The trauma of being unseen underlies both shame and codependency. It’s hidden and rarely noticed or discussed in therapy. When we miss out on healthy, empathetic parenting, we often don’t realize what we’ve missed. We may not realize our psyche has a deficit.
Growing up, it’s obvious to us if our friends have more wealth, an intact family, and sober, functioning parents that may contrast with our own. What’s not recognizable are the subtle parent-child interactions. Parents who appear loving and involved in their children’s activities, friends, and school may still not be attuned to their children.
They don’t see them as individuals, separate from themselves, with their unique personalities, interests, feelings, wants, and needs. They may only reward their children’s performance or may generously try to give them all that they missed in their childhood, but that may not be what their children truly need and want.
Read More Here: Trauma Recovery Blueprint: 10 Strategies To Heal And Thrive
The Trauma of Being Unseen And Unloved
Ideally, parents should understand, empathize with, and mirror their children, starting in infancy. Mirroring entails reflecting their child’s thoughts and emotions back to them. It may include imitating a child’s facial expression and repeating or paraphrasing their words to show they’re heard and understood. This process helps children feel seen, validated, and heard, and is essential for healthy emotional development and a sense of self, value, and self-esteem.
To help children:
- Identify and label their feelings.
- Validate and accept their feelings.
- Build self-confidence and self-esteem.
- Build self-awareness and emotional intelligence (“EQ”).
- Creates a positive sense of themselves.
- Appropriately express their needs and feelings.
- Develop empathy for others.
- Develop healthy adult relationships.
Key to forming a healthy Self is the mother’s (or primary caretaker’s) ability to mirror the child’s feelings. She empathically and intuitively matches her responses to her child’s needs and ever-fluctuating feelings. She joins in her child’s glee and remains calm and present with her baby’s sadness, containing and diffusing intense emotions. She empathizes, names, and reflects her child’s feelings accurately, teaching her child to recognize, trust, and respond to perceptions and internal feelings. Thus, through this matching process, a baby and child feel loved and understood and build a separate, psychological self.
Inadequate mirroring causes children to feel alone and insecure. They learn that their needs, feelings, and thoughts are unimportant, wrong, and shameful. Repeated instances can teach children to repress their needs and feelings and tune in to the mother’s expectations and emotions. Children adapt to their environment and develop ideals of who they “should” be for survival.
A child’s Self can become organized around withdrawing, caretaking, self-sufficiency, aggression, pleasing, and/or performing for others’ approval to feel loved instead of developing a strong sense of Self and awareness of needs, feelings, and thoughts as an adult. Shame and codependency are the result.
Usually, we may not know that we carry the trauma of being unseen, but we may continually seek external solutions to our inner hunger and emptiness. We may develop compulsive behaviors or an addiction to soothe ourselves, or enter into painful relationships. It can show up in relationships where we feel lonely or unloved.
We may react strongly with anger or withdraw when we don’t feel understood, valued, or empathized with. Rather than heal the original trauma, we may stay in unfulfilling relationships, accept abuse, keep trying to change someone else, or have an affair. Before we can effectively heal the problem, we must own it and not continue to blame other people. Sometimes, conjoint therapy can help, but often when a person has a personality disorder, like narcissism or borderline personality disorder, intense individual therapy is first necessary.
It takes courage to face the pain and emptiness from childhood and heal the wounds we carry. To heal the trauma of being unseen, we need to be that loving parent to ourselves, but without having experienced it, this can be challenging. At the same time, we must overcome our defenses of avoidance, denial, and distraction. Steps you can take to honor your feelings:
- Attend 12-Step Meetings.
- Talk to a therapist.
- Journal your feelings, needs, and wants.
- Be present to your feelings. Put your hand on your heart, and ask what you feel, what you need, and what you want.
- Call yourself by name, and name your feeling: “Jackie, you’re lonely.”
- Listen to the Self-Love Meditation.
- Dialogue with your inner child.
- Do the exercises suggested in this blog.
Read More Here: Natural Trauma Healing – Less Is More
Expect to slip. Be patient with yourself. There’s a lot of unlearning old habits and learning new skills that must take place.
© 2025 Darlene Lancer
Written by Darlene Lancer, JD, LMFT
Originally appeared on What Is Codependency
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