It is important first to establish that what is commonly understood as “neglect” is in fact parental rejection. Parents reject their children. “Neglect” is an abuser-convenient term because it does not acknowledge the agency of parents. Parents make the active choice to disengage from their children and they are damn well able to observe the maleffects this choice has. Children know their parent is choosing something else. They aren’t just dazed and confused.
I have simply chosen to use the word “neglect” in the title because it is still common parlance.
1. Feeling Invisible
Feeling invisible can result from a parent failing to consider a child’s needs for long stretches. This can also happen when a parent favors one child over another. The basic message is that there isn’t much in the way of parental interest.
2. Difficulty Expressing Emotions
For some children, expressing their emotions is a subject that requires focus as it does not come easily. Or, the child has learned that by expressing their emotions, they are inconveniencing their parents. This is typical when a parent greets crying with annoyance, frustration, emotional hardening, or disengagement. “Leave them to cry” is the attitude of a parent who is unable to bridge a communication gap between themselves and their child. Usually the pressure of reporting to a job in a dual-income home is the primary driver of this shortfall.
3. Overly Sensitive Or Emotionally Numb
In overly sensitive people, it is usually the case that they feel an unmet neediness from long ago that they now express in their adult lives. They didn’t get the validation or support they needed. People like this will even go so far as to shower others in praise and validation in the hopes that they will get some in return. They have not yet learned to do this for themselves in their self-reflection.
Emotionally numb people were often dropped in front of the TV or a video game console or a smartphone so that the digital babysitter would do its work and the parent would not have to attend to the inner life of the child. Emotional numbness can also come from being berated and yelled at often.
Without cultivation, the emotional life of the child can dry up.
4. Fear Of Abandonment
The overly sensitive piece can also combine with clinginess or a fear of abandonment.
People who fear abandonment will resort to all sorts of management of the person they project the fear onto. They may cheat preemptively because they’re afraid of their romantic partner cheating. They may resort to performative displays in order to temporarily secure a reprieve from difficult internal feelings, given they attain approval from who they’re projecting onto.
Another way the fear of abandonment manifests is a need for reassurance. Such people tend to look over their shoulder often to make sure that what they’re doing is okay. They do not feel okay so they have to generate that security externally. A funny example of this that springs to mind is guilty-conscience billionaires in the military industrial complex who build elaborate bunker homes for themselves in anticipation of being shown they’re not okay.
People who fear abandonment can also often abandon others.
5. Struggling With Low Self-Worth
Remember, “neglect” is in fact active rejection by the parent. Children internalize the message that they are not worthy compared to Internet browsing, television watching, extended family drama, outside of the home rituals and activities, video games, sportsball, the parent’s career, etc.
The person who was parented by a someone who broached active eye contact with them and conversed at length over whatever was interesting to the child is the person who does not suffer from low self-worth.
Low self-worth is implanted programming of discouragement and apathy, in the voice of the parent. The inner parents disapprove.
6. Difficulty Asking For Help
Parents do their children a bad turn when they act put out by a request for help. The child did not choose to be incapable of sorting out the challenge. They were born helpless and only progressively over time do they learn to resolve the challenges they perceive. A parent owes plenty of help to a child.
7. Avoidance Of Intimacy
A person who was not given attachment by their parent will drift through their adulthood with few romantic prospects, little motivation to pursue them, and will also tend to be unable to form friendships. They simply do not have the language of attachment loaded up in them. Their programming will push people away. They will have annoying manners of speech, unflattering clothing styles, and pursue anti-social and low status hobbies. Such people may turn to substances in their despair and loneliness. Or they may become anesthetized to their loneliness because they are so preoccupied with their meaningless hobbies.
There are many more signs a person can show when they have endured rejection in childhood. The general theme is an inability to form coherence and meaning. When society’s prodding along ends, sometime in people’s early 20’s, rejected people will lack the internal compass to fill the rest of their lives with pursuit and missions. They will flounder. The most a rejected person can achieve is a college degree or two and then a life of punch in, punch out.
