“The greatest wound a child can receive is the rejection of his authentic self. When a parent cannot affirm his child’s feelings, needs, and desires, he rejects that child’s authentic self.

Viorst goes on to say, “Severe separations in early life leave emotional scars on the brain because they assault the essential human connection: The mother-child bond which teaches us that we are lovable. The mother-child bond that teaches us how to love. We cannot be whole human beings—indeed, we may find it hard to be human—without the sustenance

What’s missing for this child, however, is the experience of being contained and protected by a loving, but larger, force. This larger force was either absent (neither parent could contain the child), or the larger force was not loving (the parent attacked or disconnected from him), or the larger force betrayed him (the child’s love was used to man

She develops an attitude of anxious expectation regarding her needs and the world. Emotional deprivation can have the same effect. If the child is very heart-centered and needs to feel loved in each moment, but her parents withdraw their heart connection whenever they are displeased or just busy with something else, the child feels emotionally aban

Clinical studies of such children reveal that a preponderance of them have parents who have related to them in either a helpless and fearful way or a hostile and self-referential one. The children of helpless and fearful parents, in particular, have a very difficult time later in life. Their parents tend to be sweet and fragile, not hostile or aggr

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev

At the heart of many mental traumas is an early experience of abandonment. Someone, when we badly needed them, was not present and their neglect has thrown us off balance ever since. We may find it hard to depend on others in adult life and lack faith that someone won’t run away, or take advantage of us, in turn.

When childhood needs are not taken care of because of abuse or abandonment, we spend our lives viewing the world through the distorted perception of a needy infant or