Understanding Childhood Emotional Neglect: Why “Nothing Happened” Still Hurts

When we think of childhood wounds, we often imagine abuse, trauma, or obvious acts of harm. But sometimes the deepest wounds are the ones we can’t see — the things that didn’t happen. This is the heart of Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), as conceptualised by psychologist Jonice Webb.

What is CEN?

• Jonice Webb defines emotional neglect as a parent’s failure to respond enough to a child’s emotional needs.

• Unlike abuse, which is an act, neglect is more about omission — the absence of emotional attunement, validation, curiosity, or care.

• Because it’s invisible, subtle, and largely unconscious (for both child and parent), CEN often goes unnoticed, unrecalled, and unrecognised.

Webb describes it as the “white space in the family picture” — behind the visible interactions lies an emotional gap that was never filled.

Over time, that gap can affect self-perception, emotional awareness, relational patterns, and internal sense of worth.

Common Patterns & Experiences: What Resonates for Clients

If you suspect CEN may have touched your life, here are some of the areas clients often find themselves relating to. (These are drawn from Webb’s work and also from lived experience in therapeutic practice.)

Areas of Life & Common Experiences

Emotional awareness & expression

Difficulty naming or feeling your emotions. Feeling “numb” or empty inside.

Self-trust & internal validation

Relying heavily on external validation. Doubting your sense of what you feel or need.

Self-worth / “never enough”

A persistent nagging belief that you’re flawed, inadequate, or incomplete.

Self-care & self-nurturing

Neglecting your own needs (emotional, rest, fun) because “there are more important things.”

Asking for help / boundaries

Fear of being burdensome, reluctance to reach out, difficulty asserting what you need.

Perfectionism & over-functioning

Striving for external success in order to feel worthy or seen.

Relational dynamics

Feeling emotionally distant or disconnected in relationships; difficulty trusting or letting others in.

Internal emptiness / existential sense

A sense that something is missing — even when things “look okay” outwardly.

Many of the clients I see don’t remember overt parental neglect — there’s no clear incident, no event to point to. That’s because emotional neglect doesn’t leave dramatic memories. Instead, the “quiet absence” shapes the interior world. Webb discusses how children of CEN often blame themselves, as there was no external “evidence” of neglect.

One more nuance: parents who unintentionally emotionally neglect are often well-meaning and loving in other ways — perhaps they simply didn’t understand how much children needed emotional attunement, or were unable to provide it themselves.

Healing the Wound: How We Can Work Together at Aberdeen Bespoke Counselling

If reading this stirred something in you — a recognition, a question, a pain — you don’t have to face it alone. Healing from CEN is possible.

Here’s how we might work together:

1. Starting from the basics: building a shared language

First, we’ll explore what CEN is — not just intellectually, but experientially.
We’ll use resources like Jonice Webb’s definitions, worksheets, videos and guided exercises to map how CEN may have shaped your life.
This “foundation work” is essential — it gives you permission to name what you’ve often felt but could not quite articulate.

2. Recognising and reconnecting with feelings

We’ll gently explore how to notice what you feel (even if it’s unclear or muted), using tools like a feeling wheel or emotion vocabulary lists.
Over time, with safe reflection and practice, you’ll develop more trust in your inner emotional world. And hopefully have a lot of light bulb mom

3. Giving yourself what you never got

One of the most transformative shifts in CEN healing is learning to be the parent to yourself.
We’ll practice self-nurturing and inner care: gentle kindness, self-compassion, small rituals that attune you to your needs.

4. Learning to ask for help and set boundaries

Because many CEN survivors fear being burdensome, they struggle to reach out. We’ll work on small steps to ask for support, express needs, and set boundaries that protect your emotional space.

5. Working with self-esteem and the “never good enough” story

We’ll explore the internal narratives that keep you stuck — the whisper that you’re flawed, the shame that you don’t belong. Together, we’ll examine those beliefs, and develop more compassionate, grounded, and realistic self-views.

6. Practical strategies & regular practice

Healing is not just reflection—it involves action and habit.
You’ll be offered:

• Worksheets and prompts (drawn from Webb’s work and adapted in our sessions)

• Reparenting exercises

• Videos or short clips (including those by Jonice Webb) YouTube+1

• Reflective journaling

• Emotion-trigger mapping and response planning

Over time, the aim is to replace patterns of neglecting self with practices of caring, attunement, and emotional resilience.

You Don’t Need to Do This Alone

If any of the descriptions above resonated with you — that persistent feeling of emptiness, the struggle to trust your emotions or your worth — I’d love to support you.

At Aberdeen Bespoke Counselling, I offer a safe, non-judgemental space for this kind of deep, relational work. We’ll move at your pace — sometimes slowly — and you’ll always lead what emerges.

If you’d like to begin, reach out. Let’s talk about where you are now, what feels hardest, and how we might take the first steps toward feeling more whole.

You deserve to be seen, heard, and cultivated — not neglected by your own inner world any more.