Some people come to counselling with a very clear account of what was difficult about their childhood.
For others, it is much less obvious.
You may look back and think your parents worked hard, provided for you and wanted you to do well. There may have been holidays, birthdays, encouragement with school and practical help whenever you needed it. You may feel loyal to them and uncomfortable with the idea that anything important was missing.
Yet as an adult, there are things you find surprisingly difficult.
You can deal with a complicated problem at work but struggle when your partner asks what you need. You can be very good at helping other people and uncomfortable when the attention turns towards you. You may know what you think about something until another person looks disappointed, becomes angry or disagrees with you. Then your position becomes much harder to hold onto.
You may have spent years assuming this is simply your personality.
Sometimes it is worth becoming curious about where that way of being came from.
Research into childhood emotional neglect and emotional responsiveness does not give us a simple explanation for adult personality. I would be wary of anyone suggesting that a few characteristics prove you had emotionally unavailable parents.
What the research does suggest is that our ability to recognise, understand and express our emotional experience develops partly through relationships. As children, we gradually learn what feelings are, what they mean and what to do with them through thousands of small interactions with the people around us.
If there was relatively little room for that in your family, you may have become very capable in other ways while finding parts of your internal experience harder to make sense of.
Your childhood can have been good in many ways and still have left something out
The phrase emotionally unavailable parents is used a lot online now. I think it needs some care.
It is not a diagnosis, and it can describe very different families.
One parent may have found emotions uncomfortable and quickly tried to solve whatever was wrong. Another may have changed the subject. Perhaps sadness was met with encouragement to cheer up, anger was treated as unacceptable, or difficult feelings simply went largely unnoticed.
Some families show love through practical things. Food appears on the table, lifts are given, problems are sorted out and sacrifices are made, while conversations about fear, sadness, vulnerability or emotional need barely happen.
A parent can also be dealing with their own depression, anxiety, trauma, financial pressure or family history. Emotional availability is not a simple measure of how much somebody loved their child.
That complexity matters to me.
Counselling does not require you to put your parents on trial.
You can recognise what they gave you and also become interested in what you may have needed more of.
How do we learn what we feel?
One of the strongest findings in the research concerns emotional awareness.
A 2023 meta-analysis drawing together 99 independent samples and more than 36,000 participants found an association between childhood maltreatment and later difficulty identifying and describing emotions. Emotional neglect showed one of the stronger associations.
That does not mean somebody who sometimes says “I don’t know how I feel” was emotionally neglected.
It does tell us something useful about how emotional understanding develops.
Imagine a child comes home upset.
An adult might notice that something has changed, become interested and gradually help the child work out what happened. Perhaps the child is angry as well as embarrassed. Maybe something that looked like anger was actually fear. The adult does not need to analyse any of this. Simply being interested helps the child begin to recognise their own experience.
Over many years, that becomes part of how we learn to understand ourselves.
Where there is less of this, the feelings still exist. They may simply be harder to recognise.
As an adult, you might experience tension in your chest, irritation, restlessness or a strong wish to get away from somebody before you have any idea what you are actually feeling.
Someone asks:
“What do you want?”
and the truthful answer is:
“I don’t know.”
Yet put a practical problem in front of you and you may know exactly what to do.
I find that contrast interesting.
Becoming capable before becoming familiar with yourself
Some children become extremely good at managing.
Perhaps you realised quite early that your parent already had enough to deal with. Maybe asking for something rarely seemed to change much. Perhaps being upset made things more complicated, while getting on with things brought approval or simply made life easier.
A child can adapt to that without consciously deciding anything.
You may learn to solve your own problems, read other people’s moods, avoid adding pressure and become fairly undemanding.
Those can become real strengths.
The adult who learned to manage may become dependable, resourceful and good in a crisis. Other people trust them. They take responsibility. They get things done.
I have little interest in treating those qualities as symptoms.
What interests me is what happens when being capable becomes much easier than needing somebody.
You may find it comfortable to give support and awkward to receive it. Perhaps asking for help feels exposing or leaves you feeling indebted. Maybe you automatically say you are fine before you have even considered whether you are.
The difficulty is often less about whether support exists and more about what happens inside you when you need it.
“I know what I think until somebody reacts”
This is one of the experiences I find most interesting in counselling.
You may have a perfectly clear view about something until you have to say it to another person.
Perhaps you know you do not want to attend something.
Then you tell your partner and see disappointment on their face.
Suddenly your attention moves towards them.
Are they upset?
Am I being selfish?
Have I made too much of this?
Maybe it would just be easier to go.
A few minutes later, something that felt quite clear becomes difficult to locate.
The same thing can happen at work. You disagree with a decision until somebody senior challenges you. You know a boundary has been crossed until the other person explains why you have misunderstood. You feel angry until somebody else becomes angry with you.
Then you start explaining, softening, apologising or questioning yourself.
The research does not allow us to say that childhood emotional neglect causes people-pleasing or conflict avoidance. The relationship is much less established than some online articles suggest.
But it gives us a useful question.
If your own emotional experience received relatively little attention when you were young, did you become particularly good at attending to everybody else’s?
And what happens now when another person’s reaction becomes stronger than your awareness of yourself?
When independence starts costing you something
Independence can be enormously useful.
I would never want counselling to turn somebody who is capable and self-reliant into a person who feels unable to manage without other people.
The question for me is whether you still have a choice.
Can you deal with something yourself when that makes sense and ask for support when you would genuinely like it?
Can somebody care about you without you immediately wondering what you owe them?
Can you say that something is difficult before it becomes unbearable?
Can you allow another person’s interest in you to remain there for a while?
This is where an old adaptation can become limiting.
What once helped you function may now leave you carrying things long after you need to.
You may be surrounded by people and still feel surprisingly alone because very few of them know much about what is actually happening inside you.
Success can make this harder to notice
For some people, competence also becomes closely tied to approval and self-worth.
Research into parental conditional regard gives us a useful distinction here. A 2023 meta-analysis found associations between parental approval being linked to behaviour or achievement and things such as more contingent self-esteem and greater psychological difficulty.
That is different from emotional neglect, and I would not combine the two as though they were the same experience.
But some people grow up discovering that achievement is one of the clearest routes to approval.
You work hard. You perform well. You become useful.
Adult life may then reinforce the same pattern. Careers reward people who take responsibility, manage pressure and deliver results. Being capable becomes both personally important and socially valuable.
That can work extremely well until something happens that competence cannot easily solve.
You lose a job.
A relationship starts failing.
You become a parent and discover that there is no obvious right answer.
Somebody criticises you.
Your health changes.
You retire and the role that organised much of your life disappears.
Then a difficult question can emerge:
Who am I when being useful does not tell me who I am?
Why criticism can feel like more than criticism
Research also gives us good reason to pay attention to shame and self-criticism in people who experienced emotional maltreatment or neglect.
Again, I would avoid turning that into a fixed explanation.
What interests me clinically is how quickly criticism can sometimes become something much bigger than the event itself.
Your partner says:
“I wish you’d told me earlier.”
What you hear may be closer to:
“You’ve let me down.”
A manager corrects something you have done and you spend the rest of the day replaying it.
Someone looks disappointed and you immediately feel an urge to explain yourself.
At times the reaction begins before any criticism has actually happened. You anticipate how somebody might respond and adjust yourself first.
You keep quiet.
Agree.
Check what they think.
Put the difficult conversation off.
This can make someone appear easy-going and accommodating while internally they are doing a great deal of work to prevent other people’s disappointment.
Eventually the cost may appear somewhere else, perhaps as resentment, withdrawal, anxiety or anger.
What happens in relationships
Our closest relationships often bring these patterns into clearer view because intimacy asks more of us than competence does.
A large meta-analysis found a reliable, although modest, association between childhood emotional maltreatment and poorer romantic relationship wellbeing in adulthood.
The word modest matters.
Childhood experience does not determine what your relationships will become.
But it can influence what feels familiar.
You may long for closeness and then feel uncomfortable when someone becomes very interested in you. You may show love by doing practical things but struggle to say what is happening emotionally. Perhaps your partner says they want more from you and you hear criticism rather than an invitation to become closer.
You may withdraw during conflict because you need space to work out what you think, while your partner experiences the withdrawal as rejection.
Or you may find yourself adapting so much to another person that you gradually become resentful without understanding why.
There is a tension I often find more useful than asking whether somebody is simply “afraid of intimacy”.
You may genuinely want connection while also having learned that staying connected involves containing quite a lot of yourself.
Loving your parents and recognising what was missing can sit together
For some people, this is the hardest part.
You may feel protective of your parents.
Perhaps they had difficult lives themselves. Maybe they did considerably better than their parents did. You can see everything they sacrificed for you.
You may feel guilty even considering whether something was missing.
I think there is room for more than one truth.
A parent can love you and struggle to understand your emotional experience.
They can provide security and still find vulnerability uncomfortable.
They can do their best and leave you with things you later need to make sense of.
Recognising that does not require you to decide that your childhood was bad.
Sometimes it simply gives language to something you have felt for a long time without knowing what to call it.
There may also be grief in that recognition.
Not necessarily grief for something terrible that happened, but for experiences that happened less often than you needed. Being comforted. Having somebody stay interested when you were upset. Feeling that your needs could take up space without creating difficulty for someone else.
People sometimes recognise this only much later in life.
They see the way another family relates to each other. Their partner asks for greater emotional closeness. They become a parent themselves and notice how strongly they want to respond differently to their own child.
Or therapy gives them the unfamiliar experience of another person remaining interested when they would usually change the subject.
What happens when this comes into counselling
I am cautious about deciding too quickly what somebody’s childhood explains.
I would rather understand how the person sitting with me actually experiences themselves now.
Someone who learned to need very little can initially be very easy to work with.
They arrive on time. They explain themselves clearly. They think carefully about what I say. They may be interested in understanding their history and able to describe difficult experiences in considerable detail.
Yet something may happen when I become more interested in what they are feeling right now.
Perhaps I ask what they need from me and they genuinely have no idea.
Maybe they describe something painful and then immediately tell me it was not really a big deal.
They might apologise for talking about themselves for too long.
Or I notice that they are watching my reaction more closely than their own experience.
Those moments interest me.
I might say:
“I noticed that as soon as I asked what you wanted, your attention seemed to move towards what I might think. What happened just then?”
We can slow it down.
Perhaps you notice tension in your body before any words arrive. Maybe there is embarrassment. Perhaps you suddenly feel responsible for making sure I am comfortable.
Something that has happened very quickly in relationships for years becomes visible enough for us to look at together.
That is one of the things I value about the way I work.
Understanding where a pattern may have come from can be useful. Noticing it at the moment it happens gives us something different to work with.
The aim is not to become less capable
If you recognise yourself in this article, I would not assume that the capable, independent part of you needs to disappear.
It may have served you extremely well.
The question is whether you can begin to include more of yourself alongside it.
Can you know what you want even when somebody else wants something different?
Can another person’s disappointment belong to them without immediately becoming your responsibility?
Can you receive help as well as give it?
Can you notice anger early enough to understand what it is telling you?
Can you stay interested in your own experience when another person has a reaction?
For me, that is where the work becomes useful.
You can remain dependable, thoughtful and capable while becoming a little clearer about what you feel, what you need and what happens to those things when another person enters the picture.
Perhaps your parents cared about you deeply.
Perhaps they also had limited ways of meeting you emotionally.
Both can be true.
And understanding that possibility may help make sense of why somebody who has spent so much of their life knowing how to cope can still find it surprisingly difficult to know what they need.
If some of this feels familiar and you would like to explore it in counselling, you can arrange a free 20-minute introductory call.
Research and sources
Ditzer, J., Wong, C. H. Y., Modi, R. N. & others (2023). Child maltreatment and alexithymia: a meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin.
Kick, L. M. & colleagues (2024). Alexithymia as a mediator between adverse childhood experiences and psychological disorders: a systematic review.
Cao, H. & colleagues (2022). Childhood emotional maltreatment and adulthood romantic relationship well-being: a multilevel meta-analytic review.
Haines, N. & colleagues (2023). Parental conditional regard: a meta-analysis.
Xiao, Z. & colleagues (2023). The impact of childhood psychological maltreatment on mental health outcomes in adulthood: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
NICE. Child abuse and neglect: terms used in this guideline.