One of the most alarming consequences of enduring neglect is that it doesn’t just teach us to expect less. It teaches us to want less.
One of the most surprising consequences of trauma is that the adaptations we’ve developed to survive it are often the ones that keep us from finding connection as adults.
If your caregivers constantly criticised everything you did, you might subconsciously become allergic to being seen. If you were told that you were too needy, you might come to believe that being hyper-independent is the best thing you can be for the people you love. And now, no body knows how to love you.
As a child, instead of learning how to receive love, you learned how to reduce the cost of loving you. And so later as an adult, you’ve become incredibly skilled at making deprivation look like preference.
I’ve written here about neglect many times. About how neglect wires us for obsession. I’ve noticed how easily we recognise active abuse as harm, while neglect is often treated as
a choice people are simply entitled to make.
And you know what, it’s true: people have the ‘right’ not to care. We hear it all the time: nobody owes us anything. People have the right to set boundaries. They have the right to leave. They have the right to decide they no longer want to participate in a relationship. We can’t force anyone to care for and love us, not even our own parents.
But it is disingenuous to believe that for social beings like humans, withdrawing care causes no harm, even when we’re adults. Adults need care, too.
Neglect is the passive side of abuse.
We’ve become so concerned with protecting individual autonomy that we sometimes struggle to talk about the relational consequences of exercising that autonomy. Two things can be true at once: we are allowed to leave, & how we leave can wound someone. We are allowed not to give care, & we shouldn’t obliged to give care, & the absence of care can still be devastating to someone who’s survived neglect. We are allowed to have boundaries, & not everything we call a boundary is care.
Love can never be an obligation. That's what I love most about love. Love is feral, it needs room to be practiced. And I refuse the idea that because care cannot be coerced, its absence is therefore neutral. Nothing is neutral in the body, not even absence. As one of my friends once said to me: care is noticed only when it’s gone. That’s how powerful care is.
I’ve learned it over and over as a somatic practitioner, sometimes, the thing that harmed us the most wasn’t what someone did to us. It was what, over and over again, nobody did.
So we survive neglect by adapting to it. We realise that wanting and asking for what we need doesn’t change anything, even worse, we have been shamed for it, and so to escape the humiliation ritual of being human, we quit wanting altogether.
It’s not that the body stops wanting, or that we stop having needs, it’s that we don’t want to feel the want and be met with silence. And so we collapse into shame. The shame of being profoundly vulnerable, the shame of being human.
As a somatic practitioner, I can honestly say that:
the real tragedy of neglect isn’t only that we weren’t given enough. It’s that eventually, we participated in our own deprivation by organizing our lives around never needing very much.
I am writing this to say: while healing neglect starts with acknowledging your wounds of neglect, for it to truly take root in the body, healing also has to be about learning to want & receive more. In other words, at some point, you have to recover your capacity to want.
So, how do we learn to want again?
Here are 4 paths I have been practicing alongside my clients to connect to your desire again. The goal of those practices is to help you feel your desires without immediately collapsing into shame or disgust—because that shame was never yours to begin with.
Ready?
