Emotionally Unavailable Parents: The Childhood Trauma You Can’t Find

Certain conditions apply

SERIES: The Life Edit

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Emotionally unavailable parenting is a childhood trauma you don’t realize is trauma until you start having relationships, and the problems that come with them.

So where does it come from? When did it begin? What does it look like? What was your trauma?

If you have problems in your relationships, or a lack of them, but you grew up in a happy, healthy, loving household, somewhere in there, through all that fun and family time, there were also emotionally unavailable people raising you. Don’t think you had to come from an abusive household, a single-parent household or a tough upbringing for this to apply to you.

And it goes without saying that the opposite is also true. You can be raised in a loving, healthy environment or in a poor, unhealthy one, and still be raised to fully understand how to give and receive love and how to be emotionally balanced. This is not a conversation about your environment. It’s a conversation about the lack of communication in whichever environment you grew up in.

When you are a child, everything you do is unconditional, until you are taught that it’s conditional. You know the small fine print on advertisements, certain conditions apply? That fine print applied to the way you were raised, nurtured, loved and provided for.

Oftentimes as an adult you won’t know you need therapy until something else triggers it, and that something else is usually a problem in your adult relationships. When you’re trying to save a marriage or a relationship, or trying to figure out what’s wrong with you, you tend to look for help. You find a therapist, or you start looking within, or maybe you end up on some life-changing retreat. But not every solution is guaranteed to solve your problems or lead you to the root of them. Sometimes the answer we’re looking for, the root of our problems and our delays in life, is staring us point blank in the face, and we choose to stay in denial and not see it for what it is. Or worse, we look for alternatives. That alone should tell you something.

Where it begins

When we are young children, we know nothing about anything. Watch children all day, at home, at the park, at school, in a group, and look at what they’re able to do naturally. But the adults responsible for that child have their own ways of parenting, and every parent’s way is different. Your parents are the first people to introduce you to conditioning, love and nurturing.

So it’s no surprise when you become an adult yourself, maybe the same age your parent was when they started raising you, and you find yourself in therapy asking why you are the way you are. Most people end up seeking advice about relationships. They go to couples therapy. They seek out astrologers and tarot card readers and want to know when they’ll find their true love. How ironic. People searching for answers everywhere else except within themselves.

I’m going to ask you something you need to ask yourself first. Before you love anyone else, how much do you actually love yourself? Can you honestly look in the mirror and say, wow, I love myself so much. Look at me. I am amazing? Can you truly say that about yourself?

If the answer is no, then who are you trying to find? Who is supposed to fix that for you? Someone else?

So when adults want to know what’s wrong with them, what they’re really asking is: why don’t I feel loved? Why can’t I find love? What’s wrong with me?

This is your trauma.

What therapy eventually uncovers

When you see a therapist, you’re the one talking about yourself, and you’re choosing what you tell them. All they’re doing is asking you questions. At some point, those questions will lead back to your childhood.

And if you can’t find your answers in your childhood trauma, there’s a good chance you were raised with emotional conditions by an emotionally unavailable parent. An emotionally unavailable parent is childhood trauma. You just can’t find it, because you associate trauma with a stand-alone event or one bad experience. The reason you can’t link your emotional wounds to that parent is that you were conditioned to believe it was nurturing and loving. That was their version of providing for you.

So when you become an adult and find yourself in your own relationships, or a lack of them, you only know what you were raised with. As an adult you’re allowed to change your perspective, to evolve past what you know, to do what you think is right for yourself. But something inside you stays in the way you were nurtured, loved and supported, and that’s what you go looking for in others, until one day it doesn’t feel right.

Somehow you’re in a relationship you think is good enough for you, but you don’t feel loved, even though there’s an exchange of “I love yous.” You don’t feel seen, even though you spend so much time together. Why is that?

Something feels off inside you. You want more, or you’re just not feeling it. This is the adult version of you not finding the right parallels to understand why your relationship feels empty. It’s because vulnerability was left out by your emotionally unavailable parent. In other words, you only knew love the way you were raised with it, and once you become your own person and try to receive love from a romantic partner, you can’t figure out why it isn’t working.

This feeling right there is your internal emotional wound signaling to you: this looks like love, but it doesn’t feel like love. This is your internal emotions letting you know you weren’t loved the way you should have been. Maybe you were loved in a rushed way, where every problem was fixed by avoiding it and not talking about it.

As children, we never understand the perspective or mindset our parents had when they raised us. All the while you thought you were being raised with nurturing love, perhaps you had a parent who was sleeping around with someone else, and this caused the nurturing parent to keep themselves distracted by being involved in your life. Or maybe you had a parent who was still chasing attention from their partner, so they never really had time to check on you because they were constantly in their own thoughts. Maybe you had a parent who treated you more as a performative piece, because they were the single parent who had to look like they had it all together after their husband left.

As children, we don’t know this. We don’t understand this. We can’t see this. But as a parent, who are you talking to about your own emotions when you’re busy raising a child, or children?

What emotionally unavailable parenting looks like

Emotionally unavailable parenting is exactly what it sounds like. A parent who gives you everything but the emotions. The validation. The self-worth. The confidence. They don’t give you the inner love; they give you the outer world. Look, I feed you. Look, I bought you clothes. Look, I’m bringing you to dance class. Everything looks good on the outside, but on the inside we’re confused, unhappy, angry, and we don’t know why. And you keep telling yourself, I should be grateful. I have someone who loves me.

So why can’t you find this trauma?

What is trauma, really?

First, let’s break down what trauma is, because emotionally unavailable parenting isn’t something you can see. It’s something you feel, or feel the lack of. For most people, that’s exactly why they can’t find it.

When you hear the word trauma, you think of death, an accident, abuse, one horrible moment. Something physical. Something external.

Being raised by an emotionally unavailable parent can be very damaging to your mental health, because you have to undo the ways you were taught and conditioned to be loved by that parent, and then as an adult you have to undo them again in your relationships. Having many failed relationships is the exact same as having one long relationship that doesn’t emotionally fulfill you.

Why you can’t find it

You were immersed in an environment that made it feel normal. For most people it goes undetected, because they believe they grew up in a cohesive home. The truth is, under every single family roof, everyone is being raised differently by parents who believe their version of parenting is good, because that’s how they were raised, or because it’s how they weren’t raised.

Some parents raise their children to give them the life they themselves never had. That doesn’t mean they’re doing it right. You’re raising your children the way you realize you weren’t raised, but you’re not healing your own childhood trauma. You’ve just found an outlet for it, and you’re likely creating another dynamic for that child and for yourself in the future.

There’s no rule book for parenting. There’s no right or wrong. There’s no school for it. Damn it, all those years we went to school for ergonomics, math, science and geography, and not one class taught us about parenting or love. That comes from the self. And there is a fine line between what you know and what you think you know.

This may be a hard thing to hear, but overparenting is the same as underparenting. Isn’t that interesting? A parent who was hard to talk to, hard to spend time with, who was there but always busy, is the exact same as the complete opposite: the parent who is always calling you, always needing to know where you are and who you’re with. A parent who constantly needs reassurance is the same as a parent who never looks for it. Both children learn from a young age that they’re being conditioned to parent their parent.

Come again?

For many adults, the emotionally unavailable parent looks like:

• The parent who’s always baking you cakes and cookies to cheer you up when you’re sad, because what you went through wasn’t serious enough for you to actually be sad and crying about.
• The parent who comes home and needs a beer and a cigarette after dinner.
• Parents who have expectations of you. Parents who expect you to run their business without ever asking what you want or knowing what your interests are.
• Watching your mother cook and clean every day and present food and laundry to her adult husband, and thinking that’s okay.
• Your parent having a bad day at work, and because you’re a child, what would you know about real-life problems?
• Listening to your parents constantly complain, but never do anything about it.
• Listening to them daydream about a different life, and never do anything about it.

So how does a child absorb all of this? Think back to when you were young. You were being raised by adults who were older than you, and as far as you knew, these people knew more than you. But if you watched your mother or father come home in a bad mood, how quickly did you adjust your behaviour because you read the room? When you walked in on your parents arguing, how quickly did you feel the tension, absorb it, and ask no questions, while the conversation changed as if nothing had been said, and nothing was ever explained to you, even though you saw something was off?

How many times did you hear your mother say, “What would they think? What would they say?” only to catch yourself saying the same thing without knowing why? How many times did you know your father was upset, so you stayed silent so you wouldn’t make it worse? How many times was your mother upset, and you went to comfort her or say things to cheer her up?

If you were a child who saw all of this, you were no longer a child. But your parents kept treating you like one, and this is the turning point in the family dynamic that so many people missed.

Parents never really know at what age children start to understand and see these things. I believe the answer is 7. I saw it for myself before I ever read about it, watching my niece and nephew: how much they retain, what they’re able to talk about, what they understand on their own, and how I started adjusting my words to meet them. Only later did I learn that 7 is recognized as a turning point in both developmental and spiritual traditions. Life moves in cycles of seven, but that’s a conversation for another day. After 7, parents need to start bringing their children into conversations, meaning and explanations. But again, there’s no book that teaches emotional parenting.

The list goes on and on, and this is why emotional trauma is so hard to find. If you were the child who was aware of all those emotions and adjusted your behaviour, guess what? That was the moment you unknowingly started developing emotional intelligence, because this was you learning how to manage your parents’ emotions before your own.

Remember, your parent had every opportunity, just like you did, to change and adjust their behaviour. The difference is your parent didn’t. If you’re wondering why you always heard your mother complain about the same things without ever asking anything about you, it’s because she was never emotionally fulfilled either.

As children, we see our parents as whole and trustworthy, and unfortunately it’s not until we reach their age that we realize: no. Even as adults, we are always still growing and learning.

Silent trauma

You do realize you were likely raised by a generation of completely unaware parents, who were in turn raised by the same. If you’re Gen X or a millennial and you’re wondering why you don’t feel emotionally fulfilled in your relationships, it’s because you were raised by boomers or Gen X parents, who were raised by the Silent Generation, and you can follow that lineage back as far as you want. But the generation being raised now is being heard, seen, and asked about their feelings. Why? Because all of this matters now.

This is what I would call silent trauma. It’s the complete opposite of the one-time event, the death, the car accident. This was every single day, from childhood to your teenage years to adulthood.

How well do you really know your parents?

The thing about childhood is that we experience life through our own eyes. We play, we learn in school, we make friends. When it comes to our parents, we don’t usually question them. Most of us probably go through life without ever having a deep conversation with our parents, and then when it comes to our own relationships, we wonder why something feels missing. Have you ever had a deep and honest personal conversation with your parent?

I never liked my parents’ relationship. My parents were boomers, and like many boomers, the traditional thing to accept and say was: well, that’s just the way it is. That’s marriage. We all have problems. That’s men for you. Boomers were raised to understand that the excuses were the answers. Those were the norm. The generations that followed, Gen X and millennials, would have been far more likely to leave.

I knew what my parents’ problems were. I knew my mother was not happy and was not emotionally fulfilled, but I never asked her the kind of deep questions that would have made her think. And that was that generation’s problem: communicating your own thoughts was a crisis. I wish I had asked my mother, what are you afraid of if you leave? For a Gen X or millennial mom, divorce might have meant walking away with half the assets. For a boomer woman, it wasn’t about the assets. It was about her identity. So many people of those earlier generations lived a life that was chosen for them before they ever came into their own thoughts, wants and needs.

It was an answer I knew my mother wouldn’t even have the words for, but I could feel it. I could hear it. Whenever someone asked me when I was going to get married, my mother was the first to jump in and say, “No, libera.” Free, in Italian. At the time, I thought my mom was supporting my unconventional lifestyle. But how could she have known about a lifestyle I hadn’t even fully embraced yet? I wasn’t hearing my mother talk about my needs and wants. I was hearing her talk about hers. Her freedom.

In my 20s and 30s, I only understood that from my perspective, not hers. Why? Because we never talked deeply about our needs and wants. We never really got to talk about life.

How well do we really know our parents? We grow up hearing their stories but never ask them how they felt about any of it. I have a friend whose parents divorced, and I speak with her mother, who is from the same generation as mine. Her husband left her, yet she still wears her wedding ring. That raises a deep question, but we were raised not to talk about it, by the same generation that kept everything inside, and then we wonder where all the emotions went.

Being emotionally available is as simple as having a conversation and communicating with the other person. Not to the point of arguments and disagreements, but to find out their hidden meaning, their truth, their feelings, and all the emotions they’re capable of feeling.

Having conversations about yourself is the best form of personal development, self-realization and self-actualization. Why do you think that when you walk into a therapist’s office, you talk about you? Because we come from generations of people who never got to tell their own story based on their own thoughts. Most of them started their stories with my father wanted me to, or my parents wanted, or my mother would have never.

Being consumed by emotionally unavailable parents leaves you less time to focus on yourself and your own needs. That’s the irony of parenting: that’s exactly what we expect our parents to be doing for us. But for many of us, that’s not the case.

Why therapy works, but not always

Therapy is a great place to start, but it’s not the only place, and it won’t give you the answers. You’re wasting your time and your therapist’s time if you’re not showing up truthful and ready to understand that the people you so badly want to love, or keep in your life, are the very people you need to detach from and observe through a different lens. Including yourself.

A therapist will ask you many questions to expand your awareness. But even if you get to the root of the problem and find out where it comes from, the course of action depends on you, and that can come at a completely different time in your life.

A therapist may realize you’re attracted to narcissistic partners because your father was absent and your mother was emotionally unavailable. A therapist may realize you’re a people pleaser because you learned to become the parent when you were young, so in your adult years you’re drawn to people who need your help, instead of receiving love.

We can always find the root of the problem. But if you’re not at the point in your life where you’re ready to hear it and heal it, the pattern will keep looping in your relationships: between you and yourself, you and your partner, and you and your parent.

Can you heal from trauma?

The solutions are the hardest part of solving the problem. Remember when we were children and got our assignments? They came with a problem, and the homework was to find the solution based on everything we’d absorbed and learned. So there you were, a child, solving that problem happily. And when you did, what relief. You got to move on to the next chapter, to something more challenging, to learning something even higher.

But as adults, we get too attached to what we’re emotionally connected to. So we keep doing the same assignment. Either we give up and stop doing the work, or we get through it no matter what.

Because we’re emotionally attached to our personal connections, it’s harder to accept that letting go of this person is something we’re just not ready to do yet. We fear for our security and our safety. We stay hopeful that they’ll change. If that’s what’s making it hard to sever the relationship, look in the mirror and say that to yourself. Because now you know your problem, and you’re putting it on the other person to make a change you won’t even make yourself.

You can heal from trauma, or not. That isn’t up to your therapist. It’s up to you, all the information in front of you, and what you’re ready and willing to do with it. Your therapist may have found your problem, but resolving it has everything to do with the timing and alignment of your life.

Can you miss the mark? Yes. How will you know? Internally. That feeling will grow inside you. The guilt. The shame. Your self-worth will decrease even further.

And the opposite is also true. Being told the answer to your problem doesn’t mean you know what to do with it. You have the same chance of making it worse, by going back to fix the problem and salvage what you have to make it work. That right there is you going back to a repeated lesson. That is an emotional blockage.

My answer is this, and it’s something I learned from my own experience: being selfish is the most selfless act you can offer yourself, because what’s waiting for you on the other side is something you’ve been waiting for the entire time.