S2 EP326 – Re-traumatizing Yourself with Self-Neglect

Welcome back to the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m Dr. Margaret Paul and today’s episode is about one of the ways you might be re-traumatizing yourself, which is self-neglect. Be sure to stay to the end because I’ll be sharing how you can learn to give yourself what you might not have received growing up.

Most of us know that children who are physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abused are deeply traumatized, but do you know that neglect is often even more traumatizing?

And if you were neglected as a child, are you treating yourself with the same neglect as you were treating growing up? 

This is how you may be re-traumatizing yourself, not because of what others are currently doing to you, but because of how you are currently treating yourself.

Were you left alone as a baby or a young child? One of my clients, Joan, was left alone in a crib all day while her single mother worked. Her mother would come home for lunch and feed her, but she was left alone to cry the rest of the time, and she eventually dissociated. When she started to work with me, she was quite dissociated from her body, completely disconnected from her feelings. She had had years of therapy but had never dealt with her self-neglect. Her neglect of her own feelings was constantly re-traumatizing her, making it impossible for her to heal.

My client John was also born to a single mother and was raised in a shelter. He was left alone most of the time while his mother worked and learned to cope by becoming very intellectual with no awareness at all of his feelings. As an adult his inner child feels completely alone, just as he did as a child. John was consistently re-traumatizing himself.

My client Liam was left alone in a hospital, tied to the bed, for 18 months when he was two years old due to a congenital defect that needed that long to be fixed and healed. Again, with years and years of therapy, when he consulted with me, he was still numbed out from his own feelings, leaving his inner child feeling as alone as he had felt in the hospital. All his years of therapy did no good as long as he was neglecting his feelings and therefore re-traumatizing himself.

Roberta consulted with me because her marriage was falling apart and she was having problems with her two adolescent children. She didn’t realize that the three months she spent in the hospital as an 18 month old toddler had caused her to not only dissociate from her feelings, but also to have a rage issue, which is what caused the end of her marriage and the issues with her children. Her focus was always on blaming others for her pain while completely neglecting herself. 

You might not realize that the ways you learned to cope as a child may now be the very ways you continue to hurt yourself, and therefore re-traumatize yourself, as an adult.

Self-neglect is not always obvious. It’s not just failing to take care of your physical needs. It often shows up in more subtle, emotional ways.

Self-neglect includes ignoring your feelings, not listening to your inner and higher guidance, giving yourself up and making others’ feelings more important than yours, people-pleasing at your own expense, staying in unsafe or unloving situations, not speaking up for yourself, numbing out with distractions or addictions, and dismissing your needs as unimportant

Self-neglect is a form of self-abandonment.

It’s when your inner child—the feeling, vulnerable part of you—does not receive the love, attention, and protection he or she needs from your loving adult.

When you were young, you may not have had a choice. You may not have had someone who saw you, valued you, protected you, validated your feelings, listened to you, comforted you, felt safe to you.

Are you treating yourself in the same way you were treated or the same way your parents treated themselves? If you are, then you are recreating the same experiences you grew up with, and your inner child feels alone and unimportant. When your own feelings and needs are not being attended to by your loving adult, your inner child is neglected, just as you might have been as a child, or just as your parents role modeled to you by how they treated themselves.

This is what I mean by re-traumatizing yourself. It’s not because the original trauma doesn’t matter, but because the same patterns are continuing internally in how you treat yourself.

And this is why I created my Love Yourself course. If you’re looking to stop neglecting and abandoning yourself and learn to love yourself, this is the next step for you. You can learn more in the description below.

This is where self-compassion is essential. We don’t neglect ourselves because we’re bad or broken. We neglect ourselves because, as children, we learned to adapt in ways that helped us survive.

For example, if expressing feelings led to rejection, you learned to suppress them. If speaking up led to punishment, you learned to stay silent. If being yourself led to disapproval, you learned to people-please.

These adaptations seemed to work then to make us feel safer, but now, as adults, they cause us pain.

In Inner Bonding, there are two core intentions: The intention to control, and the intention to learn about loving yourself and others.

Self-neglect is connected to the intention to control. You might neglect yourself in order to try to avoid conflict, avoid rejection, avoid anger, avoid disapproval and get approval, and feel safe. But the paradox is that you can’t feel safe when you are neglecting yourself.

When you shift to the intention to learn, everything changes. You tune into what you are feeling and what you need. You ask your higher guidance what is loving to yourself in any given situation. This is how you begin to move from self-neglect to self-love.

Are you aware of your own patterns? Take a moment to tune in to this. Think about a situation in your life where you feel stressed, hurt, or depleted, and ask yourself: “How am I treating myself in this situation?”

Are you judging yourself? Ignoring your feelings? Telling yourself you’re overreacting? Staying silent when you need to speak? Over giving to avoid disapproval? See if you can notice, with curiosity, not with judgment.

Self-neglect comes with a high cost. It leads to anxiety, depression, aloneness, resentment, burnout, loneliness, feeling unseen and unfulfilled. It can even lead to physical illness.

I was a very emotionally neglected child. My parents never asked me how I felt, never wanted to know me, never comforted me. I could not go to them for support or encouragement. This led to much illness most of my childhood, as well as later in my life before Inner Bonding, because I continued to neglect myself in the ways I was neglected, without realizing it. I thought my pain was coming from outside myself, and sometimes it was because others were treating me the way I was treating myself. I started to heal with Inner Bonding when I recognized that I was consistently abandoning myself.

So how do we begin to stop re-traumatizing ourselves? The shift begins with the intent to learn about loving yourself so that you can develop your loving adult. Your loving adult in tuned in to your feelings, recognized that they have important information for you, and wants responsibility for them. Your loving adult values your needs and takes responsibility for meeting them.  Your loving adult speaks up for you, sets loving boundaries, and is compassionate with yourself and others rather than judgmental. 

If you notice self-judgments or judgments of others, bring compassion to the judgmental part of you, opening to learning about the false beliefs that leads to being judgmental. Compassion is healing while judgment is re-traumatizing.
 
 The loving adult is the part of you that takes loving action on your own behalf and on behalf of others. It’s loving actions on your own behalf that eventually heals the deep pain of neglect. Loving action is what builds self-trust.

You are a loving adult when you are open to learning and connected with a higher source of love and wisdom, whatever that is for you. The loving adult asks throughout the day, “What’s loving to me right now?” When you have a genuine intent to learn about loving yourself and you are feeding yourself clean natural food, you can raise your frequency high enough to access your higher guidance.

You might want to take a moment to practice this right now.

Take a breath and use your breath to bring your focus inside your body. Imagine your inner child—the part of you that feels, and scan your body, noticing any physical sensations and what emotions might be attached to those sensations. For example, a pit in your stomach might indicate anxiety. A heaviness in your heart might indicate depression.

These kinds of feelings are letting you know that you are neglecting yourself in various ways. As you open and explore how you are treating yourself and what you are telling yourself that may be causing painful feelings, you become aware of the false beliefs you formed growing up that are leading to your self-abandoning, self-neglectful behavior.

Then you can open to learning with your higher guidance about the truth and the loving actions, and then take the loving actions, or at least imagine taking them if you can’t take them in this moment, and tune into how you feel, or how you would feel, as a result of the loving action.

By practicing Inner Bonding and learning to show up as a loving adult, your inner child starts to feel seen by you and important to you. He or she starts to trust that your feelings matter to you and that you want responsibility for them. 

Re-traumatizing yourself with self-neglect is not something to feel ashamed of. It’s something to become aware of with compassion. It’s when you become aware of your self-neglect that you can do something about it. Whenever you choose to listen to your feelings, honor your needs, speak your truth, and take loving action for yourself, you are no longer neglecting and abandoning yourself. You are becoming the loving adult your inner child has always needed.

So today, you might ask yourself: “Am I treating myself in a way that feels loving, or in a way that recreates old pain?”

And if you notice self-neglect, just take one small step toward love. You don’t have to do it perfectly. You just have to begin.

Thank you for being with me today. And thank you for the courage it takes to turn inward, to listen, and to learn to love yourself.

If you identified with today’s episode and you’re ready to learn to stop neglecting yourself and start learning how to love yourself, I invite you to check out my 30-Day video and text Love Yourself course. It’s designed for anyone wanting stop abandoning and neglecting themself and teaches you the Inner Bonding path to healing self-neglect. You’ll find the link in the description. Thank you for joining me, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

I look forward to being with you again next time, and I’m sending you my love and my blessings.