Nobody warns you that surviving childhood is only the first part of the job. The second part, the much longer, much quieter part, is discovering everything that childhood quietly wired into you, usually years later, usually at the worst possible moment, usually aimed at the people you love most.

I didn’t grow up in a house that only hit me. I grew up in a house that also left me first my mother, Mary, who handed me off at five years old with a promise about a doll she never kept, and later a string of substitute mothers who each had their own rules for love, none of them steady. Physical abuse leaves marks you can point to. Emotional neglect leaves something harder to name: a low, constant hum of “I am not safe to fully be myself here,” running underneath everything, for years, until you can’t remember a time before it.

I didn’t understand, until I was a grown woman with two sons of my own, just how much of that hum was still running.

It shows up as control. When my husband Ryan’s job had him traveling all over Alaska for work, I told myself I was worried about his safety. What I was actually doing, though I couldn’t see it at the time, was trying to control something- anything- because so much of my childhood had been decided for me, without warning, by people who left or lied. I would be thrilled when he called from the airport to say he was heading home, and then the second he walked through the door, I’d start yelling at him for being gone so much. I saw myself turning into my own mother, trying to control someone I loved out of fear, and I hated it. I know now that this was PTSD rearing its head. At the time, all I knew was how to yell.

It shows up as needing to earn your worth. I was raised to believe that if you didn’t have a career, you didn’t amount to much. So when I found myself home with two small boys, scrubbing toilets and refereeing tantrums, some part of me kept score against an invisible measuring stick nobody else could see. When friends gathered and talked about Ryan’s work trips, and nobody asked about how I’d spent my week, I felt a jealousy I didn’t have words for yet. It wasn’t really about the conversation. It was about a much older question: does anything I do actually matter that had never been answered for me as a child.

It shows up as an inability to let people comfort you. When my father died suddenly, I built a wall so fast and so completely that I didn’t even feel myself doing it. I wouldn’t let Ryan hold me. I wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to see me hurting. Two years later, a counselor had to ask me a simple question: how long has it actually been? Before I realized I’d never actually grieved at all. I had simply gotten extremely good, since childhood, at looking fine on the outside no matter what was happening underneath.

It shows up in the very children you swore you’d never hurt. Despite everything I knew about what had been done to me, I still had moments where my temper broke through in ways that terrified me — moments I am not proud of, moments that came from a well of old, unresolved pain I hadn’t finished processing. Emotional neglect doesn’t just shape how you feel. Left unexamined, it can shape how you parent, whether you mean it to or not.

Here is what I want you to take from all of this, if any part of it sounds familiar: none of these patterns mean something is wrong with you as a person. They mean something happened to you, a long time ago, that never got properly tended to. A child who wasn’t given consistent love learns to survive without it, and the strategies that helped you survive at seven or eight or ten don’t just switch off once you turn eighteen. They ride along into your marriage, your parenting, your friendships, your quiet moments alone, until you finally stop and ask where they came from.

For me, it took counseling more than once, at more than one point in my life, and a husband patient enough to keep showing up even when I didn’t yet know how to let him in. It took getting honest with my parents about the damage, even when they couldn’t fully hear it. It took years of noticing the pattern before I could finally start choosing something different.

If you grew up with a parent who was physically present but emotionally absent, or who left altogether, I want you to know that the effects you’re noticing now the control, the anger, the wall you didn’t know you’d built aren’t character flaws. They’re old survival skills, still running long after the danger has passed. Naming them is the first step toward finally putting them down. If you are on your own path toward healing from past trauma, remember that your story is uniquely yours and it is worth telling.