You cannot point to anything specific.But something has always felt missing.
Not on the outside - on the outside, things may look just fine. The family was functional. Your parents weren't monsters. There was no dramatic incident that explains the specific quality of your inner life: the emotional flatness, the persistent self-doubt, the sense that you never quite know what you feel, the loneliness that persists even when you're surrounded by people who care.
What was missing was emotional attunement - and its absence is called Childhood Emotional Neglect.
Running on Empty No More
is the comprehensive guide to understanding and healing from this invisible wound, written by a clinical psychologist with twenty years of experience working with adults who grew up feeling just fine on the outside and inexplicably hollow within.
Inside you will discover:
- What childhood emotional neglect actually is - and why it is defined by absence, not action
- The seven emotional capacities that CEN specifically impairs and that recovery specifically rebuilds
- The adult signature of CEN: emotional flatness, persistent self-doubt, compulsive self-reliance, background emptiness
- The practice of emotional literacy: learning to identify, name, and trust your feelings
- Self-compassion as the foundation - and why it is both the most important and the most difficult CEN practice
- Building your authentic inner life: preferences, values, and genuine self-knowledge
- Healing your relationships: moving from managed distance to genuine connection
- Somatic practices for rebuilding the body-level connection that CEN severed
- Reparenting yourself: providing now what was missing then
- The life that becomes possible when the inner life is genuinely inhabited
Your inner life was never empty. It was suppressed.This book shows you how to come home to it.
