You’re in the kitchen, your child starts crying - and suddenly you feel it. That rising heat in your chest. The overwhelm. The urge to shut it down or walk away.

You don’t want to react. You know they’re just expressing big feelings.

But your body’s already in fight-or-flight.

If this sounds familiar, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent.

It means you’re a triggered parent - one who’s doing the incredibly brave work of parenting after childhood trauma.

If you were raised by emotionally immature parents, you didn’t get a healthy template for love, boundaries, or emotional regulation. Now, you’re trying to break that cycle while still healing from it - and that’s more than just parenting. That’s recovery work.

Realising that you experienced emotional neglect growing up can bring up a lot of mixed emotions; relief, sadness, anger, even confusion.

You might find yourself wondering, “Now that I know… what do I do with this?”

When we think about childhood emotional neglect, it’s easy to focus only not he past. But the trust is, its effects often follow us into adulthood - especially into our relationships.

We are hardwired to seek out human connection throughout our lives. At all stages of life, we seek out connectivity with others, and sometimes these relationships are healthy, while other times they are not.