Therapy for Childhood Emotional Neglect in Chicago

Does this sound like you?

• You feel anxious or low without being able to say why.

• You often feel numb, flat or disconnected, even when things are going well.

• You look fine on the outside and feel exhausted underneath.

• It's hard to know what you feel, or to say what you need.

• You take care of everyone else and find it hard to accept care yourself.

• You'd rather handle things alone than ask for help.

• You've been in therapy, it helped you cope, and something at the core still hasn't shifted.

If several of these sound familiar, childhood emotional neglect may be part of the picture.

What childhood emotional neglect is, and isn't

Childhood emotional neglect is about what wasn't there: a parent or caregiver who didn't notice, respond to or help with a child's feelings often enough. It can happen in loving homes, with parents who were stressed, unwell, grieving or emotionally unavailable themselves. It isn't a diagnosis, and it doesn't mean your parents were bad people.

It's real, though. The CDC counts neglect among adverse childhood experiences, alongside abuse and household difficulties. Emotional neglect is simply harder to see, because there's no single event to point to.

Why it gets missed

Most people who come to us with emotional neglect in their history didn't come in for that. They came in for anxiety, depression or feeling stuck. Many worry their experience isn't "bad enough" to count as trauma. As the work goes on, something underneath becomes clear: emotionally unavailable parents, attachment wounds, a childhood spent learning not to need much.

It's also hard to see because there's often no clear memory attached. You can't remember the moment nobody came, because it was every day.

How it shows up in adults

The ways people adapt to emotional neglect usually made sense at the time. If your feelings weren't noticed, it was protective to stop showing them, then to stop noticing them yourself. As an adult, those same protective patterns can show up as:

• difficulty naming or trusting your own feelings

• a sense of emptiness, or of being different from other people

• harsh self-criticism, and turning anger inward

• perfectionism, or a feeling that you have to manage everything alone

• discomfort when people are kind to you or want to get close

• relationships where you give a lot and receive little

Seeing these as protection, rather than as flaws, is often the first shift.

Healing doesn't require blaming anyone

Working with emotional neglect isn't about deciding your parents failed you. Many people hold both things at once: their parents loved them, and some of what they needed wasn't there. Therapy makes room for both, and for the grief that can come with seeing it clearly.

How we work with childhood emotional neglect

We start with safety and pacing. You don't need to remember or tell everything, and you don't need to push past what feels manageable. From there, we draw on approaches that work with the body and with relationships, not only with understanding:

• EMDR therapy can work with present-day reactions and the earliest times you remember feeling a certain way, even without one clear memory. Before any processing, we spend time building resources and stability.

• Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you get to know the parts of you that learned to cope alone, and what they need now.

• The Safe and Sound Protocol helps a nervous system that learned to stay on guard begin to settle.

• PSIP pays close attention to body sensations and to what happens in the relationship with your therapist, which suits early attachment wounds that don't have clear memories attached.

• Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy can be part of the work when talk therapy has stalled, with a therapist present for the whole session.

If you already understand all this about yourself and still feel stuck, read when talk therapy isn't working. For the wider picture, see complex and childhood trauma.

When to reach out

If the list above sounds like you, and it's affecting how you feel, how you relate to people, or whether you can rest, that's reason enough. You don't need a diagnosis or a crisis.

Who you'd work with

Sharon Steckler, MSW, LCSW has worked with complex trauma and attachment for more than 35 years. Agi Corona Semrad, M.Ed., LPC works with attachment wounds and people who understand their patterns but still feel stuck, in English and Spanish. In person in Lakeview and Highland Park, and by telehealth across Illinois.