What Childhood Emotional Neglect Does to Your Ability to Trust a Partner
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Childhood emotional neglect. The chronic experience of having your emotional needs go unseen and unmet. Shapes the adult capacity for trust in intimate relationships in ways that are both pervasive and frequently invisible. It doesn’t announce itself. It simply operates as the quiet architecture beneath your relationships, creating patterns that can feel confusing, shameful, and impossible to change until you understand where they came from. This guide explains the clinical reality of emotional neglect, how it specifically affects trust in partnership, and what healing this particular wound actually looks like.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Partner Who Keeps Their Distance
- What Is Childhood Emotional Neglect?
- The Neurobiology of Emotional Neglect and Trust
- How Emotional Neglect Shapes Trust in Driven Women
- The Self-Sufficiency Defense and What It Costs You
- Both/And: Your Independence Is Real and Your Loneliness Is Real
- The Systemic Lens: Why Emotional Neglect Stays Hidden
- Learning to Trust: What Healing Emotional Neglect Actually Requires
- Frequently Asked Questions
Childhood emotional neglect (CEN) is the chronic experience of having one’s emotional needs go unseen and unmet by caregivers, not through overt abuse but through absence, emotional unavailability, or the minimizing of feeling. It shapes adult intimate relationships by producing a quiet architecture of self-sufficiency that makes trust, vulnerability, and receiving care feel dangerous or foreign. In my work with driven women, CEN is often the last thing to be named because it’s defined by what didn’t happen rather than what did.
In short: Childhood emotional neglect is defined not by what happened but by what didn’t, specifically the chronic absence of emotional attunement from caregivers, and it quietly undermines adult capacity for trust and intimacy.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
With more than 15,000 clinical hours supporting adults whose childhoods looked fine on the outside, I’ve learned to listen for the absence that CEN leaves rather than the presence of obvious harm. Jonice Webb, PhD, psychologist, defined and developed the clinical framework for childhood emotional neglect and its pervasive impact on adult emotional life and relationships (Webb 2012).
The Partner Who Keeps Their Distance
Rachel’s partner asks her what’s wrong, and she says nothing. He asks again, more gently, touching her shoulder. She softens slightly. Then catches herself, straightens, and says she’s just tired. He knows she isn’t just tired. She knows he knows. And still she can’t open the container, can’t hand him the actual weight of what she’s carrying, can’t make herself cross the two-foot distance between them that feels, in this moment, like something much wider.
She’s a venture partner at a growth-stage fund, thirty-six years old, known for her analytical precision and her calm in high-stakes situations. She is, by every external measure, thriving. And she has been in a relationship with a genuinely good man. Patient, consistent, emotionally available in ways she didn’t know how to value until recently. For three years. He has never given her a reason not to trust him. And she still can’t fully let him in.
In her own words: “It’s like there’s a glass wall. I can see through it. I can talk through it. I can even feel some warmth through it. But I can’t take it down. And I don’t understand why, because I know he’s safe. I’ve checked a hundred times. He’s safe. And I still can’t get through the wall.”
In my work with clients, the glass wall is one of the most common descriptions I hear from women with significant childhood emotional neglect in their histories. It’s not that they don’t want closeness. It’s that closeness doesn’t feel accessible. As if the circuitry for it never fully developed, or was deliberately shut down long ago as a survival measure, and never got turned back on. Understanding the architecture of that wall is the first step to being able to, gradually, take it apart.
What Is Childhood Emotional Neglect?
Childhood emotional neglect (CEN) is the chronic failure of a child’s caregivers to adequately notice, respond to, or validate the child’s emotional experience and needs. The term was developed and extensively described by Jonice Webb, PhD, psychologist and author of Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, who defines it as “a parent’s failure to respond enough to a child’s emotional needs.” Unlike abuse, which is characterized by what happens to a child, emotional neglect is defined by what doesn’t happen. The consistent absence of emotional attunement, validation, and co-regulation from early caregivers.
In plain terms: Childhood emotional neglect doesn’t require a dramatic childhood. It doesn’t require abuse, poverty, or visible dysfunction. It can happen in highly functional, loving families where emotions simply weren’t the currency. Where achievement was valued and feelings weren’t discussed, where you were well-fed and well-educated but rarely asked how you were feeling, and where expressing vulnerability was met with discomfort or dismissal rather than warmth. The impact isn’t obvious at the time. It shows up decades later, in a relationship with a perfectly safe person, as an inability to let them in.
Childhood emotional neglect is among the most underrecognized forms of early relational difficulty because it leaves no visible marks. There’s nothing dramatic to point to. Many women who grew up with emotional neglect describe childhoods that looked, from the outside, completely normal. Stable homes, involved parents, adequate material provision. What was absent was emotional mirroring: the experience of being seen in your inner life, of having your feelings reflected back to you with warmth and accuracy, of learning through repeated experience that your emotional experience was real, valid, and worth attending to.
What emotional neglect produces, over years of development, is a particular relationship to one’s own inner experience and to the inner experience of others. Children learn how to be in relationship through the quality of their earliest relationships. If those earliest relationships didn’t include emotional attunement, the child learns to manage emotionally alone. To become, in Jonice Webb’s framing, “emotionally self-sufficient” in a way that isn’t chosen but prescribed by circumstance. And that learned self-sufficiency becomes the template for every intimate relationship that follows.
The particularly painful irony of emotional neglect is that the children who experience it often don’t know they experienced it. They don’t have the referent for what was missing. You can only miss what you know is possible, and many women grew up without any experience of the emotional attunement they needed. So the absence was simply the texture of reality, not an identified loss. The loss gets named later, usually in the context of a relationship where someone is offering something they can’t quite receive.
The Neurobiology of Emotional Neglect and Trust
The impact of emotional neglect on the adult capacity for trust isn’t only psychological. It’s neurobiological. The capacity to trust, to feel safe in intimacy, to tolerate vulnerability with another person, is rooted in specific neural systems that are shaped by early relational experience. When those early experiences don’t provide adequate emotional attunement, those systems develop differently.
Affective attunement is the caregiver’s capacity to match and respond to the emotional state of the child. Not in a mimicking way, but through a corresponding response in a different modality that communicates “I feel what you’re feeling, and I’m here with you in it.” The concept was developed by Daniel Stern, MD, psychiatrist and developmental psychologist at the University of Geneva, in his research on mother-infant interaction and published in his foundational work The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985). Stern demonstrated that attunement, rather than simple imitation, is the mechanism by which infants learn that their inner experience can be shared. The developmental foundation of intimacy and trust.
In plain terms: Attunement is the early experience of having someone respond to how you feel in a way that communicates: “I see what’s happening inside you, and it matters.” It’s the foundation of intimacy because it establishes, neurologically, that inner experience can be shared. Without adequate early attunement, the adult often has a stunted ability to make her inner experience available to another person. Not because she’s closed off by choice, but because the neural architecture for doing so was never fully built.
Allan Schore, PhD, developmental neurobiologist and clinical psychologist, professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and author of The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, has spent decades documenting the neurobiological impact of early relational experience on brain development. His research demonstrates that the right hemisphere. Which processes emotional experience, attachment behavior, and self-regulation. Develops primarily in the first two years of life in direct response to the quality of the caregiver relationship. Inadequate early emotional attunement literally shapes the developing brain’s architecture for intimacy. (PMID: 11707891)
What this means practically is that the difficulty Rachel experiences in letting her partner in isn’t a personality trait or a commitment problem or a fear of intimacy in the abstract. It’s the neurobiological echo of early experiences in which emotional proximity wasn’t modeled, emotional sharing wasn’t invited, and the inner life was learned to be managed privately rather than shared relationally. The glass wall isn’t a choice. It’s a structural feature of a nervous system that was shaped in a particular relational environment.
Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and Distinguished University Scientist at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University Bloomington, developer of Polyvagal Theory, has shown that the vagal neural circuits responsible for social engagement. The ability to feel safe in proximity with another person, to have a relaxed face and voice and a receptive body in intimate contexts. Are calibrated by early social experience. When those circuits weren’t adequately activated in early childhood because the relational environment didn’t provide enough warm, attuned engagement, the adult nervous system may have a constitutionally lower set point for social safety. Registering closeness as somewhat threatening even when it’s objectively not. This is precisely the kind of nervous system work that specialized therapeutic support can address. (PMID: 7652107)
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- 43.1% (95% CI 39.0-47.4%) prevalence of emotional neglect in adults with psychiatric disorders (PMID: 38579459)
- 18.4% (184/1000) prevalence of child emotional neglect (PMID: 22797133)
- r = 0.41 (95% CI 0.32-0.49) between emotional neglect and Mistrust/Abuse schema (PMID: 35060262)
- OR = 2.17 (95% CI 1.58-2.99) for childhood emotional neglect and impulsivity (PMID: 29845580)
- 42% (95% CI 33%-51%) pooled prevalence of emotional neglect in Arab children (Alansari et al.)
How Emotional Neglect Shapes Trust in Driven Women
In my clinical practice, the impact of childhood emotional neglect on trust in intimate relationships shows up in driven and driven women in ways that are both predictable and often invisible to the women themselves until we identify them together.
The most common presentation is the one Rachel describes: functional intimacy with a persistent glass wall. She can be warm. She can be caring. She can be a thoughtful and attentive partner in practical and logistical ways. What she struggles with is the specific kind of intimacy that requires her to be a passive recipient. To receive care, to allow herself to be held in another person’s attention, to bring her actual inner experience into the shared relational space rather than managing it privately. She’s learned to give but not to receive, to support but not to be supported, to be needed but not to need.
Naomi runs a regional hospital system. She’s the kind of leader people describe as “unflappable”. The person the team looks to in a crisis, who is always steady, always oriented, never rattled. She came to therapy after her partner of five years said to her, with genuine bewilderment: “I don’t actually know who you are inside all that composure.” He wasn’t criticizing her. He was expressing loneliness. The loneliness of loving someone who is present in every way but that particular way.
“I didn’t know what to do with that,” Naomi told me. “Because I felt like I was completely present. I’ve always been there. I show up. I’m reliable. I care about him deeply.” She paused. “And then I tried to think of the last time I told him I was scared of something, or that I needed something from him, or that something hurt. And I couldn’t think of one.”
Naomi’s experience points to the specific gap that emotional neglect creates in intimate trust: not the inability to be trustworthy to others, but the inability to trust others enough to be known by them. She trusts her partner in the practical sense. She doesn’t doubt his fidelity or his intentions. What she doesn’t trust is the safety of her own emotional exposure. Deep in the nervous system, the learned message remains: your inner life is yours to manage. It’s not something you bring to another person. They don’t want it. They won’t know how to hold it. And if you give it, you’ll be alone with it anyway, but also more vulnerable.
What I see consistently in driven women with emotional neglect histories is that the professional success often functions as both a compensation for and a defense against the intimacy wound. Achievement provides a reliable source of felt worth that doesn’t require the risk of emotional exposure. The status and recognition that come with professional success feel, neurochemically, like the attunement and validation that weren’t adequately available in childhood. Not a conscious strategy. Just the path of least resistance toward feeling seen and valued.
The Self-Sufficiency Defense and What It Costs You
One of the most critical concepts in understanding the trust impact of childhood emotional neglect is what I call the self-sufficiency defense. It’s the adaptive strategy. Developed early, reinforced over decades. That says: I don’t need to be emotionally provided for by others. I can do it myself. And I’d rather do it myself, because depending on others for emotional sustenance has historically led to disappointment or abandonment.
This is not a pathological adaptation. In the context of emotional neglect, it’s a reasonable and in many ways brilliant one. When the environment isn’t providing adequate emotional attunement, the developing psyche does what it needs to do: it builds self-sufficiency. It learns to manage affect internally. It creates the capacity to regulate without co-regulation. And it produces adults who are, in fact, extraordinarily capable of functioning independently. Which in professional contexts is an enormous asset.
The cost shows up in intimate partnership. Because the self-sufficiency defense doesn’t distinguish between early environments that genuinely couldn’t meet emotional needs and current environments that can. It runs the same program regardless of the safety of the current relational context. So your genuinely available, genuinely attuned partner runs straight into this defense. And experiences it as distance, as unavailability, as a kind of glass wall between you. He may try harder to get in. You may try to meet him. And the gap persists, because the defense isn’t responding to him. It’s responding to a much older environmental assessment that has never been updated.
Jonice Webb, PhD, psychologist and author of Running on Empty, describes this dynamic with precision: the child of emotional neglect learns to cope by “turning down the volume” on emotional needs. First outwardly (not expressing them) and eventually inwardly (not fully registering them). The result is an adult who genuinely isn’t sure what she needs from others emotionally, not because she doesn’t have needs, but because she learned to stop listening to them. Part of the recovery work is learning to turn the volume back up. Gently, with support. And discovering that what you hear isn’t as dangerous or overwhelming as you may have feared.
The “void” Estés describes doesn’t require addiction to be present. For many women with emotional neglect histories, the void is quieter. A background emptiness that achievement and productivity temporarily fill, that manifests as the strange flatness after the project closes and the people leave, that shows up in the moment when a partner offers genuine emotional presence and something in you doesn’t know how to receive it. It’s not dramatic. It’s not even always painful. It’s just a quiet absence where full aliveness could be.
Both/And: Your Independence Is Real and Your Loneliness Is Real
One of the most important reframes I offer women with emotional neglect histories is this one: your self-sufficiency is real, it’s remarkable, and it has served you well. And your loneliness is real, it’s legitimate, and it deserves to be addressed. Both of these can be true simultaneously. Neither one cancels out the other.
Women with emotional neglect histories often carry a particular shame about the loneliness. Because they’re supposed to be the one who doesn’t need much, who manages fine alone, who has it together. The loneliness feels like a failure of the self-sufficiency strategy, or worse, an exposure of some pathetic neediness they’ve worked very hard to keep hidden. Neither is accurate. The loneliness is the natural result of a human being living without adequate intimate emotional connection. Which is a need, not a weakness. And the self-sufficiency is a genuine strength, not a performance.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
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Rachel described this both/and with unusual clarity in a session several months into our work together: “I’ve always been proud of not needing much. And I’m also exhausted from not needing much. Like, at some point I realized that ‘not needing much’ is another way of saying ‘not getting much.’ And I’ve been calling not getting much a virtue.”
This is one of the most precise descriptions of the emotional neglect legacy I’ve encountered in my clinical work. The framing of deprivation as self-sufficiency. The rebranding of absence as independence. The way a wound can get coded as a character strength before you’re old enough to know the difference. And the particular cost of that rebranding: living inside a story about yourself that doesn’t have room for what you actually need.
The both/and work here is about widening the story. Making room for both the genuine strength and the genuine longing, without either one canceling the other. You can be extraordinarily self-sufficient and want to be deeply known. You can manage your inner life with skill and still want someone to help you carry it sometimes. You can have built an impressive independent life and still want a partnership that actually goes the whole way in. That reaches the glass wall and, eventually, with the right person and the right conditions, finds that it comes down.
The Systemic Lens: Why Emotional Neglect Stays Hidden
Childhood emotional neglect remains one of the least recognized and least addressed forms of early relational difficulty in both the clinical world and the broader culture. And that invisibility has consequences for the women living with its effects.
Start with the diagnostic problem. The clinical and therapeutic literature has historically been far more focused on what happens to children than on what doesn’t happen. Abuse, trauma, witnessing violence. These are studied, recognized, and treated. The chronic absence of emotional attunement. The thing that was simply never provided rather than the thing that was actively inflicted. Is harder to study, harder to name, and harder to validate as a clinical concern.
This creates a specific problem for the women who experienced it: their difficulty in intimate trust doesn’t have a recognized origin story. When a woman with a trauma history says she has difficulty trusting partners, the connection makes sense to most people. When a woman who describes a “normal, fine childhood” says the same thing, the cultural message is often that her difficulty is a personality issue. She’s emotionally unavailable, she’s afraid of commitment, she’s “not a feelings person.” None of these framings point toward the actual cause or toward what can actually help.
There’s also a class and gender dimension. In ambitious, driven families. Particularly those with significant professional pressure and cultural expectations around performance. Emotional attunement was often explicitly de-prioritized in favor of achievement. “Stop crying and focus.” “What are you worried about? You have everything you need.” “You’re too sensitive.” These messages were often delivered by loving parents who genuinely believed they were raising resilient, capable children. They were. They were also, without intending to, teaching those children that their emotional interior was less important than their external performance. A message that shapes the architecture of adult intimacy in lasting ways.
For women from immigrant families, from communities where stoicism is culturally valued, from religious traditions where certain emotions are considered shameful, or from families where survival was a more pressing concern than emotional development. The neglect may have been even more thorough and even less visible as such. The work of naming it isn’t about blaming parents who did what they knew how to do. It’s about understanding the actual contours of the wound so you can address it accurately. The work of accurate understanding is where genuine change begins.
Finally, there’s the way that driven women’s professional identities often reinforce the neglect’s legacy. Workplaces reward emotional self-sufficiency. Vulnerability is often career-limiting. The qualities that emotional neglect produces. Self-containment, independence, high tolerance for emotional discomfort, not needing much. Are professionally valued in ways that make them very difficult to recognize as adaptive strategies rather than innate character traits. The culture keeps validating the wound. That makes it harder to notice and harder to address.
Learning to Trust: What Healing Emotional Neglect Actually Requires
Healing the trust wounds created by childhood emotional neglect is genuinely possible. It’s also genuinely different from other kinds of relational healing, and approaching it without understanding that difference tends to produce frustration rather than progress. Here’s what I’ve found to be most essential in my clinical work with women navigating this particular territory.
Learn to Name Your Emotional Experience
For women with emotional neglect histories, the first task is often the most basic and the most surprisingly difficult: learning to identify what you’re feeling in real time. Not in retrospect. Not after analysis. But in the moment, in the body, in the actual present-tense texture of your emotional experience. This is the skill that didn’t get developed because there was no one to help you develop it. It requires practice, usually with support. Therapy, journaling, body-based mindfulness practices, and deliberate attention to somatic signals all help. Taking the time to explore your patterns is a valuable starting point.
Practice Small Disclosures with Safe People
The self-sufficiency defense dismantles not through dramatic emotional opening but through incremental practice. Begin with small disclosures of emotional experience with people who are consistently safe. Your therapist, a deeply trusted friend, a partner who has demonstrated consistent attunement over time. Not the biggest, most vulnerable things. Just slightly more than you’d normally offer. And then notice what happens. Usually what happens is that the feared catastrophe. Being alone with it anyway, being dismissed, being too much. Doesn’t occur. And each time it doesn’t occur, the nervous system’s threat assessment about emotional sharing gets slightly updated.
Learn to Receive, Not Just Give
Women with emotional neglect histories are often excellent at caregiving and poor at care-receiving. The asymmetry is important. In intimate partnership, care-receiving is half of intimacy. It’s the half that requires trust, that requires making yourself vulnerable to another person’s attention and response. If you only give, you’re maintaining full control of the relational dynamic. You’re never at risk. You’re also never fully in it. Learning to receive. To accept comfort, to acknowledge need, to let someone help you carry something. Is not a soft skill. It’s the central work of this healing.
Work Specifically with Emotional Neglect in Therapy
Not all therapists are equally equipped to work with emotional neglect specifically. General relational therapy will help. What works most effectively is therapy that explicitly addresses the connection between the early relational environment and current intimacy patterns. That helps you identify the specific emotional needs that weren’t met, grieve that they weren’t met (without which the healing remains incomplete), and build new internal representations of what having those needs met could feel like. Trauma-informed, attachment-focused therapy offers this specifically.
Give Your Partner the Map
If you’re in a relationship with a genuinely safe partner, giving them some version of the map. “this is what I’m working with, this is why I sometimes go behind the glass wall, this is what actually helps when it happens”. Can transform the dynamic. Not as a comprehensive explanation of your entire psychology, but as enough context that they can understand what they’re encountering and respond to it helpfully rather than feeling confused or rejected by the wall. This itself is a form of intimacy. Bringing someone into your inner life by telling them something true about how it works.
The glass wall doesn’t stay up forever. I’ve watched women who had almost given up on the possibility of real intimacy. Who had decided, quietly, that they were simply “not built for closeness”. Discover, with the right support and the right conditions, that the wall was never a permanent feature. It was a protection that outlived its necessity. Taking it down, piece by piece, in the context of genuine safety, is some of the most profound work I witness in my practice. It’s also some of the most life-changing. Because what’s on the other side isn’t just better relationships. It’s a more complete access to yourself. To the full range of your own experience, to the parts of you that have been behind that wall for decades, waiting to be brought into the light. We write about this work every week. Come find us.
Q: How do I know if what I experienced was childhood emotional neglect or just a “normal” upbringing?
A: Some questions that can be clarifying: Did your parents regularly ask how you were feeling, and did they seem genuinely interested in the answer? When you were sad, scared, or distressed as a child, was someone consistently present to help you make sense of and move through those feelings? Were emotional expressions in your household welcomed or subtly discouraged? Did your achievements get more attention than your inner experience? Did you learn to manage your emotions privately rather than bringing them to others? If these questions resonate. If the description of “emotional self-sufficiency as a coping strategy formed early” sounds familiar. That’s a reasonable indication that childhood emotional neglect was part of your experience. You don’t need a dramatic childhood to have experienced it. The absence of adequate emotional attunement is enough.
Q: My childhood was objectively fine. Can I still have trust issues rooted in that period?
A: Yes. “Objectively fine” tends to refer to the material and practical dimensions of a childhood. Safety, stability, adequate provision. These are important. But emotional wellbeing in childhood requires something additional: consistent emotional attunement from caregivers. Many families provide excellent material care while being significantly limited in emotional availability. Not from malice, but from their own emotional neglect histories, from cultural conditioning, from the demands of survival, or from mental health challenges that limited their capacity. A “fine” childhood materially can coexist with a significantly emotionally undernourishing one. And the relational impact of that undernourishment is real regardless of how the outer circumstances looked.
Q: I’m capable of deep empathy for others but can’t access vulnerability myself. Is that a CEN signature?
A: This is one of the most characteristic presentations of childhood emotional neglect. High outward empathy combined with significant difficulty receiving emotional care or being emotionally vulnerable with others. The capacity to attune to others’ emotional states is often well-developed in people with CEN histories, partly because learning to read the emotional environment was a survival skill, and partly because giving emotional care is safe in a way that receiving it isn’t. The asymmetry. Generous with others, guarded with self. Is a reliable signature. It’s not a deficiency of character. It’s the predictable result of an emotional system that learned the direction of emotional flow very early on: you attend to others’ needs, not the other way around.
Q: My partner says I’m emotionally unavailable. I don’t feel that way. I feel like I’m fully present. Who’s right?
A: You’re probably both describing something real. You may be present in the ways you know how to be present. Practically, functionally, attentively in all the visible dimensions of partnership. What your partner may be experiencing as unavailability is the absence of a specific kind of emotional self-disclosure. The sharing of your inner experience, your fears, your needs, your softer states. Because that kind of self-disclosure wasn’t modeled or practiced early, it may feel unnecessary to you or even invasive. As if your inner life should remain private. But for many partners, that inner access is what makes them feel they truly know you and are truly known. The gap is real, and it’s worth exploring in therapy. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because there may be a dimension of intimacy available to you that you haven’t yet accessed.
Q: Can a relationship with an emotionally available partner actually heal childhood emotional neglect?
A: Partially, yes. A consistently attuned, patient, emotionally available partner can provide the corrective relational experience that gradually updates the nervous system’s model of what intimacy is and what’s safe. Research on earned secure attachment confirms that adult relational experiences can shift internal working models in meaningful ways. But the healing tends to be more complete and more conscious when combined with therapeutic work. Because the partner relationship, however good, doesn’t provide the reflective space to understand what’s happening and why, and doesn’t have the specific skills to work directly with the underlying developmental wound. The combination of good partnership and good therapy is the most powerful context for this healing.
Q: Is childhood emotional neglect connected to why I’m attracted to emotionally unavailable partners?
A: Often, yes. The nervous system pattern-matches toward the familiar, and for women who grew up with emotionally unavailable caregivers, emotional unavailability in a partner can register as a recognizable and even comfortable relational dynamic. While full emotional availability can feel strange, even threatening. There’s also a specific dynamic where the emotionally unavailable partner lets the woman maintain the self-sufficiency position. The caretaker, the one reaching toward someone who stays a step back. That dynamic is deeply familiar from childhood. The work of changing partner-selection patterns, when CEN is in the picture, requires addressing both the pattern of choosing and the difficulty tolerating what’s on offer when an emotionally available person is in front of you. That dual work is something I help women with directly.
Related Reading
- Webb, Jonice, with Christine Musello. Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2012.
- Schore, Allan N. The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
- Stern, Daniel N. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
- Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2020.
- Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
- Schore AN. The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity. Front Psychol. 2021;12:648616. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648616. PMID: 33959077.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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