During my career, I have developed a passion for helping people who have experienced difficulties in their early relationships with their parents or caregivers.

While I have extensive experience of working with individuals who have experienced abuse and/or neglect at the hand of their caregiver(s), I have developed a particular interest in understanding and working with people who have experienced more subtle forms of emotional neglect from otherwise well-meaning caregivers.

Sometimes caregivers can be emotionally immature or unavailable for their child(ren) while they are growing up. This can occur for a number of reasons, including a parent experiencing a mental health difficulty, a parent in an unhappy, unhealthy or abusive relationship, a parent without an adequate support system, a parent misusing substances like alcohol or drugs, and a parent’s own unresolved trauma.

This can result in things like:

• Chronic mis-attunement, where a parent or caregiver is unable or unwilling to recognise and respond appropriately to a child’s needs.
• Emotional unavailability, where a parent is emotionally absent and unaware of their child’s outer and/or inner experiences due to self-involvement.
• Unrealistic expectations or demands, that are not matched to a child’s developmental capabilities.
• Parentification: a role reversal where the child’s needs are secondary to the needs of the family. This often results in the child taking on adult roles and responsibilities, and can include meeting others’ emotional needs, managing household tasks, caring for others, or making decisions that are beyond their developmental readiness.
• Enmeshment, where boundaries are blurred (or non-existent) and the parent treats the child as an extension of themselves.

This can then lead to problems in adulthood such as:

• Chronic self-abandonment
• People pleasing / fawning
• Performing
• Low self-esteem / low self-worth / feelings of inadequacy
• Loss of or lack of identity and autonomy
• Inability to identify own thoughts and feelings (disconnection to self)
• Disconnection to the body / physical sensations
• A harsh inner-critic
• High anxiety
• Perfectionism
• Over-analysing everything
• Always on high alert / scanning the room / highly sensitive to subtle changes in others’ behaviour or mood
• Chronic / toxic shame
• Poor boundaries with others
• Anxious, avoidant or disorganised attachment styles / difficulty forming healthy, secure relationships with others
• A dysregulated nervous system (stuck in fight / flight / freeze / fawn responses)

These experiences and associated symptoms are often referred to as complex trauma / C-PTSD (as they are chronic in nature, as opposed to a one-off traumatic event), relational trauma (as the trauma or unmet needs occur in relationship, or in the absence of relationship), and developmental trauma (the chronic unmet needs negatively impact normal, healthy development).

If any of the above resonates with you in some way, please do get in touch to explore how I can help you.