Many people who have trouble finding their direction in life have experienced some form of emotional neglect or abuse in their childhood. In this post, Jane Rubin, PhD, talks about how these experiences can create obstacles to finding your life path, and how therapy can help you overcome them.
Can you talk about how clients who were emotionally neglected struggle to find their path in life?
For the most part, the patients I’ve seen who were emotionally neglected didn’t suffer from physical neglect. They came from financially stable middle-class homes. But they grew up with parents who were completely unresponsive to their emotional needs.
These patients talk about how their parents had no idea how they were doing in school or what they were interested in. Often, their parents were preoccupied with their jobs and spent little time with them. Some parents had alcohol or substance abuse problems. The result was that my patients never felt their parents cared about them or that they really mattered to their parents.
Some of these parents justified their inattention by saying that they wanted their children to feel less controlled by them than they had felt as children and that they wanted them to feel completely free to make their own choices. The unfortunate result of this laissez-faire style of parenting was that my patients felt emotionally abandoned. As they became adults, they felt increasingly adrift. Because they had never really received any guidance or direction as children, they felt singularly ill-equipped to choose a path as adults.
Many of these patients have no idea what they want. They often end up in jobs or relationships that don’t satisfy them, but they can’t identify what would. When they try to identify what they want, they draw a blank. Nothing compels them to move in one direction or another.
Some of these patients, in contrast, do know where they’d like to go in their lives, but they feel that nothing they do will get them there. Their belief that they don’t really matter feeds thoughts like “ Why would anyone hire me?,” or “ No one will ever want to be with me.” They believe that, no matter what they do, no one will really care.
As a group, these emotionally neglected people feel that “I didn’t matter to my family, so something must be wrong with me.” As a result, they feel like they have to fix themselves before they can set out in life. Of course, nothing is actually wrong with them, so they remain uncertain and unclear about what to do next. They simply persist in believing that they don’t matter so what they do in life doesn’t matter, either.
How do those who were highly criticized by intrusive parents struggle as adults?
This second group has exactly the opposite problem. They were not ignored or neglected. Instead, their parents were intrusive and critical. These patients grew up feeling that every move or decision they made, no matter how seemingly trivial, was extremely important, and had the potential to anger or disappoint their critical parents.
These patients feel that they have to be perfect in order to protect themselves from criticism. They’re so afraid of making mistakes that they aren’t willing to try things outside of their comfort zone. As a result, they often choose jobs for which they're overqualified just so they won’t run the risk of failure. Because they’re paralyzed by the fear that someone will judge or criticize them, taking the risk to find their own path feels impossible.
How do you guide these clients and help them move forward?
Over time, both groups are able to understand how their childhood experiences deeply influenced their feelings about themselves. This allows them to have more compassion for themselves and frees them up to find their own path in life. However, at the beginning of therapy, while I’m trying to build up trust in our relationship and in the process of therapy, I also think it’s important to focus on what’s going on in the present, and on practical solutions that can help patients to move forward even as we address the more long-standing emotional issues. Some therapists seem to feel that focussing on the practical issues keeps patients from focussing on the “deeper” issues, but I think it’s our job as therapists to do anything that will help our patients feel less stuck.
Once we reach the point where practical suggestions aren’t enough to keep patients from feeling stuck, I’ll start out with questions like, “What were your parents’ expectations about what you were supposed to do with your life?” Inevitably, the more emotionally neglected patients will answer that their parents had no expectations. The patients who were routinely criticized will often say that the expectations were very specific-- that, for example, they had to have a 4.0 grade point average, or excel in sports, or go to medical school. Because the expectations were so narrow and rigid, they felt that they were being programmed to fail, either because their skills, talents, and interests weren’t a good match for their parents’ expectations or because they felt that they would inevitably fail if they tried to meet them.
Where do you feel like the most progress is made in therapy?
I think most of it happens in patients’ relationships with me. Patients who have been neglected don’t expect anyone to care about them. This means they don’t expect me to care about them, either. If they can begin to experience me as someone who genuinely cares about them, their feelings about what they can expect from other people begin to change.
This often involves talking about the ways they feel that I don’t care about them--about things I do or say that makes them feel like they don’t matter to me. As we have these conversations, they’re able to see both how their early experiences influenced their sense of how other people would respond to them and experience new ways of relating to other people.
The same principles apply to patients who have been severely criticized or emotionally abused. The more we can understand their expectation that this will happen to them in our relationship, and the more we can disconfirm those expectations, the easier it is for them to move forward in their lives.
In what ways do you think therapy is the most helpful for these groups?
Really, in the ways I’ve just mentioned. If patients can have a relationship with me that makes them feel understood, taken seriously, and cared for, that experience can be the gateway to being able to find their life path and to set out on it with confidence. It’s a complicated process, and it’s not linear, but, in the end, it can provide a firm foundation for having a life of meaning and purpose.
Are you struggling to find your life path? Please click to learn more about finding your life path with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.
Jane Rubin, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, California. She works with individuals in Berkeley, Oakland, the East Bay, and the greater San Francisco Bay Area who are struggling with depression and anxiety. She also specializes in working with people who are trying to find meaning and direction in their lives.