Are You “Emotionally Stunted???”

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General

An "emotionally stunted" person is someone who is emotionally guarded, and uncomfortable with feeling & showing emotions. Persons can be emotionally stunted when they are confused by the emotions themselves and of others and are unable to express their emotions. There are others who have learned to suppress their emotions and appear to be emotionally stunted. We learn a lot of our emotionally vocabulary when we are toddlers. If we miss this window it can be very difficult to pick it up and appear natural. 

Emotional stunting is not the same as "emotional immaturity," which is the situation where an adult expresses emotions as a child would: temper tantrums, uncontrollable impatience - basically behaving like selfish children, narcissistic teenager, or irresponsible young adult - and feel entitled to behave as they see fit. I have heard this condition referred to as Little Prince (or Princess) Syndrome, and Peter Pan Syndrome. It often results from an overly protective parent - a helicopter parent - or a parent who gives the child free range, and too much praise and attention during childhood and adolescence. Such parental behavior is also sometimes referred to as emotional incest, although I find this term to be inappropriate and ugly. In the famous case of Ethan Couch, the "Affluenza" teen who was acquitted of murder, his was actually a case of "emotional immaturity," or peter Pan Syndrome. However, as interesting as this is, my point is that it is not the same thing as emotional stunting, the topic of our discussion here.

Emotion is defined as the mind and body's integrated response to a stimulus of some kind. Emotions represent a big part of who we are, our personality. Just think of how boring we would be without them. We will discuss some of the many important functions of emotions shortly.

There are a lot of automatic emotions, such as fear when we we hear footsteps at night, or the happiness when we get that job we really wanted. A lot of emotions, however, are not automatic, and are instead processed through the brain and require interpretation and decisions. Love is one such emotion. These are the ones that are mostly affected in emotionally stunted people.

There are two reasons why people become emotionally stunted:

1. they grow up in a home where emotion is not expressed or acknowledged, or where emotion is even discouraged or seen as a weakness (the "suck it up" mentality), or
2. following a traumatic or emotionally painful event, where the emotions are so painful that the person's defensive reaction is to suppress emotions. The painful memories linger forever, so suppressing emotions becomes a way of life.

Growing up without emotional stimulation

Let's have a quick look at each of these situations. In the first one, the person has grown up in an emotionless home. We see this situation a lot in people who were raised by a single father. The father may have had a traumatic event (his wife died or left him and the children) and may himself be suppressing emotions. He probably has to work very hard to provide for his children. Paternal instinct is to provide for his family, so work and income become very important and often trump other parental duties, such as spending quality time with the kids. He has to "suck it up" a lot in life, and may feel he's helping his kids grow up and mature by teaching them to "suck it up." Without trying to speak in stereotypes, it is also fair to say that men tend to be less expressive of emotions than are women.

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There are other situations where children grow up in emotionless homes: children of unavailable parents, children of parents struggling with addiction or alcoholism, children who are unwanted by their parents, children who are blamed by their parents for some deficiency in the parent's life (a child of rape, a child of a bitter divorce, a child who is the focus of large support payments to be paid, a disabled or otherwise heavy care child, a misbehaved child). Also, the children of emotionally stunted parents may be lacking in enough emotional stimulation and modelling to attain a healthy emotional development.

A lot of children, especially boys, are brought up being discouraged to feel and express emotion. Some parents believe that people become successful only when "tough," which they take to mean being emotionally blunted. They believe that by discouraging showing and expressing emotion they are helping their kids to succeed in life by making them totally insensitive. In reality, they are just teaching them to stuff their emotions deep down inside, rather than allow the emotions to do their job by helping us to feel our way through life's situations, both good and bad.

The person who grows up uncomfortable feeling and expressing emotion tends to lash out in even minor stressors, as pent-up emotions that have accumulated over a life-time try to find their expression. As well, they tend to be seen as "emotionally unavailable" in relationships. Having said that, it is important not to paint everyone with the same brush, everybody's situation is somewhat different. Certainly, I have observed that emotionally stunted people are capable of just as much empathy and sympathy and love as anyone else, but they are just not comfortable or confident of their ability to express it. Thus, they may be seen as emotionally cold.

The home is key to a child's emotional development. Schools are not geared to assist in children's emotional development, and in fact strongly discourage shows of emotion, especially affection, anger, sadness, and love. The home is where these important aspects of human cognition grow and are fostered. In fact, in this society people are encouraged to think and discouraged to feel, so the home in early life is the only place where emotions can be properly learned and nurtured.

Emotional stunting as a defence mechanism

The other way that people become emotionally stunted is following some emotional trauma, as an automatic reaction to protecting themselves from the emotional pain that comes from the trauma, and to prevent themselves from getting hurt in the future. This is an understandable reaction, and may or may not be done consciously. By cutting off emotion, they are being robbed of the richness that emotions add to life. It's like cutting off their hand so that they don't have to worry about burning it on the stove again.

Emotional stunting and substance use

In my experience with people with drug or alcohol addictions I have noticed that emotional stunting can lead a person to using substances to tamp down emotions that need to be expressed.

Many such people have unacknowledged and unexpressed emotions that cause them ongoing pain. A common example is someone who is emotionally stunted and at some point faced the death of a loved one. Often these people have not allowed themselves to grieve, either because they were uncomfortable with it or didn't even know how. Because of this the grief becomes an ongoing emotion buried deep inside that causes pain.

An emotionally stunted person usually will not even recognize this pain, or will accept it as yet another emotion to be ignored.

Over time, other strong emotions - grief, anger, hate - go unresolved and add onto the big pile of mixed feelings brewing inside the person. These can cause considerable discomfort and ongoing pain. Alcohol or drugs may become the preferred way of gaining a temporary release from these unresolved emotions. Likewise, other addictive behaviors - binge-eating, gambling, compulsive shopping, sex addiction - may become ways of trying to gain temporary relief. These people may not even be consciously aware of why the effect of the addictive substance or behavior is so attractive to them.

*** For an interesting read about how to apply positive psychology to your daily life, see "The Science of Self-Motivation" (click here). ***

Why are stunted emotions harmful?

It might sound good to some people to be emotionless, like the Vulcans on Star Trek. Oh, to be immune to grief and anguish and sadness! Maybe, but we are not Vulcans. Emotions are an embedded part of our higher brain functions (our cognition) and we are not immune to them. In fact, if we try to be emotionless we are just suppressing the expression of emotions that allows us to get them out of our psyche in a healthy way. Like it or not, we all have emotions, whether we recognize and understand them or not. Trying to ignore them doesn't make them go away.

I commonly see situations where emotionally stunted people never allow themselves to grieve after a significant loss, such as the death of  a loved one. Expressing grief and sharing it with others who are grieving is like a pressure release, and is crucial to allowing us to move through the healthy stages of grieving, eventually getting to the "acceptance" phase. This is where we have accepted the loss, and are able to move forward without the grief still dominating our thoughts and actions. Certainly, the loss will never be forgotten and will always remain sad for us, but it is put in its proper place.

Being in touch with our emotions helps us to use them for their intended purposes in life. They provide us with the energy and motivation to meet our goals. They motivate us to make decisions, to be bold, or strive to understand each other. They enrich the experience of film, theatre, art, music, and reading.

Understanding them in ourselves and the having the ability to read them both in ourselves and in others is vital if we want to make it through even an average day. Misreading them in ourselves and others can be confusing and even dangerous. Sensing emotions helps us to read other people's intentions and reactions.

The ability to effectively express and validate tender, loving emotions is essential to maintaining close personal relationships. This means sharing intimate feelings with our loved one, in a manner that's nourishing and constructive, and being able to respond affirmatively when the other person does the same. 

Emotions also serve to focus our attention in important situations (e.g. fearful situations), or to sense a non-verbal situation which requires our attention (such as when a teenaged daughter is upset or distraught but doesn't say so).

Emotions are also connected to thoughts and memories. Memories are not just facts encoded in our brains; they are colored with the emotions felt at the time the events occurred. It has been well established by research that memories that are associated with strong emotions are our strongest memories. We want all our best memories to be remembered forever, and emotions help us to do so.

Emotions serve as the affective basis of many attitudes, values, and beliefs that we have about the world and the people around us; without emotions those attitudes, values, and beliefs would be just statements without meaning. Emotions give those statements meaning, and allow us to be passionate about our beliefs and principles.

Emotions, therefore, not only influence immediate actions but also serve as an important motivational basis for future behaviors. Many of us strive to experience the feelings of satisfaction, joy, pride, or triumph in our accomplishments and achievements. At the same time, we also work very hard to avoid strong negative feelings. So, emotions provide a strong incentive to strive for rewarding situations and to work hard to prevent negative situations.

Emotions are expressed both verbally through words and nonverbally through facial expressions, voices, gestures, body postures, and movements. We are constantly expressing emotions when interacting with others, and others can reliably judge those emotional expressions. Thus, emotional expression is an important part of our communication with others and influences others and our social interactions. Emotions and their expressions communicate information to others about our feelings, intentions, relationship with the object of the emotions, and the environment. Because emotions have this communicative signal value, they help solve social problems by evoking responses from others, by signaling the nature of interpersonal relationships.

Emotional expressions provide incentives for desired social behavior. People around us will try to elicit a reaction of happiness, love, or surprise in us. Our positive reaction is rewarding to them, and it provides them with a powerful incentive - consciously or otherwise - to continue to do things that will please us. This can be seen when employees at work go the extra mile to elicit a positive, happy response from us, but it is especially important in relationships at home. Children are very sensitive to emotional reactions from their parents, and will be motivated to pursue good behaviors by the desire to elicit positive emotional responses from the parent.

Even the "negative" emotions - anger, sadness, grief - are important to us. If we don't recognize, acknowledge, express and share these emotions they will remain inside of us and remain a reliable source of negative feelings and reactions for a lifetime.

*** Like reading about positive psychology that you can apply to daily life? See our article "How Perspective Changes Lives" (click here). ***

A couple of things you may have heard of

I'm going to mention a couple of concepts related to emotional stunting, because some readers may have heard of them. These are "Emotional Deprivation Disorder" and the "Emotional Intelligence" (EI, also known as EQ).  

Emotional Deprivation Disorder was first discovered by Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Anna Terruwe in the 1950’s. She called it frustration neurosis , as she believed it had to do with the frustration of the natural need for unconditional love. Emotional Deprivation Disorder is a syndrome (a grouping of symptoms) which results from a lack of authentic affirmation and emotional strengthening by another. A person may have been criticized, ignored, abandoned, neglected, abused, or emotionally rejected by primary caregivers early in life, resulting in the person’s arrested emotional development. Just like children, unaffirmed persons are incapable on their own of developing into emotionally mature adults until they receive authentic affirmation from another person. However, while unaffirmed persons cannot affirm themselves, there is much they can do to help themselves.

Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) is the ability to perceive, control and evaluate emotions – in oneself and others – and to use that information appropriately. Some sources claim that 90% of high performers at the work place possess high EQ, while 80% of low performers have low EQ. Emotional Intelligence is absolutely essential in the formation, development, maintenance, and enhancement of close personal relationships. Unlike IQ, which does not change significantly over a lifetime, our EQ can evolve and increase with our desire to learn and grow.

Really, "Emotional Deprivation Disorder" and a "low EQ" are both essentially different names for what I am referring to as "emotional stunting." However, EQ is also applied to people who are "emotionally immature" and unable to handle emotions, which is very different than stunting.

So, what if I am emotionally stunted?

We can definitely get connected with, recognize, and allow our emotions to express themselves in our life, even if we missed out on the full development of these as a child, or a traumatic event caused us to suppress our emotions.

There are lots of websites and books with all kinds of suggestions on how to get in touch with our emotions, but it has been my experience that emotionally stunted people need some informed guidance here, in the form of a therapist familiar with dealing with emotional issues. Emotionally stunted people usually have very little insight into their issues, mainly because they have been living like that for so long that they may not recognize anything wrong. As well, they tend to be out of touch with their emotions, and reading in a book how to do that is like reading in a book to learn what a banana tastes like, for someone who has never tasted a banana.

Having said that, many people have succeeded in getting in touch with their emotions and overcome the emotional debris from the past. There is no one who is incapable of it.

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