When Everything Looked Perfect on Paper (But You Still Struggle)

You had a happy childhood. Your parents were there. They are still together. They are kind and helpful. You had pets, playdates and birthday parties. They supported you, came to school events, maybe even told you they loved you.

So why do you feel like something's wrong with you? Why do you constantly feel so much? Why do you get sick so often, have unexplained fatigue, allergies, autoimmune symptoms?

Maybe you’ve heard that illness can come from trauma, but you think: "I wasn’t traumatized. I had a happy childhood." And "officially" you did.

But here’s the thing that no one told you: emotional neglect is trauma. And it’s invisible unless you know how to see it.

You can have parents who were physically present, kind, supportive, and still experience emotional neglect. Because emotional attunement isn’t about presence alone. It’s about feeling felt. Having your emotions mirrored, named, welcomed. Not fixed, not silenced, not dismissed.

If your parents lived as if emotions weren't real or important, if they avoided sadness, denied anger, or froze in the face of your tears - that’s neglect. Not because they were cruel, but because they simply didn’t know better. And because your system needed it, and didn’t get it, the wound formed.

And yes, it’s trauma. It stays in the body. It shows up in your adult life as anxiety, confusion, numbness, chronic health issues, and that constant inner voice asking: "What’s wrong with me?"

There are two layers to this:

• The past: the unprocessed emotions that got stuck.

  All the times you swallowed your tears. All the times you told yourself, “It’s not a big deal.” Those moments mattered. They left imprints. And healing often means revisiting them with compassion and presence, finally letting those tears fall, finally saying: “That hurt.”

• The present: how you treat your emotions now.

  If you grew up emotionally neglected, chances are you still do it to yourself. You might catch yourself saying: “Why am I like this?”, “Just get on with it.”, “It’s not that bad.” But that’s not healing. That’s repeating the pattern. To heal, you have to become the emotionally attuned presence you never had. To say to yourself: “It’s okay to feel this. I’m here with you. You’re safe.”

And if you've never completed a full emotional cycle, if you’ve never been allowed to go into an emotion and come out the other side, it makes sense that you’re scared of feeling. You learned that emotions are overwhelming. That if you let them in, they’ll never leave. But emotions do move. They just need space, presence, and permission. Then the body heals. Your the heart opens. This is how you reclaim your full capacity to feel and to live.