Building Emotional Safety: Reclaiming Your Voice After Growing Up with Emotionally Immature Parents
Growing up with emotionally immature parents often leaves adult children feeling unheard and uncertain about their own needs and boundaries.
Thus, reclaiming your voice is a crucial step toward building emotional safety and finding self-trust. It can be a challenging journey when you’ve been conditioned to prioritize others’ emotions over your own. Yet, you yearned to be heard, to be seen, to be validated.
“I think, therefore I am.” René Descartes.
You exist. Therefore, you have value. Your story has value, and your context is valuable to understanding your story. Your context is made up of data from your mind, body, and environment. When you consider how complex and varied the systems are in emotional experiences, you might begin to appreciate the value of an authentic emotional response.
While some systems advocate for you to stake your emotional claim, your past experiences serve as the most pertinent data and make calculations so that you survive>thrive. The brain, at all times, wants efficiency (Barret, 2021). So, there are neuronal processes in play that prune any obsolete and unused pathways. When an environment teaches you that swallowing/invalidating/neglecting your feelings keeps you safe from further emotional turmoil or abuse, your brain will prioritize those systems (Barret, 2021; Diamond & Alley, 2022). Now, it's beginning to make sense why, even when we yearn to be heard, seen, or believed, we may act against those goals.
I know it's a difficult idea to sit with often, the feeling of being disappointed by our parents. They do so much for us, yet also let us down? How do we sit in that? Well, we acknowledge that first and foremost, that's a really uncomfortable thought. How can I think this way about my parents?
The annoyingly familiar truth of it all is our parents were born and raised in a vastly different time than ours. Our parents grew up without Google and with fewer resources to learn for themselves in the ways we are privileged to do in Western society. They genuinely fought their way to be where they are today. While these pieces are true, and we can hold empathy and compassion for them, we can also challenge their way of thinking, their persistent way of thinking that has led us to be emotionally stunted and drained. Both can be true.
We can begin to balance the scales between showing up for our parents' beliefs and values and our own by adding in moments of self-validation, sparking emotional safety. By practicing self-validation, we reconnect with our inner voice, affirming our feelings as valid without needing external approval. This inner work lays the foundation for building emotional safety with others, empowering us to communicate openly and assertively. Through a compassionate process of reclaiming our voice, we can begin to heal from emotional neglect and embrace the authentic version of ourselves.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2021). Seven and a half lessons about the brain. Picador.
Diamond, L. M., & Alley, J. (2022). Rethinking minority stress: A social safety perspective on the health effects of stigma in sexually diverse and gender diverse populations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 138, 104720. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104720
