Nobody was cruel. Nobody was abusive. Your parents are still together. You had a roof, food, holidays. From the outside, your childhood looked completely fine. So why do you feel broken when nothing bad happened?
Why the relentless inner critic that turns every small mistake into evidence of fundamental failure. Why the bone-deep exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. Why the sense, underneath all the achievement and capability, that you are somehow fundamentally not quite right.
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “nothing that bad happened to me, so why can’t I just get over it”, this is for you.
It’s not always a dramatic story
When we think about childhood trauma, we tend to think about obvious things. Abuse. Violence. Addiction. Events we can point to and name.
But there’s another kind of damage that’s much harder to see, precisely because it doesn’t look like damage. It looks like a raised eyebrow where encouragement should have been. A parent who needed you to be okay, so you learned to be okay. Approval that was always just slightly out of reach, no matter how hard you tried to earn it. An atmosphere where certain feelings weren’t welcome, so you pushed them down and learned to stop having them.
This is sometimes called childhood emotional neglect or emotionally immature parenting. It doesn’t leave marks you can point to but the impact can be huge.
“Nothing that bad happened”
One of the cruelest things about this kind of childhood is that it makes the pain harder to make sense of. You find yourself minimising your own experience because you can’t produce a good enough reason for it and that minimising becomes its own layer of shame.
Many people I work with don’t have a dramatic story but still their nervous systems have learned that the world wasn’t safe, that they weren’t enough, that love was something to be earned rather than simply received. Those lessons get learned over years, and they go very deep. The fact that you can’t point to a single event is not proof that the wound isn’t real. A 2025 study found that emotional neglect was the strongest predictor of CPTSD out of all trauma types studied – stronger even than physical abuse or threat to life.
It can be different
Understanding where this comes from is a start. But understanding alone rarely shifts it and if you’ve spent years reading about your patterns and watching yourself repeat them anyway, you already know that.
What actually changes things is a different kind of experience. Being genuinely known by another person and it being a safe, validating experience is what changes things. That’s not something you can get from a book or a podcast. It’s relational, which means it happens in relationship.
If any of this sounds familiar, you might want to start with my free guide to calming your inner critic – it’s a practical first step you can take today.
Or if you’re ready to start therapy, you can book online here.