Child Neglect Trauma Makes You Vulnerable to Procrastination
Child Neglect Trauma happens when your parents teach you to live emotion-free. There are many different ways that parents can emotionally neglect their children, but most times no one realizes it’s happening. Your parents may have been emotionally neglected by their own parents and may have unknowingly passed the pattern onto you. (To determine whether you might be living with the effects of Child Neglect Trauma, you can take my free Child Neglect Self Test.)
Below are three different kinds of Child Neglect Trauma that make children more vulnerable to procrastination, oftentimes continuing into adulthood.
- A lack of emotional responsiveness. When parents aren’t there to teach you the value of emotions—to acknowledge, validate, and compassionately respond to how you feel—you learn that your feelings are unimportant. You avoid your feelings, especially bad ones, at all costs.
- A lack of structure and discipline. The lack of consequences and responsibilities may be experienced as a good thing by a child. But, if you don’t learn structure in your childhood home, it may be a struggle to follow structure, like deadlines and rules, as an adult.
- A lack of encouragement, rewards, or praise for your strengths. You never felt proud when you accomplished tasks because it wasn’t positively acknowledged by your parents. This sets you up to be unmotivated and disinterested, feeling unfulfilled even when you accomplish something great.
