A child who never bothered anyone can grow into an adult nobody really knows.
Many capable, high-functioning people quietly ask the same questions. “Shouldn’t I be happier?” “Why haven’t I accomplished more?” “Why doesn’t my life feel more meaningful?” When they look back for a cause, they find nothing. Nobody hit them. Their parents fed them, housed them and probably loved them. So they conclude that the problem must be them.
Jonice Webb’s answer is that they are looking for the wrong kind of cause. What shaped them was childhood emotional neglect: not what happened to you, but what didn’t happen. It is the white space in the family picture, the background rather than the foreground, and that is why it is so hard to see.
A house without heat
Picture growing up in a house where the heating was never turned on. Nobody was cruel. You didn’t know houses were supposed to be warm, because you had never been warm. As an adult you feel cold all the time and can’t work out why, since there are no broken pipes and no visible damage. The damage is the absence itself.
The cold sets in through ordinary parents. They don’t need to be abusive, only absent, overwhelmed, depressed or too busy. A workaholic parent conveys that feelings and needs matter less than work, and because the child sees himself as privileged rather than deprived, he blames himself for his inner struggles. No one thinks about a child losing a parent to success. Depressed parents seem beleaguered by ordinary demands, so their children learn to make themselves invisible. In each case the child learns that her feelings are a burden and cuts them off. That works, in the sense that she stops being “too much.” The cost arrives later: The natural human experience of simply having feelings becomes a source of secret shame. “What is wrong with me?” is a question they often ask.
The book’s title comes from the conclusion Webb draws. The fuel of life is feeling. If we’re not filled up in childhood, we must fill ourselves as adults. Otherwise, we will find ourselves running on empty.
What the cold house produces
The adult raised in that house doesn’t feel sad so much as empty, and emptiness is actually a feeling in and of itself, intense enough to drive people to extremes to escape it. Webb describes the restless person who discards jobs, apartments, cars and people when they fail to deliver. He isn’t broken. He grew up in an emotional vacuum and keeps trying to fill it with stimulation.
The same absence explains a stranger symptom. It is hard to feel loved by people who don’t really know you, and nobody really knows you because you have been hiding yourself since childhood. You know people love you. You don’t feel it. Underneath sits what Webb calls the Fatal Flaw, a buried belief rather than a real defect: “If people get to know me, they won’t like me.”
Two habits keep the belief safe. One is counter-dependence, the drive to need no one, to avoid asking for help even at great personal expense. It is the mirror image of neediness, and it grows from the same lesson that needs are unwelcome. The other is alexithymia, a deficiency in knowing what you feel at all. Alexithymic people are often irritable for no visible reason, because emotions that are not acknowledged or expressed tend to jumble together and emerge as anger.
How far it can go
Webb describes one woman in whom the pattern went all the way down. There was no adult present to put her mistakes into context, help her understand how they happened, or show her compassion, so she never learned to do those things for herself. A harsh internal parent took over instead, telling her she had better do everything exactly right, and she became paralyzed by disappointment and anger at herself. The only way she could soothe herself was to imagine being dead. She didn’t want to die. Deadness was simply the only state she could imagine that didn’t hurt. She kept that possibility as a safety net from age 13 into adulthood without telling a single soul, and the person everyone knew and loved was not the real person.
The obvious objection is that this is less serious than abuse, since nothing actively bad happened. The opposite is closer to the truth: the absence of something is harder to see, harder to grieve, and harder to heal than the presence of something bad. You can point to abuse and say “that was wrong.” You can’t point to nothing and explain why it hurts.
The way out starts with recognizing that the emptiness is an absence that was never filled rather than a character flaw, and that it can still be filled. Webb says adults must do the filling themselves. Part of that work, though, is letting someone know you, which means asking for something. For a person whose whole personality was built around never needing anything, that may be the hardest step of all.
References:
- Jonice Webb, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect