15 Personality Traits You Didn't Realize Come From Growing Up With Emotionally Unavailable Parents
It's not you, it's how you were raised.
Michal Binkiewicz / Unsplash Devon Caley is a Ph.D. Candidate in Clinical Psychology and a mental health influencer focusing on self-love and relationships. Much of her content is rooted in attachment theory and its connection to different relational systems.
In a recent TikTok series, she used humor to highlight how emotional neglect in childhood can produce traits of an insecure attachment style in adulthood.
Caley shared 15 traits that can stem from growing up with emotionally unavailable parents.
1. Trying to manage other people’s moods.
Constantly monitoring other people’s feelings and taking their emotional temperature can be a sign that you grew up with emotionally unavailable parents.
“I grew up with emotionally unavailable parents. I’m gonna try to continuously try to manage your mood and check in to see how you’re doing, because if you get upset, and I didn’t foresee that, I’m gonna worry that none of my basic needs are gonna be met,” Caley pointedly remarked.
Any emotional dysregulation that your caretakers experienced could have been blamed on you, which is why you now try to manage people’s moods and make everything okay.
2. Feeling like affection needs to be earned.
Caley also noted that people who were raised by emotionally unavailable parents have a hard time trusting “unearned” affection.
3. Isolating yourself when you feel difficult emotions.
People with emotionally unavailable parents never learned to properly navigate big feelings, so they enter adulthood not knowing how to manage difficult emotions. They tend to socially separate themselves when times are hard, so as to not feel like a burden on others.
4. Not knowing how to ask for help.
Asking for help when you need it is a learned skill. It’s not an easy one to master, as asking for help can leave you feeling vulnerable, which is a feeling people who were emotionally neglected as children tend to avoid.
5. Performing at a high level, even when things aren’t okay.
“I’ve learned how to over-function and put on a really good mask that everything is okay even when everything is spiraling and it feels like it’s falling apart,” Caley shared as another trait.
Photo: Annie Spratt / Unsplash
6. Feeling like no one knows ‘the real you.’
Growing up with emotionally unavailable parents might have meant masking how you really feel or not showing the full range of your emotions. Because being vulnerable wasn’t entirely allowed when you were growing up, as an adult, you might feel like nobody really knows you, including yourself.
7. Being a perfectionist.
If you had emotionally unavailable parents, you might have been judged on what you were able to accomplish, which means you tie being perfect to being validated as a person.
Caley explains, “I have mastered perfectionism, so you don’t need to worry about any of my needs or me, really at all.”
8. Being called ‘an old soul.'
Getting told that “you’re so mature for your age” is another sign you grew up with emotionally unavailable parents.
Because they couldn’t access their own emotions, you ended up doing a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, which made you grow up faster than you should have.
9. Over-apologizing.
Caley explained the reason behind saying “sorry” so often, sharing that “I apologize unnecessarily for anything that could possibly be a bother or a burden to you.”
Photo: Vitolda Klein / Unsplash
10. Interpreting kindness as transactional.
“Kindness feels transactional,” she stated. “If you do a kindness for me, I have to do something comparable or better for you.”
11. Basing your sense of self-worth on your achievements.
If the idea of being loved just for being you and existing as you are feels outlandish, you might have had emotionally unavailable parents.
Caley revealed that someone raised in an emotionally neglectful household might feel as though “I’m loved for my productivity and accomplishments,” instead of by virtue of being enough, as you are, without having to prove yourself.
12. Having a hard time trusting your own intuition.
Trusting your intuition is a muscle that can be made stronger with practice, yet people who have emotionally unavailable parents might have a hard time trusting themselves, so they look to outside factors to make decisions.
13. Having a deeply critical inner voice.
Caley shared that hearing a lot of criticism while growing up can lead to the creation of a very critical internal voice. She notes that the criticism doesn’t have to have been aimed at you for you to internalize it; hearing it directed at the people around you is enough for it to take hold in your psyche and become how you speak to yourself.
14. Being a people-pleaser.
Trying to make people feel satisfied at all times is another way of trying to manage their emotions, and it often comes at the expense of setting clear boundaries to help you care for yourself.
15. Being competitive.
“If I win, that means I’m the best,” Caley said simply.
While Caley presented these traits in a joking manner, many of her followers resonated with them.
In recognizing how our childhoods affect us, we’re able to change how we see ourselves and create the future lives we want to inhabit.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers mental health, pop culture and all things to do with the entertainment industry.