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[quote=Anonymous]I’m a 32 year old woman. I was raised by a single mom, with one of my older brothers.
My mom was almost completely emotionally neglectful or emotionally absent throughout my childhood years, teen years and throughout my earlier twenties when the effects were really damaging to my mental health and to my overall development.  Some of my other family members were also emotionally abusive or verbally abusive.  I was bullied at school as a child and I mostly felt isolated, alienated, misunderstood, attacked, and picked on throughout my childhood years.
Throughout my childhood and teen years, my mom hardly ever spoke to me.  She never really asked me about my thoughts, feelings, ideas or anything like that.  She may have asked me, every now and then during my childhood years, “How was your day?” but she never really tried to have an in-depth conversation about the most important ideas of life such as worldview, politics, her beliefs or her values and her expectations for my life and how she would support me in meeting those expectations, etc.  She never really talked to me about anything important and she rarely spoke to me at all.  She mostly ignored me and then she focused on watching T.V. or being in her own world.  She didn’t show much interest in my thoughts, feelings or experiences.  She treated me like I didn’t exist unless it was time to feed me or it was time to go to school or go to the dentist.
My mom never offered guidance or advice about anything related to applying for jobs, gaining work experience, importance of gaining work experience/importance of building a solid work ethic, enforcing personal boundaries with others, maintaining healthy friendships, establishing healthy romantic relationships with others, maintaining healthy romantic relationships with others, applying for apartments, moving out of the house, buying a car, career choices, developing positive coping skills to face life’s challenges, marriage, children, family life or anything else.  She never offered any guidance, advice or expectations about any of life’s transitional phases or important areas of development even throughout my childhood, teen and young adult years.  She never tried to teach me about positive coping skills or resilience.
She never discussed these things, at all, even during my teen years and during my twenties.
After I started exhibiting a lot of psychological problems and behavioral issues (like social isolation, failure to launch syndrome, getting into abusive situations that could’ve been avoided, low self-worth, etc.) and after realizing that my mom showed other problematic behaviors during my twenties (showing up to my dorm room without my permission several times, becoming overly involved and overprotective in my personal life, sabotaging my potential romantic interests, enabling me to stay at home with her while I was chronically unemployed and unmotivated to move forward in life, her yelling at me and blaming me for being raped when I told her an older man raped me while I attended college undergrad, etc.) I chose to study psychology and I’ve learned more about codependent parents, childhood emotional neglect, failure to launch syndrome (which I was a failure to launch person until I overcame that), how to have healthy relationships with others, etc.
I blame myself for the many bad decisions and self-sabotaging decisions that I made during my teens and earlier twenties.  I don’t believe in blaming my mom or others for the my failures as an adult.  I think I’m responsible for the problems in my life because I made foolish choices during my teens and twenties.  
But a lot of the low self-esteem, lack of personal boundaries, failure to launch syndrome, foolish choices, lack of self-control, addiction-based compulsive behaviors, lack of coping skills, and overall emotional immaturity can be blamed on my trauma from experiencing severe childhood emotional neglect and also trauma from my mom’s codependent, clingy, overprotective and intrusive/coercive control that I experienced during my earlier twenties.
I know that my mom was probably emotionally neglected herself.  She has never understood how to be an emotionally nurturing mother.  Her own emotional needs weren’t met as a child.  
But I still think it’s no excuse because she should’ve understood that she still needed to provide guidance, encouragement and emotional support to move out of the house, apply for jobs, find apartments, seek independence from her, etc.  She should have instinctively thought to do these things but maybe she just didn’t care enough to do them.
As an adult, I learned that my mom had my older brother at age 16 and then she had me at age 23.  She was raised by her maternal grandmother because my mom’s mother wasn’t able to raise my mom.  During my twenties, my mom told me about the family problems that happened long before I was born.
Sometimes, I also think my mom was neglectful because of her personality type.  It’s like she’s not interested in thinking deeply about ideas and she’s interested in being introspective or learning about much of anything that’s meaningful.  She’s not interested in talking about meaningful ideas, thoughts or feelings so she wasn’t interested in providing guidance or support about important things.
What I realized is that when my thoughts and feelings and my very being were largely ignored by the most important person in my life, that’s why I struggled with low-self esteem and difficulties with personal relationships with others throughout my childhood and into my twenties.
I’ve been to individual therapy sessions, online therapy groups and online social media sites such as Reddit, Lipstick Alley and others to gain the emotional support, validation, affirmation, advice, guidance and sense of belonging that I never received from my mom.  It took a while but I finally found some good coping skills to handle life’s challenges.
Now I’m living a great life.  I’m thankful I have a full-time job, wonderful hobbies, and a sense of my own self-worth.[/quote]

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