How to Know You’re Struggling with a Parent Wound
By Laura K. Connell.
Childhood unmet needs often lead to self-sabotage, including codependency, in adulthood and even physical illness. That’s because the coping mechanisms we used as children to survive abuse and neglect work against us later.
Sometimes these habits are passed down because you’re emulating a family member who abandoned themselves to enable another’s toxic behavior. Other times it’s because you’ve been pushed into a role of caretaking and overgiving at a young age.
Whatever the reasons, there are telltale signs that you are struggling with a parent wound. That is, your caregivers were unable or unwilling to meet your needs for safety, security, and love.
5 signs a parent wound is impacting your adult life
- Self-Abandonment
As children, we crave a connection with our caregivers. That bond is so essential, we’ll choose it over ourselves.
For example, if you got the message that your parents were happy with you when you asked for nothing, you would suppress your needs and wants.
If you were punished for expressing certain emotions or left alone to figure them out on your own, you’d suppress those, too.
This leads you to disconnect from your authentic self. If you don’t explore what you want and need and how you feel, you will not develop a healthy sense of self.
- Codependency
Codependency is often generational and shows up as over giving in relationships and looking to something outside you to make you feel better about yourself.
You might find it hard to be yourself (or even know who that is). You get involved in excessive caretaking which can become enabling for the other person.
In relationships, you allow people to treat you in ways that aren’t acceptable, but you feel you don’t deserve better. Without an experience of receiving more from your caregivers, you have trouble asking for it as an adult.
- Fear of Abandonment
If your parents were unable to meet your needs, that is a form of abandonment which feels very dangerous to a child.
As a result of this formative experience, you develop a fear of abandonment, a parent wound that has a huge impact on your future relationships.
It can make you clingy and needy but can also make you avoid commitment for fear of getting hurt again.
It can make you please and prioritize the other person’s needs in a codependent way for fear of losing them. But this prevents the authentic emotional intimacy required for a successful relationship.
- Pain & Disease
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study in 1995 proved the link between poor physical outcomes and childhood abuse and neglect. It showed definitively that a parent wound developed in childhood can shorten your life and make you sick.
For instance, chronic pain that has no explanation or diagnosis is sometimes a result of repressed anger from narcissistic abuse.
Childhood trauma can also lead to autoimmune disease. This is possibly due to the heightened stress that impacts your immune system and makes it function far less optimally.
- Poor Self-Care (including basic needs)
You may have never been taught about the importance of self-care because you were never taught to think of yourself. As a result, self-care feels selfish as an adult.
Add to that, the fact that your sense of self is diminished, and you’re disconnected from your needs and wants. How will you know what feels good so you can administer care to yourself?
Self-care becomes confusing and confounding rather than soothing. Your self-worth may be so low that you don’t tend to basic needs such as hygiene and nutrition.
2 ways to overcome a parent wound
Inner child healing and self-compassion will help you overcome the multi-faceted impact of a parent wound on adult outcomes.
Instead of scolding your inner child for self-sabotage, understand it is trying to protect you from harm the only way it knows how. As a child, for example, self-abandoning was a survival skill that kept you safe from parent’s rejection or abandonment.
You can even thank your inner child for taking care of you the best way it knew how. And develop the adult skills that were never taught to you to do better as you practice them.
Instead of pushing away your emotions and shaming yourself for the way you feel, take an accepting nonjudgmental stance toward feelings. Allow yourself to process them instead of suppressing them. Take on board any information they have to share with you.
One way to process repressed anger that has been linked to chronic pain is to journal your rage. Set a time for 10-20 minutes and get out on paper how angry you feel about what happened to you. This will give you a safe outlet for the feelings instead of keeping them trapped inside where they can turn against you.
For help healing the inner child and learning the art of self-compassion, consider working with Laura. Get all the details including testimonials on transformed lives here: https://www.laurakconnell.com/coaching
