"That's how I was raised."
I hear this sentence in my office almost every week. It usually arrives with a shrug and as a clear indicator that there is no more to explore in whichever direction we were going in (usually the past and it’s connection to the present). There is a clear subtext I often detect that everything hard gets handled alone, in silence, behind a closed door.
And here’s the thing: the sentence is usually true. It “is” how you were raised.
But sometimes I offer a small edit, and I watch it land like an anchor in deep water: another way of saying “that’s how I was raised” is “that’s how I was neglected.”
I’m not here to rewrite the past, just tell a different story about it together. A story that is likely more honest and leaves an opening for more understanding, compassion and clarity.
"But my childhood was fine"
Almost everyone resists this word at first, and the defense is nearly always the same: “I was always fed. I always had a place to live. Nobody hit me.”
All of that can be true, and the word can still fit because emotional neglect isn’t about what happened to you. It’s about what “didn’t” happen. Nobody asked what you were feeling. Nobody sat with you when you were upset — distress was met with a solution or with silence, “fix it or ignore it.” Nobody showed you what repair looks like after a rupture, so conflict just… ended, unresolved, and everyone moved on as if nothing had occurred.
We know from decades of research on institutionalized infants that food and shelter are not enough. Babies who were fed and housed but not held and soothed failed to thrive. Touch, attunement, and comfort aren’t luxuries layered on top of “real” needs. They are real needs. A childhood can be materially complete and emotionally empty at the same time, and the child who lives it will usually grow up calling it “fine,” because fine is all they ever saw.
Gaps, fog, and forgiveness
Evidence of emotional neglect shows up in many fingerprints. Let’s look at a few that may be present in your experience. The first is memory and fogginess around the past. Think back to your childhood and you get bits and pieces — a house, a car, a couple of scenes — with vast stretches of nothing in between. Not the locked-vault blankness of trauma, just absence or haziness. Memories consolidate around emotion; when little was emotionally attended to, less got filed.
The second one shows up in relationships: explaining instead of apologizing. If every childhood mistake opened a case that required a defense — where you learned to produce reasons, context, mitigating circumstances — then explanation became your armor, and it still deploys automatically, decades later, the moment someone you love says “that hurt me.”
An explanation and an apology are not the same thing. An explanation protects “you”. An apology requires vulnerability, which means standing in the impact of what happened without the shield of why. If vulnerability was never safe, and never modeled, of course apology feels impossible. You’re not withholding it. You genuinely never learned it.
Why changing the story matters
Here’s what I’ve seen naming it do, and why I push on this word gently but persistently: you cannot grieve “fine.”
As long as the story is “that’s just how I was raised, and I turned out okay,” there is nothing to feel and nothing to change — just a personality, fixed and final. But “I didn’t get something I needed” is grievable. And grief, unlike self-blame, is productive. It softens the question from *what’s wrong with me?* to *what was missing — and can I get it now?* The answer to that second question, in my experience, is almost always yes.
One important thing this reframe is not: an indictment of your parents. Most emotionally neglectful parents were themselves raised in emotional deserts and handed down the only map they had. You can hold compassion for them and accuracy about your childhood at the same time. Naming neglect isn’t prosecution. It’s charting your own map.
Three places to start
1. Catch the shrug. Once a week, notice when “that’s just how I am” or “that’s how I was raised” leaves your mouth. Don’t fight it — just add, silently, “…and it cost me something.” That’s the whole practice.
2. Practice one unarmored apology. Next rupture, try leading with impact instead of explanation: “I can see that hurt you, and I’m sorry” — full stop, no “because,” no case for the defense. Notice what your body does. That discomfort is the skill being built.
3. Let someone teach you what you missed. Whether that’s a partner, a therapist, or a friend who’s good at feelings — the capacities that didn’t develop in childhood develop the same way now: in relationship, through repetition, with someone safe.
You were raised to explain. You get to learn to apologize. For many reasons, there wasn’t enough accountability in your family to be able to honestly claim the neglect that happened. Now is your chance to change the pattern of lack of accountability in the present. Those are different skills and it will take time to learn them but remember, it was never your fault they were missing to begin with.
Dr. Thomas Wood, LCSW, CST, CST-S is a relationship and sex therapist in Philadelphia.
