Neglect: How It Influences The Quality Of Our Relationships
When you search “neglect” on Google, you get a good basic understanding of what it means. Neglect is considered a form of abuse. If a parent chooses to not care for a child properly, it has long term effects. When that child grows up, he or she will be considered an adult. This in turn will influence how that person cares for another person. Relationships will be impacted.
Every person wants to be cared for, but sometimes the parent has his or her own issues or the environment is unstable. There could have been other factors at play influencing the lack of care. The child growing up that has been neglected will experience emotional issues like attachment issues, feelings of isolation, anxiety, and depression. The GoodTherapy website recognizes the emotional effects described above.
Childwelfare.gov acknowledges the physical development of the child’s brain being influenced by neglect and then subsequent issues resulting from lack of proper care. In a Google search of “what percentage of kids are neglected 2020,” it shows that there were 4.1 million reports of child maltreatment in the United States involving more than 7.5 million children. This is an extremely high number. Living in a country where everyone has the right to express themselves and be free, we should not have to still be fighting this issue.
The above statistics show proof that a cycle is strong and that something that shouldn’t exist is still existing. If parents of children were mistreated and don’t know the difference between care and neglect, they may automatically do what their previous parents did because there is no other experience to compare their lives to. They may also justify their neglecting actions.
If you recognize that you experienced neglect and that it is influencing how you relate to people, going to see a therapist, counselor or coach to get down to the bottom of all of the many issues that you experienced in your life is one way to stop this cycle of neglect. Establishing self-care practices and scheduling in time for yourself is also good to reinforce the need to feel good about yourself since it was not reinforced when you were younger. Using mindfulness practices like visualization techniques, yoga and meditation can allow you to face your emotions and help aid you to be peaceful in the present moment.
We can’t erase the past. If thoughts come up like “I wish it didn’t happen” or “I’ll never get past this” in relation to the past, it creates a wall between us and the future. Once there is a wall in place, we can’t get past it.
Acceptance for what has happened without judgement helps us to move away from feeling ashamed or worthless. A lot of times when something happened to us as a child, we had no control over it. Someone else was in charge of us and that person did not do their job so we were affected.
In our relationships with others, we can always recognize our ability to change by becoming aware, gaining the information to empower us and then practicing by taking actions to establish a good habit in our lives. If we want to put our relationship first, we schedule time with our partner, practice communicating to our partner more, value our partner’s needs and take action to help our partner know that we find meaning in being with our partner.
