Can Emotional Neglect be a behavioural issue of concern?

Yes, Emotional Negligence is an area of concern for many of us. The negligence shown by loved ones is the most stress-building factor for developing various anxiety-related issues.

Having said that, I would like to mention a few anecdotes which did come in handy during my counseling sessions. In my Master’s in Education, from Manasa Gangotri, Mysore, I was taught many interesting, yet, imposing personality variations and the origin of each of these models based on human interactions. During the interactive discussions with students, Professor Sri Nair, The Head of the Department of Education and Psychology, at Mysore University had mentioned about those models and had also told us how they could be made applicable, in the field of psychology, at any point in time and space in counseling. In each session, he would elicit the perception of each of his student groups and brainstorm to make each one of us think about the complexity, adaptiveness, destructive interactions the mind can think of /assume, and the behavior that the body can exhibit as a reflex response.

In the forthcoming posts, when you see the titles of the topics of different personality dispositions which I deal with, you would be surprised to know how these phenomena never get outdated in their existence and the attention they seek.

If you observe, in today’s busy hustle-bustle, people have started perceiving the behavior of each person with their telescopic eye and are giving their color-overtone. With more power, greed, and competency, people have become more possessive of themselves and intolerant of honesty.

However, at times, we see overlapping personality traits in people around us. Each personality trait goes many layers deep and overlaps with the relatively close-looking traits and is becoming more challenging for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to deal with.

How can Emotional neglect or abuse push YOU into a devastating state?

All the parents teach their child or their going-to-be adults children to be more cautious of their surroundings and of other people’s behavior. Why don’t parents acknowledge that emotional abuse is as toxic as physical abuse?

Here, I need to mention the social model called Karpman Drama Triangle, proposed by  Stephen B.Karpman. This triangle talks so much about the destructive human interaction between one another at various levels.

What remedial measure, for emotional neglect, you can adopt in your day-to-day life

1. In organizations, you can see this model used explicitly in Psychotherapy sessions to deal with a bunch of people involved in a conflict and bickering.

2. Organizations use this during the counselling sessions as this acts as a powerful precautionary tool to resolve the simmering underlying issues and to retain the trustworthy workforce for their valued contribution to the organization.

The situation/ circumstance may showcase an upper hand of a person or a group playing a power game. It may talk about a person with a perverted socially non-approvable psychological orientation.

colorful puzzle cube placed on white surface
Photo by Mathias Reding on Pexels.com

The above model takes cognizance of a Victim, a Rescuer, and a Persecutor. Each character/ role represents the variations in the personality spectrum seen in society. Imagine yourself in each zone specified below and see how you feel-

A. As a Victim of emotional neglect-

  1. Thinks that you are helpless/powerless/not competent enough to stand up for yourself in the given situation.
  2. Depends on the Rescuer to come to your problem or conflict.
  3. Feel depressed, if the rescuer, doesn’t help on time or asks you to stand up for yourself.
  4. You feel dejected and lose self-worth and tend to blame the situation and your fate.
  5. Lose the power to make a decision
  6. You lose faith in the system or the Judiciary when you don’t get help immediately.
  7. Show no interest/ puts no effort into transforming the situation to make it less damaging.

B. When you are a Rescuer of the victim. (In reality, there can be two kinds of Rescuers).

a. The one who takes immediate action by being vigilant.

b. The other can be with a more intervening kind of personality disposition.

  1. You tend to be on high alert sense with a good intention to serve the others
  2. You feel drained out in the course of rescuing the victim/s.
  3. Your unsolicited effort goes unnoticed.
  4. You feel guilty if you cannot reach out to the victim in a situation that you could have averted.
  5. Too much dependency by the victim can be more annoying and can make you lose control over the victim’s emotions
  6. In the course of being more vigilant and service-oriented, you may not attend to your own needs.
  7. Your spirit of fighting for the victim might push you to finish the task after everybody does
  8. When you finish the task after the stipulated time, you might end up getting flacked.

C. If you are one among the Persecutors-

  1. You tend to be a big critic. You find fault with the victim, and the victim’s behaviour and try to control him/ her without proper assistance.
  2. You blame the victim for any unprecedented event.
  3. You blame the rescuers also for their behavior for being overprotective or for not giving enough space to the victim to explore and learn from their mistakes.
  4. You pass comment on unsolicited intervention in the rescue operation of the victim and you show rigidity in your action and speech.
  5. You become rude and leave the victim to fend for herself/ himself without any appropriate guidance. This is the emotional neglect portrayed by the persecutor.
  6. You project yourself as a bully too to create chaos.

As Parents/guardians, what can you do to avoid Emotional Neglect?

  1. You have to encourage your child to share whatever he/ she wants to share at any given time.
  2. Spending a substantial amount of your time every day on a random conversation can be beneficial. procrastination and setting a time for conversation can be detrimental.
  3. You should avoid putting words into the child’s mouth but can prompt when the child is all set to communicate with you.
  4. Before all these preventive measures, check whether there is any persecutor in your loved one’s life.
  5. As adults, you have to share the victims’ struggles with their friends or with the people whom they trust ( Note- sharing the struggle with someone makes one feel better If he/she is fighting any persecutor or if he/she is a rescuer himself/ herself).
  6. When an adult is making a repeated effort to speak to You, it is a sign of the other person being gaslighted or caught in the emotional neglect/ abuse. You have to proact.
  7. Prejudice plays a big role in not reaching out to the victim or the rescuer at the required time. so, avoid seeing through a magnifying lens

with the above pointers, don’t you think that when you witness three people/ groups involved in playing the above three roles, two people or groups will experience tense moments? This is because of the intervention and the involvement of the persecutor. How sad.

Personality Disorder – Gaslighting Can parents be friends with their children?

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