Some parents will not tolerate displays of emotional neediness by their children. They respond by quashing even the slightest bit of complaining, unhappiness, fearfulness or crying. To do this they may resort to punishment, threats of punishment or buying the child off with the promise of a treat. Sometimes the parents may guilt trip the child by explaining how hard they work to give the child a good life, which makes expressions of neediness unjustified as well as a mark of ingratitude. They might even go so far as to compare the child’s good life to the lives of children living in war zones or places where poverty and malnutrition are rampant.
Being rebuked and shut down for expressing natural feelings can be traumatizing. When a child feels fear or abandonment, she needs holding and loving reassurance from her parents. When parents act out in response to the child’s expression of feeling enough times, she gets the message to expect being lectured to, punished or bribed to be quiet whenever she expresses dissatisfaction, sadness, loneliness or neediness for emotional comfort. In the terminology of Internal Family Systems, the child will then develop a protector part to prevent her from expressing these kinds of feelings, and in extreme cases any feelings at all. As a therapist I have seen adult clients in my practice who are emotionally shutdown by a part that makes them feel so small, so powerless, and so deeply hated they dare never express a need.
The parents who create the conditions for the emergence of this self-hating part in their child have no idea they are creating this legacy. So why do they do it? Sometimes it flows from emotional inheritance, from having been raised by a parent without empathy who acted that way. Sometimes it’s because the parents are so stressed out and exhausted by work, they desperately crave peace and quiet in the home and have no bandwidth to tolerate crying or what they see as whining. Sometimes the parents suffer from a mental illness (like irritable depression or bipolar) that puts them in no mood to tolerate an unhappy, demanding child. And sometimes one or both parents are alcoholics or addicts and thus unable to inhibit resentment, anger or rage. Whatever the reason this sequence of parental lack of empathy plus lecturing, punishment or manipulation through bribery when a child expresses emotional needs is something that can cause a suffering across the lifespan for the child on the receiving end.
