The Root of All Your Pain

What is the number one thing a child needs from their parents?

Did you answer “love”?

Although love is extremely important, the number one thing a child needs from their parents is not love but it is “emotional connection.”

Emotional connection is defined as how well a parent acknowledges the feelings of their child by asking them,

“How are you feeling?” 

“What are you feeling?” and 

“Why do you feel the way that you do?”

I have seen over 2000 clients in the past 14 years of my practice and every time I ask my clients about the emotional connection they had with their parents as a child, they all virtually share the same answer saying they had little to no emotional connection with their parents.

The reason why emotional connection is so vital for a child’s well-being is because of this universal truth:

“You are your feelings.”

If a parent doesn’t acknowledge how a child feels, they thereby don’t acknowledge the child. The child will then inevitably feel invisible and worthless, even if the parent loves the child. That is why love is not enough.

For example, when a parent dismisses their child’s feelings by saying that they are being “too sensitive,” the parent is making the child feel that it’s wrong to feel the way that they do. And because “you are your feelings,” the parent is essentially making the child feel that it’s wrong to be who they are.

This child can grow up invalidating their feelings by constantly telling themselves, “It’s no big deal. I’m just overreacting.” They may also wonder, “What’s wrong with me?” because they were made to feel that it’s wrong to feel the way that they do, and thereby wrong to be who they are.

The lack of emotional connection between parent and child is the very reason why society is in pain yet doesn’t understand why. People think that their parents loving them is enough when it’s not. Love is very important but it’s incomplete when standing alone. People are not able to source their pain back to its origin because they don’t acknowledge their parents’ behavior as being traumatic.

We view trauma as something physical or violent but that only depicts 1% of traumas. 99% of traumas are emotional. Even the 1% of trauma that is physical or violent, is rooted in emotional trauma because the parent is obviously not acknowledging how their child feels.

So what is trauma exactly?

“Trauma is when your parents don’t acknowledge how you feel.”

Once again, this is the hidden root cause of the pain of humanity. This is the reason why we feel pain but don’t understand why and therefore we are just left with coping mechanisms like “stress management” or “anger management.”

This is why positive thinking or cognitive behavior therapy is so widely used. Since we do not understand the source of our negative thoughts and feelings, we are just left with treating the symptom by changing our negative thoughts into positive ones, while ignoring the root cause of our negative thoughts and feelings.

This is also a major reason why addiction is so prominent. We feel pain but we can’t do anything about it since we are not consciously aware of the source of it, therefore, we are only left with numbing it.

Ask yourself, did your parents acknowledge how you felt as a child? Did they ask you about your feelings? If they did not, you can begin to see and demystify where the source of your pain may be coming from.