Do I really have CEN?
I’m going to make a few guesses about you.
You’ve read a book (Dr. Jonice Webb’s Running on Empty?) or you’ve been following someone on IG (Patrick Teahan maybe?) and they’re talking about Emotional Neglect.
Or maybe you’ve been googling late at night and the ever benevolent algorithm has started suggesting things to you and you’ve stumbled across the terms CEN, or Emotional Neglect.
If you're still wondering what childhood emotional neglect actually means, I've written a more detailed explanation you can find here.
When the symptoms list looks eerily familiar
I’ll make another guess, you’ve seen the list of symptoms (numbness, difficulty knowing what you feel, feeling bad about yourself for no reason, difficulty in close relationships or with children) and it felt like reading a list of things about yourself.
You feel attacked. And confused, because you’re fairly sure you don’t qualify as neglected and now you’re wondering what you’re supposed to do about it. Because this isn’t fun and the instructions seem skimpy at best.
Let me try and help clear a few things up for you.
The most common things people say to me when they suspect CEN (or I do) are:
It wasn’t that bad,
We didn’t go without anything,
We went on holidays, and we had two cars,
We always had Christmas presents,
Maybe I’m just exaggerating,
It probably wasn’t that bad,
It was probably my fault.
So as you can see, most people are not immediately identifying with CEN. They’re simultaneously racking up a list of reasons they can’t have experienced Emotional Neglect, blaming themselves and panicking about what this means. ‘Do I have to divorce my parents?!’ You might be thinking. ‘I’m supposed to be staying for a week at Christmas. I’m bringing dessert!’
What if I don’t want to blame my parents?
This can be a complex question for a few reasons.
Some people genuinely love their parents and vice versa. They know their parents made mistakes but they feel supported by them. Or perhaps their parents have changed a lot or are willing to admit they didn’t always make the best choices.
Sometimes people know a lot about their parents own childhoods and see the changes they have made. They did try to do better and they were starting from a difficult place.
This isn’t about condemning your parents.
This is about being honest about the cause and effect of how you were raised, about how you manage now, about how willing your parents or family are to talk about things that are bothering you and about how you feel around them.
What about abuse?
Neglect is about what didn’t happen, whereas abuse is about what did happen. And both can and do occur together. Abuse can take the form of violence, name calling, being hurt in other ways, financially or emotionally controlled.
Sometimes people feel tightly bound and indebted to people who hurt them very deeply and these effects continue in the present. Love isn’t supposed to hurt you and if you grew up thinking this was just how it works, a lot of unpicking is often needed to see what needs keeping and rejecting.
If you need help doing that, I might be able to help. You won’t always have the information you need to do this alone and that isn’t your fault. You can learn how to separate things out and feel less confused.
People often tell me that bruises fade but it’s the absence of love that haunts them. The lack of acknowledgement, the being ignored, the being forgotten. And since we’re told we can’t miss what we never had, it's easy to blame ourselves when this still hurts 30 years later.
What if I don’t remember anything bad happening?
Emotional Neglect is a little more hidden. It’s often about what is not talked about, how you had to manage things by yourself, perhaps because your parents were overwhelmed or had their own problems. It’s about how you tried to manage them because they didn’t seem ok which means you’re still doing that (like when you end up helping your manager because frankly they’re a little out of their depth). But this means you didn’t get the help you needed as a kid and you’re quite likely to still have very high expectations of yourself now.
And you can’t remember something that didn’t happen. Many families are a bit weird about emotions, make incessantly unkind jokes about each other, avoid difficult topics like death or sex or money. Nobody ever had to say ‘hey don’t ask if your girlfriend can sleep over’. You just knew that your staunchly Catholic mother would never let you have sex under her roof despite never having set foot in a church during the last 20 years.
Whilst having a prudish mother doesn’t constitute neglect, having unspoken rules about what can and cannot be discussed or knowing that you’re responsible for keeping the peace can be and it can manifest later in adult life if you’re still unable to talk about the things you need to discuss with your partner.
Why do I feel so guilty for even considering this?
We are taught that family is critically important. But sometimes family can also be a prison, where we blame ourselves if we feel stuck or want to escape. Since we are taught that families are love and belonging, many people feel treacherous for wishing they could abscond.
Mostly, people do try their best, it just isn’t always effective, or they close their eyes and sing la la la when you tried to tell them what went wrong. Or regale you with all the times you made their life difficult. It’s hard for people to hear how you think they screwed up and that doesn’t mean it’s not an important conversation. After all, you can’t mend bridges if you don’t know they’re broken.
It’s also true that some parents just ignored the signs that what they were doing was not working. You wonder how they missed the neon flashing lights, the drinking, the slammed doors, the stony silences at dinnertime.
And sometimes parents actively enforce the guilt. They rewrite the past, forget the bad bits and somehow manage to guilt trip you ‘look, I had a lot on ok. I didn’t get much help’.
You don’t need your parents’ permission to start investigating your past. There I said it. Because, if you know this isn’t working, it won’t keep working if you ignore it, drink a nice bottle of red wine on a Thursday to cover it up (it’s nearly the weekend, right?) You’re allowed to be the adult who looks at how you feel and says ‘I think I need some help with this’.
Do I need a diagnosis?
Emotional Neglect or CEN is not a formal psychiatric diagnosis and your doctor may not recognise it if you refer to it.
The term CEN has become recently popularised, mostly through the work of Dr. Jonice Webb and her book Running on Empty.
Psychotherapy has been talking about Emotional Neglect in different forms for many decades although the terms that people use and recognise often go in trends. You might recognise related concepts for Emotional Neglect such as insecure attachment, misattunement or sometimes developmental trauma.
You don’t need someone to give you a piece of paper with a name on it to get help either in therapy or from your doctor. A diagnosis is often not necessary and many people just know that something is wrong without knowing what the specific label is.
What am I actually supposed to do about it?
Yes, the critical question. So maybe your childhood was a little problematic (whose wasn’t?!) but what do you actually do about it?
Well, you need to learn the hidden patterns that you learned. Like discovering you’ve accidentally been taught the earth was flat, you need to find out the missing info. And I’ve got you because I spent 15 years wandering around trying to figure out what I needed to know.
Roughly, because I know you like a plan, I take a three-pronged approach.
Firstly, figure out your emotional situation (do you feel too much or not enough) and rebalance it. This looks like being able to recognise your feelings and actually feel them so they don’t overwhelm you but they do have an outlet. This takes time and practice and that is completely normal. I’ve been through it with many people and can help you recognise your progress and keep going.
Secondly, you’ll need to learn how to stop blaming yourself for every little thing (yes, really and it’s where we start). You are, my friend, drilling holes in your own boat and then wondering where the water is coming from. It’s not your fault but it’s critical that we get you on your own side (and if you have a few people to help that’s incredibly useful too).
We do look at what you’re contributing, because everyone is contributing something and it isn’t always something helpful. We do this kindly of course, but if you’re overfunctioning, saving everyone’s feelings and swallowing your own or never learned to put yourself first this needs addressing. And sometimes what you’re contributing isn’t something you’re particularly proud of. I get that too. I was shouty, unreasonable and not always ‘my best self’.
And thirdly, you need to understand how people work so you can see what your family is doing and why. This not only helps you to stop taking things personally, but it helps you to detach because if your father has complained about everything for the past 70 years it’s probably not just about you. Once you better see how your family behaves, some things become much easier to understand. It almost feels like cheating.
If you need help, I’ve been doing this for 15 years now and I know the ins and outs and will simultaneously hold up the map and encourage you to keep going.
You can book a call here to see what I’m like and find out if I can help.
Written by Sarah Lee, October 2026. UKCP Psychotherapist, about me.