The cognitive dissonance of having a caretaker who doesn’t give sufficient care is incredibly difficult for children to tolerate. Because at a young age we cannot hold such a painfully conflicting experience in our conscious mind (“I am being hurt by the person who is supposed to nurture me”) we repress some of our innate neediness and may disavow our right to ask for (and even be conscious of) the needs that are going unmet. In the short-term, this dissociative coping strategy allows us to stay in relationship (however tenuously) with someone that we are biologically dependent on for survival.
But ‘needing less’ as a way to lessen the intensity of our unmet need, will become ingrained in our attachment blueprint and cause problems for us as adults. One problem with working from this blueprint is that we perpetuate the trauma: we neglect and under-nurture ourselves in the ways that our caregiver did, since those are the conditions underwhich our nerveous system was programmed for survival. This means that our true array of needs continues to go unacknowledged and the caretaking deficit persists.
Some of us that have experienced neglect will seek out very nurturing partners, which can lead to patterns of enmeshment; internal polarizations cannot be balanced interpersonally. Sufficient caretaking starts inside. As adults, we are the self-parent and we have a duty to begin unearthing what has gone unrecognized; a duty to stop inadvertently perpetuating an experience of neglect within our own systems.
A useful question to ask ourselves as we begin to unravel learned-neglect and reveal authentic need: Is this way of being (toward myself, toward others) a genuine expression of who I am or is it a reaction to what I have been through?
And what have I been through? How did I adapt? What is true now? This and more, soon.
InnerExpanse 