What Does Neglect Do?

Some people really don’t understand how deeply neglect affects you. It causes an emotional development arrest. There’s a school in psychology called object relations: it teaches us that little babies go through developmental stages, which require the parents to be mature and loving. If that is lacking literally your brain is affected. For example areas in your brain responsible for self regulation.

Psychodynamically speaking, neglect causes you to miss those milestones, and because of that the safety required to build your sense of a true Self is absent. You are never what you are supposed to be. Who you authentically are. Because that requires safety and healthy mirroring of authenticity from your caregivers. Instead, You are a walking collection of defence mechanisms, but with no soul so to speak. This is the source of all neurosis, and even psychosis.

In this way, neglect could be worse than straight physical abuse. Because in physical or intellectual harm at least the existence of the child is acknowledged. It actually enters a relationship with the parents anger. Whereas neglect leaves you completely unable to separate the internal world from the external - for example this is the case in the borderline personality structure, with its reactivity coming from that inability to recognise and control internal states.

All that is to say: neglect is soul murder.

Self: Cost of Neglect

When you have anxiety - you’re not yourself. Anxiety is a defence mechanism. When you have compulsions - you are not yourself. It’s a defence mechanism. When you’re narcissistic you’re not yourself, it’s a defence mechanism. And so on, with every type of neurosis and psychosis. They are defence mechanisms against abandonment, loss, frustration, etc. You cannot be your true self with these states active, because your so called „true” self is a human self. One that isn’t afraid of life.

Being a walking defence mechanism means a state of constriction, or limiting life, or limiting danger that goes with it.

Ones true self is always directed at love, hope, curiosity, etc. because these are pinnacles of human development. These are the holy grails of developmental processes that human self goes through.

Like Walt Whitman said: „all goes outward and onwards, nothing collapses”. Ones true self is a construct, a type of shooting star of one’s whole potential. It can never be completely realised if only because of our limited time on this planet. But approximating it, holding it in one’s heart as the dearest friend, a father substitute, an imago of god if you’re so inclined - is truly the only sense of meaning in life one can find. And to be soul-murdered early in life is to share in the defeat of your abusers: who can never even fathom such a mode of bing existing, such sharing of undying love and hope, so in envy they castrate their children so to speak - for them to never attain that direction in life.

They cut that spiritual cord in their children which should connect them naturally to that ideal. This is the cost of abuse and neglect. The death of an ideal in you.

In sum, a true self is the totality of your potential as a human being. It’s not attainable, but it is a very concrete psychological construct which insists on your psychological health for you to go with it and to respond to it. Not imitate it in the fullness of its potential, but in your recognition of that potentiality as fundamentally good and worthy of calm, loving, non-perfectionists pursuit. Any type of arrested development, cheating of life out of its reality, inauthenticity, anxiety, and neurosis is holding you back from being in a relationship with that ideal. And parents are the ones who should model that internal relationship with that ideal for you in early childhood. Now, you have to do it for yourself.