The number one reason that many
psychologists, psychiatrists and professionals say that we become susceptible to toxic relationships is because of childhood
emotional neglect and there's one way that we can change all of that for ourselves and future generations.
That's what we're talking about today at QueenBeeing.com. So let's get started. (Closed captioning provided by
Athena moberg and CPTSDfoundation.org). My name is Angie Atkinson and on this channel,
I offer free daily video coaching to help you discover,
understand and overcome
narcissistic abuse and toxic relationships. I like to call it toxic relationship rehab.
So if that sounds good to you, hit that Subscribe button, and let's get going.
So for a lot of years, psychologists, psychiatrists, people in the mental health field
were afraid of labeling people, because they felt like it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy or that we were damaging people for being -
whatever condition we labeled them,
but on the flip side of that; in recent years many researchers have stated that not talking about the cluster B spectrum, narcissism, sociopathy,
psychopathy, things like that - it was actually causing more harm than good.
Of course these days you can find plenty of information about that stuff, all the videos on my channel, all the videos on several other
channels here on YouTube.
Many thousands of articles around the internet including QueenBeeing.com,
but there aren't as many articles talking about how people become susceptible to being in relationships with these toxic people, with these toxic personality
disorders. What is it exactly that makes us more vulnerable to a toxic person in a relationship?
What makes us more likely to accept things that other people wouldn't accept in their lives as part of our normal.
Well,
I think that... I kind of mentioned it at the beginning of this video - childhood emotional neglect is a big part of it.
That means that when you were growing up your parents may have discounted your emotions or ignored them or even just
minimized or discourage them.
The thing is, it's a lot more common than people think it is,
and as someone mentioned in the live chat today, it also happens in homes that seem loving and supportive
otherwise. The parents are just not emotionally aware,
but on the flip side of that it also happens in homes where they're dealing with addiction and abuse and self-absorbed narcissistic
parents, but regardless of why it happens, it happens and it happens more often than most people would care to admit.
What happens is that, you grow up and you're disconnected in so many ways from other people and from "normal".
You'll find yourself asking for almost nothing and also being disconnected from your own emotional needs and your own physical needs, sometimes
what ends up happening is that you end up kind of developing a pattern where you just don't care about yourself and you don't even
feel functional unless you're caring about someone else - you neglect yourself. Of course the narcissist is totally into that.
It's exactly what they're looking for.
Someone who wants to take care of other people before themselves.
Someone who cares more about how other people feel than how they feel. So here are some ways that
growing up with childhood neglect kind of leads us into self neglect as an adult and therefore into toxic
relationships, take a look. Growing up with a narcissist as a parent will do a number on your self-esteem, your self-
perception and in the long run your whole life.
You can either choose to ignore neglect that part of yourself or you can actually learn to embrace it and love your inner child,
but for today we're talking about how that happens. One of the things you have to understand
Is that wherever you are today,
whatever you are today,
It's the result of your experiences up to this point and that is going to include your problems, your strengths, your habits,
and of course your level of self-esteem from the time that you're a newborn baby until the time that you're a child and then an
adolescent - you had certain distinct and
specific challenges and when you have experienced toxic abuse,
whether it was verbal, mental,
psychological, physical, you might need to work on healing, because otherwise you're going to find yourself in a difficult position.
You won't be well balanced. You won't be emotionally strong. You will become codependent.
When your relationships as a child and your childhood
experiences are filled with trauma and negative issues and abuse and problems as is most likely the case if you were raised by a toxic
narcissist. These past
incidences are going to impact you significantly on who you become as an adult.
There are some different ways that growing up as the child of a narcissist can make you more vulnerable to being in
relationships with narcissists, sociopaths, etc.
The first way that we are affected is that we don't always have access to our own feelings.
So as you know,
we're born with our emotions for a specific reason and it's not just so that we can feel pain or happiness.
Really our emotions teach us how to
get through life, how to survive, how to stay safe and even how to thrive, because when we're scared, when something is a
problem in our lives, our emotions tell us - "Hey you might be in danger,
you got to protect yourself right now right"?. When your emotions are blocked though,
what happens is that you're not quite able to really access this information and
you can't recognize what the feelings are telling you. When you go through childhood with a narcissistic parent,
you might not even feel very
upset when you should feel upset or you might not feel angry when you should feel angry or you might not even feel sad when
you should feel sad, because you have to recognize that your narcissistic parent taught you that your feelings weren't real and didn't matter.
And so you might be to this place where you're like, well just because I feel scared
doesn't really mean I'm in danger, because my feelings - I don't trust them,
they're not real or you might not even feel like you're allowed to have feelings, right?
So if something makes you feel sad, like say your narcissistic boyfriend or girlfriend
you know cheats on you or leaves you hanging somewhere,
you might
justify that in your mind, because you were taught that you were too dramatic or you think too much or whatever and of course on
the negative side here, this makes it super easy for narcissists to manipulate you and to keep you in those toxic relationships.
That's part of the reason we end up staying as long as we do. The other thing you need to be aware of is that,
going through that type of childhood leaves you without the ability to really be aware of what things you need and want, because
narcissist as we know and sociopaths; they seem like hyper vigilant of their own emotions and stuff and they are, but they're certainly not
hyper vigilant of yours, they're not even aware of them. They're not self-aware in that they can't imagine how other people see them.
So that's part of the reason they have no empathy I think, but they are very, very, very concerned with how they feel and what
they want and as we all know, they will do just about anything to get what they want.
That means they don't care if they hurt other people and some of them might actually enjoy hurting other people,
but you have to understand, because you're not the sort of person who needs everything and wants everything all the time. You don't say
"I need you to do this" or "I want you to do that", then they know - Hey, this person is easy there, they're low maintenance, right?,
so I don't need to be overly concerned with what they want or need, so I can stay focused on what I want or need.
And that's part of the reason that sociopaths, narcissist, psychopaths, etcetera, find themselves more attracted to you.
They'll want to be your friend or they'll want to go on a date with you or whatever and because you don't want to hurt
them or because you don't think you deserve better or whatever - directly linked to the fact that you were emotionally neglected in childhood,
you're especially vulnerable to them. When you're growing up with childhood neglect
you very often feel like you're stuck, like you don't have
similarities with other people. You feel different, you feel like you're just kind of out there.
You might even feel kind of emotionally empty. You might feel numb.
I felt numb a lot, you feel disconnected from your emotions. You feel like you're watching through a bubble.
This is kind of a dissociation thing that happens to us.
You almost don't allow yourself to feel anything deeply and being disconnected from those emotions
make your life feel sort of dull sometimes and a lot of times when a narcissist comes into our lives because they're so in-your-face
sometimes or they're so opposite of whatever you are,
and because they do this thing where they're all about themselves
and they don't really worry too hard about the way people feel, they have no guilt, they have no conscience, all that stuff.
Well
they might really seem like
just a breath of fresh air when you first meet them,
because they seem like they might have what you think you don't have, you are naturally
going to be drawn to them at least initially and
because you're someone who didn't have the right kind of love in childhood.
You're someone who feels afraid to release any sort of love and that's another reason we stay so long.
But while we can't change the past, we can change the future.
The thing is when you grow up in this way, when you grow up
feeling like you don't matter like your feelings don't matter, your opinions aren't real, you aren't real, you feel
insignificance, you feel like you don't matter, you would just melt into the wall
if you could sometimes. You almost feel like
you're better on the sidelines than on the field, sort of or you're better in the audience than on the stage if that makes any
sense.
So that like you're not the main player in your own
life, at least that's how you feel until you realize differently. At the same time
you feel really sad about the fact that people don't see you, people don't acknowledge who you are or anything that you do sometimes and
narcissist as we know - what are they always doing?.
They're always looking for people to cheer them on, people to admire them, people to tell them how amazing they are, everywhere
they go they do this, they do this with you,
they do this with other people in their lives and when you meet a
narcissist, at least during the love-bombing phase,
you become drawn to that feeling of being in the spotlight, the feeling of being special, because you never got that in childhood. The
narcissist sees this and because of the fact that you didn't have the kind of recognition or the kind of
connection with your parents or whoever raised you, because of the fact that you didn't have the normal healthy
gift of feeling like you mattered, this makes you more vulnerable to the narcissist.
And now, how do we become narc proof?. How do we become less vulnerable
than we are now?. What are the things that we can do?
What is the one thing you know, we need to change about ourselves?, take a look.
So
how do you do it?. You start by making a choice to become less vulnerable to narcissists and the
honest-to-god truth is, there's one way for you to become less vulnerable to narcissists and it's as simple and complicated as you can imagine.
I can tell you how to do it in one word - Heal. Now let me explain, heal before you get into new relationships.
Heal your childhood emotional neglect and when it's fully healed you will be able to discern, you will raise your standards.
You will have a higher awareness of yourself in your life. You can do this.
You can heal this and when you do that that will help you to stop attracting
narcissists and toxic people into your life. So how do you start this?
Well,
you have to start by actually taking care of yourself, paying attention to yourself in ways
that you never have before and in ways that you weren't given as a child. So what do I mean by this?
Well
take a little minute each day a couple times a day and ask yourself those questions
that no one asked you when you were a kid. Ask yourself - What do I want? Ask yourself -
What do I need? Ask yourself - How do I feel?
As you learn to answer those questions, you will start to say to other people - This is what I need.
This is what I think. This is what I feel.
This is what I want and you'll express yourself without doubt, because you will no longer have self-doubt.
You have to learn to recognize and acknowledge your feelings, your thoughts, your needs, your beliefs, everything as
legitimate. As you do that, you begin to create your own
sort of place in this world, of your own life, a life that you choose, a life that you decide and
you become your true self,
you finally allow your real self to shine on the surface. You no longer hide behind a mask or the false image that your
narcissist told you that you were supposed to be, you become real. You become healthy.
You become something that you always were supposed to be.
Someone you were meant to be, but you were blocked before and the more you start to watch what you need, what you want, what
you feel, what you think, be aware of it and embrace it, the less attention
you will get from toxic people in your life. The more you love yourself, care about yourself, accept yourself
unconditionally, the less you will want those people in your life.
And the more that you learn to say what you think, what you feel, what you want,
the easier it will be for you to walk away from any
toxic person who crosses your path as you go down this road of
narcissistic abuse recovery - of recovering from your childhood emotional neglect.
You begin a new life a life, that doesn't leave you open to being emotionally abused, emotionally
manipulated by toxic people and this is the kind of life where you finally get to be
protected in a way that you always were meant to be protected.
Something that might help you as you go through this, just a quick tip from me to you,
is that if you take the time to ask yourself -
What would I do for my own child or what would I do for my own best friend or my niece or nephew
I love deeply, my grandchild, whatever. What would I say or do for my loved one if they were in the same situation
I'm in?. What would I say or do for them if they thought or felt or
did what I've thought, felt or done or if they needed what I need, how would I help them?
And then you've helped yourself in that same way.
It's almost like you have to sort of be your own parent in a way and this is
rounding right back around to the whole inner child thing.
I'm gonna link to an inner child series for you on healing. Childhood emotional neglect
leaves us broken, leaves us not whole and complete and very often, when we've discovered that we've gone through it,
it's because we ended up in a relationship with the narcissist or because we didn't end up in a relationship with anyone,
depending on the type of person we are. But what you deserve and what you can create for yourself now is a life
that doesn't contain emotional neglect. Take care of your own needs and take care of the needs of the people closest to you.
Just remember that childhood emotional neglect is very, even if you think that you've had this perfect childhood, chances
are you may have been traumatized in a way that you didn't even
recognize. This brings me to the question of the day,
and the question of the day is; Can you relate to anything I talked about today?,
do you think you experienced childhood emotional neglect or do you know that you experienced it?,
and if so, how do you feel about it today?, and what did you do to start to heal?.
Are you still kind of in the waking up phase?. Share your thoughts, share your ideas,
share your experiences in the comments section below and let's talk about it.
I want to take a quick minute to shout out my amazing channel numbers. I really appreciate that
you took a chance on me and that you're here supporting my mission here at YouTube to help survivors of narcissistic abuse discover,
understand and overcome their situations so that they can evolve and become the people they truly want to be. Thank you,
it means so much to me. My awesome channel members and inner circle include;Angela Falsetta.
Susan Marion. Roxanne Antle. Deborah. Black Caesar. Life's Revival. Tricia Wolf.James F.
Marlene. Jen Archer. Sarah Lee. and Patricia Keenum. Thank you all so much.
Again, thank you so much. Alright, that's all I've got for right now,
but as always thank you so much for being a part of my day and a part of my life and hey
thanks for letting me be a part of yours,
it really does mean a lot to me. Now before I go, make sure you take a look at the videos
I'm leaving for you right there and right there
and while you're here, hit that Subscribe button right down there and remember you're never alone, you always have your SPANily. I'll see you soon.