The emotional environment we experience in childhood shapes how we act as adults. When our needs aren’t met as a child, we often develop coping mechanisms to navigate a challenging environment, often to our detriment in adulthood. We take a look at 18 habits you have developed that indicate a lack of strong emotional connection:
Difficulty with Intimacy
If you didn’t feel emotionally connected when you were young, you might struggle to understand how you feel about yourself and others. This can make it difficult to express emotions openly and authentically in future relationships, impacting your ability to be intimate as an adult.
People-Pleasing Tendencies
When children are not given enough attention from caregivers, they can often do anything to feel loved. In a bid to win approval, both as a child and as an adult, you may prioritize others’ needs and happiness over your own, in your bid for approval.
Negative Self-Image
Children learn about themselves through the way their caregivers treat them. If you didn’t receive love, affection, and positive reinforcement when you were a child, you might internalize negative messages about yourself. You might believe you’re unlovable, unworthy, or a burden as an adult.
Fear of Abandonment
When a child is abandoned and neglected, it can have severe consequences in later life. As an adult, you may experience intense anxiety about being left alone or rejected. Research in the The National Library of Medicine found that when people faced rejection as a child, they went on to experience shame and guilt as adults.
Constant Validation Seeking
A lack of love and positive reinforcement in childhood can lead to low self-esteem and self-doubt. Someone who doesn’t believe in themselves might constantly seek validation from external sources to feel good about their actions. This is especially the case when making decisions as an adult, as there is always a sense of self-doubt.
Emotional Numbness
Children learn to express and understand their emotions through interactions with their caregivers. If your caregiver was emotionally distant or dismissive of your feelings when you were growing up, you might not learn how to process your own emotions. This can lead to a general sense of emotional numbness in adulthood, particularly in intimate relationships.
Self-Sabotaging Behaviors
If you often experienced disappointment as a child, you may have never experienced true happiness. In adulthood, this can translate into destructive behaviors that undermine your own happiness and success. If you have never known what it’s like to be happy, it can feel scary, and the feelings of disappointment may feel familiar to you.
Hypervigilance
A core need for a child is to feel loved and accepted by their caregivers. When that love is absent, a child might develop an intense fear of rejection. This fear can manifest as hypervigilance, as they constantly scan for signs that they might be rejected or abandoned.
Addiction Prone
A study by Rosalie Broekhof showed that children who had suffered adverse childhood experiences (ACES) had a higher tendency to use drugs and alcohol. Adults might turn to substances for comfort or to numb the emotional pain they have experienced in childhood.
Difficulty Setting Boundaries
In childhood, we learn about boundaries through interactions with our caregivers. But, in an environment lacking love and support, we might not develop a sense of our needs and other people’s boundaries. This can make it difficult to identify, communicate, and understand boundaries in adulthood.
Fear of Failure
Many adults who were unloved as a child experience a crippling fear of failure. It might prevent you from taking risks or pursuing your goals. If you experienced little love in childhood, you may be prone to low self-esteem, which means you automatically think the worst of yourself.
People-Pleasing in Friendships
To feel the love you have craved all your life, you may often prioritize keeping friends happy, even if it means sacrificing your needs. This can be a result of not having little attention throughout your childhood and often going to extreme lengths for people to pay you compliments.
Codependent Relationships
A lack of love in childhood can lead to emotional insecurity, which manifests as a constant need for validation and approval. This fear can carry over into adulthood, leading them to seek out relationships where they might feel abandoned if they don’t prioritize the other person’s needs.
Unexplained Anger
When there is a lack of love, there can also be a lot of anger. Looking around at others who are experiencing things that you are missing out on can build resentment. This pent-up anger can often result in intense anger outbursts in adulthood.
Trust Issues
Children who experience broken promises from their caregivers might learn to be wary of trusting others’ words or intentions. If people have constantly let you down, you may struggle to form trusting relationships as adults.
Loneliness
A lack of love and positive reinforcement can lead to low self-esteem in unloved children. Someone who believes they are unworthy or unlovable might struggle to believe they deserve close relationships, leading to social isolation and loneliness.
Difficulty with Self-Care
If you struggle with looking after yourself physically and mentally, it could stem from being neglected and unloved as a child. You may not have formed the habit of looking after yourself, and as an adult, you may not believe you’re worth the effort.
Perfectionism
If you often need to constantly prove yourself and strive for perfectionism, it could be from the love you received as a child. The love from your caregivers could have been conditional, meaning you only got attention when you were “a very good boy/girl”. As an adult setting impossibly high standards, you might believe that achieving flawlessness is the only way to feel worthy of love and acceptance.
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