My dad has never told me he loves me.

Not once.

It’s a fact many people find odd whenever I tell them. But to me, it was just part of growing up with an emotionally unavailable parent.

But even the term itself isn’t so clear-cut. Because research shows that how emotionally present and responsive your folks are often exists on a spectrum.

Generally speaking, the hallmarks are emotional distance and emotional instability.

They may have been around physically, but they didn’t feel approachable or affectionate.

It’s likely that you didn’t feel very close to them or supported.

Perhaps they took little interest in you and your life. Maybe your emotional needs or boundaries seemed to take a back seat to their own.

Given just how important emotional validation is to a child growing up, it’s probably unsurprising that it can have a lasting impact on you.

1) You find yourself putting up with less than you deserve in relationships

A difficulty forming healthy connections is quite common for people who didn’t learn how loving and reciprocal relationships should work.

Without this two-way bond growing up, you may be used to expecting less from people. So that’s also what you tolerate.

Your boundaries may be a lot more flexible than most people’s, which often leads them to being pushed. That’s if you’re able to set them in the first place!

In your relationships, you think nothing of being the one who does most of the emotional work. That’s how it’s always been.

But you can end up with people who don’t pull their emotional weight and put the same effort into the connection as you.

2) Getting “too close” to others makes you feel uncomfortable

When your folks are emotionally unavailable, it’s harder to learn intimacy. So you can develop a fear of it later in life.

This can make it more of a struggle to form meaningful relationships with others.

Forming close connections can make you feel uneasy, even if you can’t figure out why.

Emotional detachment is a way of handling the overwhelm of feelings we don’t know how to navigate.

It’s not straightforward, because a fear of intimacy certainly doesn’t mean you don’t want love.

You want to be seen, to be cared for, to be acknowledged. But that’s not something you were necessarily shown as a kid.

So at the same time, you don’t know how to cope with that either, even when you are shown attention. So it can create this sort of push-and-pull dynamic in your relationships.

On the one hand, you feel like you crave closeness, but you may also inadvertently avoid it.

Sometimes, as we’re about to see next, this can happen in subtle ways like chasing the “wrong types”.

3) You’re attracted to emotionally unavailable partners

Patterns of our childhood can have a habit of repeating on us unless we consciously change them.

I know this firsthand. For much of my adult life, I chased emotionally unavailable men.

Why?

It was familiar to me.

I was drawn to the aloof and laid-back nature of men who kept their distance because my own father was never emotionally available to us as a family.

It meant that I found it “cringe” when I guy would openly show me interest and attention.

Even though this was healthy and normal expression, it felt over the top for me because of the model I had growing up. It wasn’t “normal” to me.  

Psychotherapist Allison Abrams says this can be a common trap we fall into:

“I call it the chemistry compass. Our ability to love intimately and sexually unfolds in stages, starting with our attachment with our parents. Our early patterns of relating and attaching to others, if problematic in childhood, get “wired” in our brains in childhood and then repeated in adulthood.

“We then grow up with a chemistry compass that’s broken—pointing us to those who embody the worst emotional characteristics of our primary caregiver(s). Our psyche tries to re-create the scene of the original crime (how we were wounded as children) hoping that we can save ourselves by changing its ending.”

 It’s not easy, but a conscious effort to reprogram this faulty compass is how we overcome it.

4) You find it hard to say how you really feel

Role models are there to show us how it’s done.

Studies have proven that having emotionally available parents in childhood is linked to positive emotional regulation in adulthood.

But your parents couldn’t handle emotions, preferring to avoid them. So no one guided you on how to understand and regulate your feelings.

That may mean you now have difficulty expressing emotions.

This can lead to:

• Communication barriers
• Difficulty discussing emotional topics
• A tendency to avoid deep conversations

You may also struggle with other’s emotions as well and find yourself being dismissive of them.

You harden yourself to feelings, yours and other people’s, because you never learned how to handle them.

If you didn’t learn appropriate ways of relating to people, you may use unhealthy tactics to get your emotional needs met — such as manipulation, guilt trips, or gameplaying. 

5) You try to be perfect to keep people interested in you

Children instinctively crave the attention of their parents or caregivers.

If you didn’t get that, you can be left subconsciously wondering why.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ becomes the internalized question.

Steve Rose, Ph.D., counselor, and former academic researcher, says children with emotionally unavailable parents feel rejected.

“You may have felt invisible, dismissed, or unaccepted the way you are. This is a commonly overlooked experience among children of emotionally unavailable parents. These children grow up suffering in silence, feeling empty but not necessarily knowing what’s wrong, often blaming themselves.

“Being told they are too sensitive, these children often feel dismissed and rejected, learning to avoid going to their emotionally unavailable parents for support.”

Feeling unaccepted for who you are can lead you to feel like you have to be someone else. This can lead to perfectionism and people-pleasing.

You may feel like you have to be on your best behavior at all times. But that can make authenticity tricky for you.

Perhaps it feels like you wear a mask, always trying to hide the parts of yourself you worry will be undesirable.

6) You’re scared of being abandoned

As we’ve just seen, in the back of your head, rejection is never far away.

Even though it’s not personal and certainly not your fault, that’s what having an unavailable parent feels like to a child.

We all want love, but you have learned this is a scarce resource. So insecure attachment styles are very common, as Annie Tanasugarn explains.

​“Situations in childhood where a child cannot consistently rely on their caregivers for emotional or physical support or in getting their basic needs met often result in an insecure attachment style and a subsequent fear of abandonment.”

This fear of having the rug pulled out from under you at any moment may lead to clinginess or neediness in your relationships.

You may also be more likely to fall victim to manipulators or narcissists, who can exploit your strong desire for love and validation. 

7) You rebelled in an attempt to get missing needs met

There is evidence to suggest that without the right emotional support, you may be more likely to go off the rails.

For example, research showed that girls with emotionally unavailable dads were more likely to get involved in risky behavior.

It’s hard to definitively say why. It could be a lack of healthy emotional guidance that leads to poorer decisions.

Or it could be a desperate way to try and get the attention you were lacking. Certainly,  attention-seeking behaviors often look like rebellion or destruction from the outside.

So-called reckless behaviors like promiscuity, drinking and drug taking, or eating disorders can be used as coping strategies and outlets for pain.

8) You have some self-esteem issues

Many of the unhealthy patterns of behavior that adults who grew up with emotionally unavailable parents fall into come down to this:

They’re still struggling with low self-esteem or negative self-image.

That’s because even though self-love is all the rage these days, our ability to do that is still shaped by other people.

As explained by Sarah-Len Mutiwasekwa in Psychology Today:

“Our self-esteem develops as we grow from childhood to adulthood. It is affected by the image we build for ourselves through experiences with people and different situations. The things that you experienced as a child initially form a foundation in the shaping of your self-esteem.”

That’s why building your own sense of self-worth becomes even more vital in adulthood if you felt it was lacking from your parents.

Healing old wounds

It’s true that the past programs us. But we can consciously rewrite those programs.

It all starts by shining a light on it.

It is important for people who have experienced emotional unavailability from their parents to think about the ways it may have affected and shaped them.

Developing self-awareness, learning healthier coping mechanisms, and consciously overriding unhelpful patterns can help in healing from past trauma.

It may not be a skill you picked up in childhood, but love, open communication, and healthy relationships are still something we can learn in adulthood.