused only” may have learned to identify their feelings. They were then punished for them, sure. But there was some recognition that the feeling existed.
With emotional neglect, as we experience emotions, they are not acknowledged or attended to… so, like invisible friends or other imaginings (or even extrasensory detections) we get the message “this isn’t real to the adults around you, therefore it isn’t real, therefore you shouldn’t experience it or even have curiosity about it.” And our feelings become as real as ghosts.
We all know what ghosts do.
Torment us, in ways we and others can’t understand, in a lingering fashion. In this case, known as depression. Which can feel like possession.
Next paper! Knowing they’re connected, let’s add disassociation to the mix to better clarify that relationship.
Type and Timing of Childhood Maltreatment and Severity of Shutdown Dissociation in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder
Inga Schalinski 1,*, Martin H Teicher 2,3
PLOS ONE
2015
Part of the abstract:
Dissociation, particularly the shutting down of sensory, motor and speech systems, has been proposed to emerge in susceptible individuals as a defensive response to traumatic stress. In contrast, other individuals show signs of hyperarousal to acute threat. A key question is whether exposure to particular types of stressful events during specific stages of development can program an individual to have a strong dissociative response to subsequent stressors.
Just one note… I thank them for the validation that depression is a defensive, self-protective, response to trauma or ongoing stress. Not an emotional disordering that “just happens” as the western world would like us to think.
And the same is true for disassociation.
Now into the:
BACKGROUND
Overall, there is a strong relationship between exposure to adverse childhood experiences and presence of dissociative symptoms in adulthood [7,8], and recent etiological models acknowledge dissociative symptoms as a long-term consequence of traumatic stress [9]. The defense cascade model describes adaptive reactions to life-threat including signs of shutdown dissociation. When confronted with an imminent life-threat, for which flight or fight are no longer viable options to counter danger, the organism may choose immobility and dissociative responding [10,11]. Dissociative responses may thus be adaptive, enabling the organism to escape the threatening situation as well as the internal distress and emotional arousal and may persist as a long-term consequence [12,13,14,15,16]. However, ongoing dissociation affects perceptual, emotional and cognitive functions as well as motivation and interferes with an integrative representation of the environment and the self [9].
So, as I said earlier in the episode, disassociation happens peri-trauma – increasing the chances of PTSD development - and then habitually under the spell of PTSD, potentially forever.
And this… in clinical terms… fucks us! Fucks us right up. In so many ways. Forever! Perceptually, emotionally, mentally. We become spun out, fragmented, and disordered, possibly every time we feel threatened or overwhelmed.
All stemming from childhood. Because?
Childhood is thought to reflect a particularly sensitive developmental window for different brain regions in structure and function [23,24]. Adversities during this sensitive period may target brain structures undergoing rapid development, such as myelination, synaptic overproduction or synaptic pruning [25].
Some neuroscience notes:
Myelination is the wrapping of axons – the neural stems that action potentials transverse from one cell to the next – with fatty conductive material that helps the signal to move more quickly. Highly myelinated cells, then, are more efficient. Poor myelination means poorer signal transmission.
Synaptic overproduction is the overabundance of cell to cell connections where neurotransmitters flow. Having too many connections can cause overexcitability or redundant messaging.
And synaptic pruning is the process of clipping cellular connections that don’t serve us. It’s a crucial part of brain organization and efficiency.
Adversities may clunk up all of these processes.
AND the outcomes may be symbolic or ironically reflective of the adversity faced. Piggybacking off the recent study describing the connection between stunted childhood communication and later inhibition of throat functioning is this fascinating part I had to include where they say:
Neurobiological studies have also shown that different types of maltreatment specifically target brain regions and pathways that convey the adverse experience. For example, witnessing domestic violence was associated with alterations in visual cortex [27] and visual-limbic pathway [28]. In contrast, exposure to high levels of parental verbal abuse were associated with alterations in auditory cortex [29] and auditory pathways [30], while childhood sexual abuse was associated with thinning of the genital representation area of somatosensory cortex in females [31].
WHAT? Right?
They’re saying the brain tries to disconnect from the senses that have caused it pain or stress through inhibiting or destroying the pathways that would make them detectable. See abuse, alter the visual cortex. Hear abuse, alter the auditory cortex. Genitally experience abuse, alter the area responsible for those sensations in the brain.
Amazing.
But back to our question from this paper: what’s the connection between emotional maltreatment, disassociation, and age?
Fin abstract:
Vulnerability to ongoing shutdown dissociation was assessed in 75 inpatients (46M/29F, M = 31±10 years old) with schizophrenia spectrum disorder and related to number of traumatic events experienced or witnessed during childhood or adulthood. The Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure (MACE) scale was used to collect retrospective recall of exposure to ten types of maltreatment during each year of childhood. Severity of shutdown dissociation was related to number of childhood but not adult traumatic events… Type and timing of childhood maltreatment could predictably account for 31% of the variance (p < 0.003) in shutdown dissociation, with peak vulnerability occurring at 13-14 years of age and with exposure to emotional neglect followed by various forms of emotional abuse. These findings suggest that there may be windows of vulnerability to the development of shutdown dissociation. Results support the hypothesis that experienced events are more important than witnessed events, but challenge the hypothesis that “life-threatening” events are a critical determinant.
It turns out, again, that emotional neglect is (quote) “bad enough” to leave a lifelong mark. This time, teaching and later promoting disassociative shutdown – essentially flipping the breaker on the brain and nervous system to protect the individual from overwhelm. Disassociation patterns then, as we spoke about, lead to myriad manner of vulnerability, somatization, and revictimization later in life.
And the peak years for emotional neglect to have this effect?
Surprisingly…. Adolescence, not early childhood. Ages 13-14 may be the period of greatest vulnerability. Which is ironically when parent-child relationships tend to shift vastly, towards what could be considered “typical teenage emotional neglect via parental rifts” – let alone what else may have been happening in the traumatized household.
Something to consider when looking at your own personal history and trying to place emotional or disassociative challenges. I, for one, don’t remember as many specific instances of emotional neglect as a small child, probably due to memory and general awareness. But I sure remember those events explicitly as a teenager. Ahhh the emotional betrayal that I learned to enact against myself.
Getting clearer on unlearning emotional neglect? Don’t forget to examine your adolescence for lessons in shutting down – to bring in our first paper, potentially corresponding with depression.
And lastly, for our third, because we never want to leave you without tools to use:
The relationship between childhood emotional neglect experience and depressive symptoms and prefrontal resting functional connections in college students: The mediating role of reappraisal strategy
Xu et al
Front. Behav. Neurosci.
2023
Childhood emotional neglect (CEN) refers to the failure to meet children’s basic emotional needs, the lack of emotional response to children’s pain, the inability to take into account children’s social needs, and the expectation that they will deal with situations beyond their maturity or insecurity (Teicher and Samson, 2013). Several studies have identified CEN as a relatively common subtype of childhood trauma with a relatively high incidence rate and substantially adverse effects (Finkelhor et al., 2013; Dias et al., 2015; Shen et al., 2015; Maguire and Naughton, 2016; Taillieu et al., 2016).
Many studies have indicated that CEN is closely related to emotion regulation and depression symptoms. For instance, Huh et al. (2017) demonstrated that adaptive emotion regulation strategies significantly mediated the relationship between CEN and depressive symptoms. According to a study by O’Mahen et al. (2015), there was a strong correlation between the CEN score and the avoidance strategy score. This strategy significantly mediated the relationship between CEN and depressive symptoms. In addition, Wang et al. (2017) also demonstrated a significant negative correlation between CEN and reappraisal strategies in patients with depression. Huh et al. (2017) demonstrated that only CEN, but not other childhood trauma subtypes, could lead to more depressive symptoms causing less frequent utilization of adaptive emotion regulation strategies. Similarly, O’Mahen et al. (2015) found that only CEN could exacerbate depressive symptoms through avoidance strategies. These studies suggest that CEN may change the tendency to utilize emotion regulation strategies in adulthood, which may be an essential reason that CEN leads to depression.
They’re saying childhood emotional neglect has been shown to be correlated with avoidance as a regulation strategy because the individual doesn’t have tools to confront issues that may cause discomfort or nervous system upset. This, unfortunately, aligns with “shutting down,” AKA disassociation. Which then tends to tumble into depression, if we want to consider that to be a separate event.
So, the regulation strategy of avoiding stimulation – including feelings we were never taught to have or express - may be the problem.
FINDING:
Primary CEN may closely correlate with more depressive symptoms in adulthood.
And it all may come down to lack of effective regulation strategy.
Shipman et al. (2005) found that children who experienced chronic emotional neglect tended to develop psychological disorders in adulthood due to the less utilization of adaptive emotion regulation skills such as reappraisal. Wang et al. (2017) also found that adults with depression had experienced CEN, and this experience was correlated with the tendency to utilize adaptive emotion regulation strategies less frequently.
So, if we’re identifying as emotional neglectees and realizing this describes a self-defeating pattern or three in our lifetimes, what can we do? How can we help ourselves break the spell of emotional neglect turning into disassociation and depression?
According to Gross's emotion regulation process model, reappraisal may be more adaptive and protective than suppression. Reappraisal is one of the antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies because it focuses on helping individuals reinterpret and understand the nature and significance of the situation or stimulus that triggers their emotions and makes them take action at the early stage of the emotion generation process (Gross, 2002).
For example, leaping into anxious interpretations of relationship events or crippling self-shame emotional responses and resulting actions. Reappraisal can help stunt these patterns.
The aforementioned characteristics of reappraisal make it possible to effectively control improper emotional expression, improve the bad subjective emotional experience, and simultaneously reduce an excessive emotional physiological response (Gross, 1998; Ochsner et al., 2002; Ray et al., 2010; Kim and Hamann, 2012).
Individuals who often use the reappraisal strategy have better emotional and mental health (Gross and John, 2003). Compared with reappraisal, suppression may only forcibly reduce the impulse of negative emotional expression.
And here comes the kicker that makes this a perfect part of the current series:
For individuals who often use the suppression strategy, their negative experience and corresponding physiological response may not be effectively improved (Gross and Levenson, 1997; Harris, 2001).
AHHHH! FULL CIRCLE YOU FUCKERS!
With that, let’s:
WRAP
From emotional neglect, we might not be able to recognize or organize our own feelings, just like we might not be able to recognize or organize our own bodies – both of which can lead to revictimization; through behavior, through voice, through bodily dysfunction, through walk.
Emotional neglect makes us strangers to ourselves. Not even capable of feeling our insides, let alone regulating our outsides.
And as a result? We leave ourselves behind whenever they become too stimulated.
Leaving the stimulation alone in our bodies, which do not experience the same “come down” as our brain does under a state of disassociative shut down. With our physiology then absorbing the impact of the stimulation through extended activation that we, mentally and emotionally, are not aware of, we get dysfunction.
And THIS is how somatization seems to unfold.
Not through physical abuse leading to physical dysfunction… but through conditioned emotional ignorance causing one to physically neglect their own body, causing long-term disorder.
So, when people say “feelings don’t matter” – remember…
Feelings, quite directly, affect YOUR matter. In the form of your biological functioning for the rest of your life.
We learn to treat ourselves the ways that others treat us.
So make an effort to break that pattern. Tend to your feelings (in your body) and emotions with care, consideration, concern, and curiosity about what they might have meant all along.
Reappraisal is your best bet for emotional management rather than shutdown. Flip your thoughts inside out and look for other options rather than getting trapped in negative self-schemas that promote self-abandonment.
And start to heal, simply (though not always easily), through staying associated with yourself. Noticing emotions. Speaking to them. Applying care. And breaking childhood patterns that may have dominated your experience (so far).