Before I start in on part 2 of my mental health series, I want to mention how grateful I am for all the responses to my last post. I was touched that it struck a chord for many people. However, I think some readers may have been misled by it. I got many very sympathetic comments from people who seemed to think I had a really rough childhood. Actually, I don’t think it was harder than the average. My point with the last post was to highlight that our mental health is not necessarily consistent throughout a person’s lifetime. For instance, I hit a rough patch in my teens and ended up bulimic for a short period. It could have been a lot worse, of course. What I’m hoping to do is to normalize mental health challenges that many of us (maybe most of us) face at one time or another.
If someone is clinically, mentally ill and has been diagnosed with clinical depression, schizophrenia, etc, maybe that’s different from what I’m talking about. The majority of people will not be diagnosed with a serious mental illness during their lifetime. (According to the WHO website, about 3.8 % of people worldwide suffer from depression and less than 1% suffer from schizophrenia, for example) Still, the rest of us might need help even if our mental health challenges aren’t extreme. Sometimes life throws stuff at us that we can’t handle on our own, and that’s okay and normal. The pandemic has been very hard on a lot of people who might otherwise have been coping with life very well. I feel like I’m treading a fine line here, because I don’t want to marginalize those with severe mental illness, but I don’t want to trivialize mental health challenges many of us face either. A friend of my daughter’s, Rai Waddingham, has been treated for various mental illnesses for much of her life, because she hears voices. She has been active in raising awareness for those who are in a similar situation and has found alternative ways of coping with the challenges she faces. If you’d like to check out what she’s doing, here is a link to a short report on The Hearing Voices Network and to her new podcast. I find her story fascinating and proves the point that mental illness isn’t black and white or easy to define.
Recently I heard about a phenomena or syndrome, called Childhood Emotional Neglect. I had never heard of it but when I went on the CEN website to check it out and consequently did the questionnaire to see whether I might be suffering the effects of CEN, I ended up answering yes to about half the questions. I don’t know whether that’s an average number, but I thought, yeah, that sounds about right.
CEN is described as follows:
“CEN happens when your parents do not respond enough to your feelings as they raise you… childhood emotional neglect is actually an absence of response. It’s not an action that your parents commit, it’s something your parents (often unknowingly) omit. Childhood emotional neglect does not happen to the child, like abuse or trauma. Instead, it’s something that fails to happen for the child, like emotional awareness, emotional validation, and emotional discussion.” (Jonice Webb in Psychology Today.)
“Emotional neglect can take many forms, from a parent having unrealistically high expectations or not listening attentively, to invalidating a child’s emotional experiences to the point he or she begins to feel self-doubt. When a parent is not emotionally attuned to a child, there is no mirror held up, no positive reflection being shared with the child. Developing a positive sense of self, then, becomes more challenging for the child.” (Dhyan Summers, Westside DBT.com)
When I was in my thirties and struggling with a lot on my plate, I ended up in therapy for the first and only time in my life (so far). I had a wonderful therapist who helped me discover buried feelings, partly concerning the divorce of my parents (which happened when I was 8) and helped me figure out ways to identify and cope with feelings as they arise. I certainly didn’t walk away cured, saying, “okay, I’ve got this, no more problems here!” but simply knowing that my feelings are often under the surface, and that there’s frequently a significant time lag between an event and my having recognizable feelings about that event, helped me a lot. There have been times in my life where I really wondered about my reactions to things. My inner child had learned very well to govern my, possibly “inappropriate” or “difficult”, feelings and carefully place them on a shelf to be examined at a later date. Therefore, my immediate reactions to painful events, confrontation of any kind, etc, would often give the impression that I was “fine with it”, whatever IT was. This is probably my most obvious symptom of CEN. I also had a moderate case of Imposter Syndrome, (which I’ll discuss more fully next time), and that can apparently be a symptom of CEN.
It’s important for me to make clear that my parents were caring people, who did their very best to raise four radically different humans, without having been raised by emotionally aware parents themselves. They had plenty of struggles, including their own ill-fated marriage, to handle while they tried to take care of us. That being said, even though they were trying their best and didn’t mean to cause harm to any of us, doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer emotional neglect to a certain extent. I believe we each suffered in differing ways and amounts because our characters are so varied, and birth order and circumstances came into play as well.
If you take the quiz, you might be surprised at how many times you answer Yes. I suspect that us Baby Boomers (I’m at the tail end of that era, but my siblings were closer to the middle of it) mostly had parents who denied the importance of personal feelings. They were much more concerned with not rocking the boat, and keeping a stiff upper lip than saying things like, “I get the feeling that you’re really upset about what happened, can you tell me about it?” or words to that effect. I hope now that there’s better awareness of the importance of mental and emotional health, that parents are better able to acknowledge and help navigate their children’s difficult feelings.
So, next time I’ll talk about my experience with Imposter syndrome. This is something else I had without realizing that it was a diagnosable mental disorder, like bulimia. And it’s something shared by many prominent artists and famous people, so I feel pretty good about that rarefied company.
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