Family is the central environment for a child growing up, and it impacts you enormously. For all, family related trauma can create the most impact and insecurities, especially from such a young age, and touching on them is significant. 

Some include anxious attachment, anxious avoidant, anxious preoccupied, fearful avoidant, and so much more. Usually, these can be left unnoticed or untreated because they are unaware they have it. 

Teens and kids have these because of the way their parents raised them; it’s usually from a reaction to a form of abandonment that took root in early childhood when a child experienced coldness, lack of emotional vulnerability, or rejection from a parent. When this happens, the brain reacts with pain given any form of closeness. This is due to the “amygdala.” Over time, the person or student blocks their own need for closeness, which creates emotional distance even when there’s no reason. 

This trauma, this pattern of protection from hurt closeness is flagged as danger or refusal before any full connection is formed. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is what blocks this need for any relationship and suppresses the impulses to be close with someone or begin a relationship. “I think that it’s horrible when parents give their kids trauma because it impacts them for the rest of their lives and all that they do and some kids turn to drugs or alcohol to feel better,” said Senior Chloe Konieczko.

Eventually, these can all turn into what people use as “independence,” but it’s all because their brain preemptively stops the need for the behavior and hidden vulnerabilities, and sometimes the teen or even adult doesn’t know they have it. These all can be represented as self sufficiency creating a fear of abandonment, constant need for reassurance and overthinking, avoiding emotional closeness, and much more. 

With these, because of the trauma and neglect they endorse throughout childhood, they begin to feel numb and develop a lack of empathy. While self control and suppression run in overdrive, you may long for closeness but your mind and your emotions tell you otherwise to prevent potential danger.  So you don’t seem weak, like a fool, or so you simply protect your feelings but that’s not ever going to fulfill your heart’s desire to love or be loved. It can be covered up as a rationality or “control” of the situation but it always traces back to a traumatic childhood experience and it can help you better understand yourself or your partner’s struggles and hidden vulnerabilities.

“Trauma can cause a child to lash out which can lead to many different paths or a string of events within their life while the child is growing and figuring out their ways even though sometimes they don’t realize they ruin the course of their child’s life,” said Senior Jayden Bellis-Domingue. There are cases if you both have trauma it can help establish a sense of better understanding for each other. 

Parents who enact emotional neglect to their children and raised by it grow up with emotions they don’t fully comprehend on the outside. They may seem calm and hide behind a smile, but, deep down, it comes from the trauma their parents either intentionally or accidentally give them when their emotions were dismissed or neglected. 

Emotional neglect doesn’t have to be simply not providing the amount of love needed not by a lack of being spoiled but it means the inner world was invisible emotional neglect leads to emotional needs being clouded and shut down so they don’t feel like “too much,” which creates an intense amount of unneeded pressure.

Teens or even adults in reaction to childhood neglect or trauma will shut down emotional signals which is where the term “I’m fine” comes in even when they are not. 

“I’m fine” is a cry for help without seeming like too much it’s to protect themselves without becoming too emotionally open or attached, traced back from distant parents where they made their children feel like their feelings didn’t matter. 

Oftentimes when you are asked for your feelings instead of fully understanding you need time to reflect because you don’t truly know your feelings in the moment. The main thing is to know you’re not alone and many people experience family neglect or trauma of many sorts that affect their relationships to this day.