For a child’s developing brain, invisibility can be more painful and more damaging than the negative attention and behaviour they might receive from a parent. Because their psyche is still immature and because of the normal developmental tendency to personalise everything, children translate the absence of a parent’s gaze as proof that they are not worthy. They have not yet reached the maturity that would allow them to understand that other perspectives exist, and that a parent may be emotionally unavailable for reasons of their own. The consequence is that the child’s sense of self-worth is injured, and they feel that they are the ones driving the parent away, rather than perceiving that it is the parent who is neglecting them.
We know from experiments in psychology (such as the still face experiment) that when infants do not find faces that respond to them, they try desperately to attract attention and to connect — and if they do not succeed, they withdraw. Left alone to manage these distressing feelings, children are flooded with cortisol, the stress hormone. Research from Harvard’s centre on the developing child shows that neglect, with no relief from an adult, activates the stress response system and creates a state of toxic stress, causing damage to the brain’s synapses. Within this unmanageable panic, the psyche mobilises defences such as dissociation, in which the pain is frozen so that the organism can survive. Just as the body mobilises protective defences when it is injured, so in psychological phenomena the psyche mobilises corresponding defences as a means of survival, helping it not to feel the psychological pain.
When a child is struck, they have a tangible event they can hurt or be angry about. In neglect, by contrast, the form of the harm is more subterranean. It is easier for a child to admit that they were hurt by something that happened than by the embraces and acceptance they did not receive. This diffuse emptiness has no name, but it has a feeling. It often gives rise to a deep, toxic shame, in which a person feels defective at their core, asking themselves: “Why do I feel like this, when my parents gave me everything?” Material sufficiency thus becomes the veil that covers emotional deprivation.
For a child to move through this process and mature, they need to receive the function of mirroring adequately from their parent. Through it, they feel that they exist in the eyes of someone who can recognise their experience. As Winnicott — one of the most important scholars of children’s psychological development — argued, the first mirror is the mother (or whoever cared for the child). When an infant looks at the mother’s face, they need to see there the reflection of their own mood and existence. If the mother mirrors the child, the child begins to exist as a Self. If the mother mirrors only her own state (her depression or anxiety, for example), the child “loses” themselves before they have even found themselves.
Healing this emotional emptiness and neglect does not come only through recognising what was missing back then, but through the experience of visibility in the here and now of the therapeutic relationship. Where the child learned to be invisible, the adult now learns to exist through the gaze of another who can bear and can name their feelings and their experience.
