Throughout our whole lives, but especially during developmental stages, we need a certain amount of love and affection. Growing up feeling isolated, afraid, or uneasy in one’s home can have deeply harmful long-term impacts on a person that affect them well into adulthood. It’s important to try and recognize certain patterns or emotions so that you can properly heal from trauma and end the cycle of neglect. Here are 18 possible indicators that you might not have gotten the love you deserved as a child.
Struggle to Trust Others
If you’ve experienced abandonment or betrayal, especially during childhood, you might struggle to trust other people as an adult. On the flip side, you might be too trusting later on. Without consistency in the home, development of this key skill is stunted.
Low Self-Esteem
Parents or caretakers who don’t demonstrate truly unconditional love to their children can forever tarnish the child’s perception of themselves. This is something that needs to be instilled in you from a young age, that feeling of being worthy of love, and without it, you might grow up to have a warped sense of self and little self-esteem.
Difficulty Surrounding Intimacy
Whether it be physical intimacy or emotional intimacy, a lot of people who were not properly cared for as children grow up to struggle with that level of closeness to someone. Combatting it involves a lot of therapy and often the right people to show you that you can trust them with those parts of yourself.
Perfectionism
Feeling like you need to be perfect can impact your ability to grow close relationships and generally lead to a negative self-view because you don’t allow yourself to be human. It’s important to practice compassion towards oneself and forgiveness for making mistakes sometimes.
Inability to Properly Express Emotions
The capacity to accurately convey one’s emotions is integral to relationship building. Without it, emotional distance grows rapidly and frequent misunderstandings are par for the course. Many people, regardless of childhood trauma, struggle to express how they feel, but practice is key. It’s often going to be uncomfortable for a while, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying.
Need for External Validation
It is natural to seek validation from other people, but it can grow extreme and affect relationships and individuals. If you are completely reliant on the approval of others, you lose agency of your own. This leads to insecurity that can be crippling. It can also strain your relationships when others feel like you need them too much.
Fear of Abandonment
Being abandoned during childhood can show up in adulthood as clingy behavior, hypervigilance, self-sabotage, avoidance of relationships altogether, and more. It’s important to explore the underlying causes of this fear and try to overcome it so you can build relationships based on healthy attachment.
Feeling Unlovable
Feeling like you are unlovable can manifest in isolation and poor self-esteem. It also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a sense because you feel so unlovable that you don’t allow other people to get close enough to you. There is also a fear of rejection that often appears, holding you back from sharing your love with others.
Chronic Anxiety or Depression
While there are many other causes of anxiety and depression, one potential is childhood trauma. It disrupts your natural brain development and screws up the way your body regulates stress and fear. Later on in life, it’s no surprise that this can lead to severe issues with anxiety and depression. Medication and therapy, often used in tandem, are both strong options for working through these things.
Attachment Issues
TikTok made attachment styles a popular avenue to talk about mental health and relationships, and while there is a lot of misinformation out there, it has seemed to be a helpful way for people to learn about why they struggle with attachment. Someone who did not receive enough affection as a kid might have very insecure attachment styles, or they might be avoidant, controlling, or something else entirely.
Emotional Disconnection
If you struggle to connect emotionally to other people, it is very possible you experienced some sort of trauma that inhibited that growth. Emotional disconnection can lead to a lack of intimacy, feelings of loneliness even while in a relationship, struggles to communicate, increased conflict, and unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Self-Sabotage
Self-sabotage, to put it simply, refers to behaviors that work against one’s own happiness and success in life. It often stems from feeling like you don’t deserve good things or from the fear of what would happen if you got them. This can show up as procrastination, harmful self-talk, impulsivity and intentional bad decision-making.
Control Issues
Many individuals who suffered childhood trauma feel a need to have extreme control over their environments, which can include micromanaging, rigidity, manipulation, and a need for perfection. For some people, this can even manifest as eating disorders such as anorexia. The ability to restrict one’s body so firmly gives some people a sense of control.
Addiction
There is a strong connection between childhood trauma and substance abuse. Many people who have experienced trauma in their youth use alcohol and drugs to self-medicate in order to numb the pain. In fact, over 70% of adolescents receiving drug or alcohol addiction treatment underwent childhood trauma.
Struggle to Set Boundaries
If healthy boundaries were not taught and actively demonstrated to you as a child, it is likely going to be much harder to learn them in adulthood. Seeing authority figures in your life blow past your boundaries or allow others to blow past theirs can lead people to not setting them for themselves.
Constant Loneliness
Feeling like you are alone in what you went through can make you feel ashamed and isolated from the rest of the world. Certain traumas are more closely associated with shame than others, and you may bury those things deep and not want to get too close to people because you feel you can’t tell them about your past. In order to heal, though, we must let love and connection in.
Avoidant Behaviors
Avoidant patterns may occur from a fear of re-experiencing traumatic events or a lack of trust in other people. It can also lead to avoidance of seeking help because you don’t want to confront the pain you’ve been through. Lots of trauma-focused support through therapy is key to growing to a place where you can navigate situations in healthier ways.
People-Pleasing Tendencies
Especially if you grew up in a volatile, unpredictable home, you may be terrified to rock the boat or upset anyone. This can lead to a tendency to only do or say what you think other people want from you, but this stunts growth and emotional development and does not allow you to really live a full life or become your own person. The number one person you should be trying to please is yourself.
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