Last Sunday I was sitting with my mother at her kitchen table, same as most Sundays, and she was telling me about a recipe she’d found for a stew she used to make when I was small. She described the ingredients in careful detail—the cut of beef, the exact brand of stock cube, the way she’d slice the carrots on an angle because my father liked them that way. She remembered every practical detail of feeding a family of four for thirty years. But when I asked her what she remembered about how we talked to each other at that table, she went quiet for a moment and said, “We didn’t, really. We just ate.”
She wasn’t being unkind. She wasn’t deflecting. She was telling the truth as cleanly as she knew how. And sitting there, a man in his sixties with a cup of tea going cold in his hands, I recognised something I’ve been circling for most of my adult life: the particular confusion of growing up in a home where you were fed, clothed, sheltered, and cared for in every visible way—but where nobody ever asked you how you felt. Or taught you that how you felt was something worth mentioning at all.
When Love Looks Like Logistics
My parents were good people. I need to say that clearly because what follows isn’t a complaint. My father worked long hours. My mother kept the house running with a kind of military efficiency that I only appreciated decades later. The fridge was always full. Our clothes were always clean. If we were ill, there was medicine. If we needed school supplies, they appeared. If something broke, it got fixed.
What didn’t get fixed—what never even got identified as broken—was the emotional wiring underneath all of it. We didn’t talk about sadness. We didn’t talk about fear. We certainly didn’t talk about anger, not the real kind, not the kind that sits in your chest and has nowhere to go. If I came home upset, I was given food. If I was anxious about school, I was told it would be fine. If I cried, I was told to stop. Not cruelly. Just efficiently. The way you’d turn off a tap.
Researchers have a name for this now. Jonice Webb’s work on childhood emotional neglect describes it as what happens when parents fail to respond adequately to a child’s emotional needs—not through abuse or cruelty, but through omission. The child’s feelings aren’t punished. They’re simply not noticed. And because there’s no visible wound, the child grows up thinking everything was fine. The confusion doesn’t arrive until much later, when they’re sitting in a therapist’s office at sixty-two—as I was—saying, “I don’t understand. I had a good childhood. So why do I feel like something’s missing?”
The Fridge Was Full, but the Conversations Were Empty
I think about this now when I watch my older son with his children. He’s a teacher—a career I resisted for years because I’d pushed him toward engineering, convinced that practical meant safe. He ignored me eventually, thank God, and he’s built a life his children actually want to be part of. But what strikes me most is how he talks to them. When his daughter is upset, he sits on the floor and asks her what the feeling looks like. When his son is angry, he doesn’t say “calm down.” He says, “Tell me about it.”
I didn’t do that. I did what was done to me. I provided. I fixed. I made sure the logistics were covered. And when my boys were hurting, I offered solutions instead of presence. I told them it would pass. I told them to toughen up. I did it with love—genuine love—but love filtered through a generation that believed children should be seen and not heard, and that emotional silence was a form of strength.
The result, for me and for many people I’ve talked to since I started writing, is a very specific kind of adult confusion. You know you were loved. You can point to evidence of it everywhere—the full fridge, the warm house, the holidays, the presents. But you also carry this persistent sense that nobody in your childhood home ever really knew you. Not the real you. Not the you that was frightened, or lonely, or unsure. That version of you never got airtime.
Having Enough Without Being Enough
In my years in HR, I saw this pattern play out in hundreds of workplace conflicts. People who’d been materially provided for but emotionally overlooked often became the hardest workers in the building—and the most confused when recognition didn’t fill the hole. They’d earn the promotion, get the pay rise, accumulate the things, and still feel like something was off. Because the original wound wasn’t about resources. It was about being seen.
Research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships has shown that feeling known by others—what psychologists call “felt understanding”—is a stronger predictor of relationship satisfaction than feeling loved. You can feel loved and still feel profoundly alone if the person loving you has never made space for your inner world. And when that starts in childhood, it becomes the water you swim in. You don’t question it. You just keep swimming and wonder why you’re always tired.
My therapist—I started seeing her at Linda’s suggestion a couple of years ago, and I wish I’d done it decades earlier—helped me see something I’d never quite articulated. She said that children in emotionally neglectful homes don’t learn that their feelings are bad. They learn that their feelings are irrelevant. And that’s almost harder to recover from, because there’s no villain in the story. There’s no moment to point to and say, “That. That’s where it went wrong.” There’s just a long, quiet absence of something that should have been there.
The Quiet Work of Learning to Be Known
I’ve been doing that quiet work for a few years now, and I won’t pretend it’s comfortable. At sixty-three, you’d think a man would have himself figured out. But the truth is, I’m only now learning to identify what I’m feeling in real time—something psychology tells us isn’t about emotional immaturity but often traces back to well-meaning childhoods where negative emotions were quickly reframed before they could be fully experienced.
Linda has been patient with this. More patient than I deserve, probably. For years, when she asked me how I was feeling, I’d answer with what I was doing. “I’m fine. I mowed the lawn. I called Mum.” It took her pointing out—gently, after thirty-five years of marriage—that she wasn’t asking for a status report. She was asking to know me. And I didn’t know how to let her, because I’d never been taught that being known was something you could allow.
A study by Lischetzke and colleagues in the journal Emotion found that adults who have difficulty differentiating their emotions—a trait called low emotional granularity—tend to have poorer emotional regulation and weaker interpersonal connections. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a skill that was never developed because the environment didn’t call for it. When the family system rewards stoicism and provision over emotional expression, the emotional muscles simply don’t get exercised.
What I’m Trying to Do Differently Now
I can’t go back and give myself the childhood conversations I didn’t have. But I can do something with the grandchildren. When my youngest grandchild—she’s three—falls over at the park, I don’t say “You’re fine” anymore. I say, “That hurt, didn’t it?” And then I wait. I let her tell me about it. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she just nods and goes back to the swings. But either way, she knows her experience was acknowledged. That someone in her life is paying attention not just to whether she’s fed and safe, but to what’s happening inside her.
I think about the people who grew up like I did—and there are millions of us. The ones who can look at their childhood and see nothing technically wrong. The fridge was full. The roof didn’t leak. The parents showed up. But those of us raised by emotionally reserved parents didn’t develop less capacity for love—we developed a different fluency for it, one built on watching hands instead of listening to words. And now, in midlife or later, we’re trying to learn a language we were never taught.
It’s not too late. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. It’s not too late to learn to name what you feel. It’s not too late to tell someone you trust that you’re struggling, even if your fridge is full and your bills are paid and everything looks fine from the outside. Because “fine from the outside” was the whole problem in the first place.
The Table, Again
Last Sunday, after my mother told me about the stew, I did something I’ve never done before at her kitchen table. I told her I’d been feeling a bit low that week. Nothing dramatic. Just the quiet kind of heaviness that settles in sometimes when the house is too still. She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached across the table and put her hand on mine.
She didn’t offer a solution. She didn’t tell me it would pass. She didn’t get up to make more tea. She just sat there, her hand on mine, and said, “I know that feeling.”
She’s eighty-two. I’m sixty-three. And for the first time at that table, I felt something I’ve been reaching toward my whole life—not just loved, but known. Even if only for a moment. Even if it took us both a lifetime to get there.
