Figuring out if you have suffered emotional damage can be difficult. Emotional damage often develops slowly over time, and the signs can be subtle. However, recognizing the signs of emotional damage is the first step in healing and reclaiming your emotional health.
What is emotional damage?
Emotional damage refers to long-lasting negative effects on a person’s emotional well-being, usually caused by traumatic, abusive, or neglectful experiences. Emotional damage can occur when a person’s emotional needs aren’t met during childhood or due to prolonged exposure to emotional abuse or trauma. This can impair a person’s ability to have healthy relationships, achieve goals, and manage emotions.
Emotional damage may lead to low self-esteem, attachment issues, unresolved anger, chronic emptiness or sadness, inability to trust others, and a negative self-image. A person with emotional damage often struggles with regulating emotions and may resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as addictions or self-harm.
Signs of emotional damage
Here are some common signs and symptoms that may indicate emotional damage:
Difficulty regulating emotions
A person with emotional damage often struggles to manage their feelings. They may rapidly swing from happy to angry to sad, have frequent emotional outbursts, or feel emotionally numb. Small disappointments provoke intense reactions. They may not understand why they feel the way they do.
Problems with relationships
People with emotional damage tend to have turbulent relationships characterized by intense highs and lows. They may idealize new partners before later devaluing them. They struggle with intimacy and trusting others and may repeatedly pick partners that are emotionally unavailable, critical, or abusive.
Low self-esteem
Those with emotional damage frequently have a negative view of themselves. They may feel worthless, flawed, or unlovable. They often feel inadequate and beat themselves up over small mistakes. Their self-esteem may also depend heavily on others’ opinions of them.
Sensitivity to rejection
People with emotional damage often expect rejection and abandonment. They may interpret neutral situations as rejection and overreact. Romantic breakups may devastate them, and they may fear being rejected by friends. They feel they need constant reassurance from relationship partners.
Anger issues
Unresolved resentment and anger are common in those with emotional damage. Past betrayals, abuse, or neglect can leave a person unable to let go of anger. They may have frequent outbursts of rage or seethe with quiet bitterness. Anger often covers underlying feelings of shame or vulnerability.
Attachment issues
Those with emotional damage often struggle with attachment patterns like avoidance or anxiety. Anxious types become overdependent in relationships, while avoidants distance themselves emotionally. Both types may compulsively seek or reject intimacy.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism and extremely high standards are common coping mechanisms for those with emotional damage. Perfectionism helps create an illusion of control for people who feel powerless. Holding themselves to impossible standards also keeps painful feelings suppressed.
Unresolved grief
Emotional damage often involves grief over past losses or childhood traumas that was never fully processed. These individuals may avoid thinking about the past. Signs of unresolved grief include chronic loneliness, inability to move on from losses, and a pervasive sense of sadness.
Difficulty feeling positive emotions
Due to past traumas, people with emotional damage may struggle to feel joy, excitement, contentment, or other positive emotions, even for things others enjoy. Positive experiences may trigger shame or discomfort. They may dampen positive feelings with negative thinking.
Self-destructive habits
Those with emotional damage frequently engage in self-destructive habits like addiction, self-harm, eating disorders, compulsive behaviors or giving up on life dreams. These behaviors provide distraction and temporary relief from inner turmoil. Healthy self-care feels unfamiliar or scary.
Constant anxiety or depression
Emotional damage often manifests as ongoing struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, sadness and depression. Those affected may feel tense or unsettled for no clear reason, withdrawn, fatigued, or plagued by unwanted thoughts. Trauma or grief may underlie these mood issues.
Common causes of emotional damage
Emotional damage often originates in childhood from:
Neglect
A lack of affection, nurturing, or attention from primary caregivers damages children’s emotional development. Neglect communicates to a child they are not worthy of care.
Trauma
Witnessing or experiencing physical, emotional or sexual abuse, violence, or death of a loved one can overwhelm a child’s coping abilities and cause long-term harm.
Inadequate mirroring
When parents insufficiently reflect back a child’s emotions or make the child feel bad for having needs, it impairs the child’s ability to understand and regulate their feelings.
Failure to develop autonomy
Parents who discourage independence, treat the child like a friend or spouse, or excessively control the child stunt a child’s emotional growth.
Perfectionistic parents
Children of highly critical, demanding, or controlling parents often develop perfectionism and performance-based self-esteem.
Inconsistent parenting
Erratic or unreliable parental affection and discipline make children feel anxious and unable to depend on others.
Scapegoating
When certain children in a family are singled out for blame or abuse, they internalize toxic shame, guilt and worthlessness.
Adults can also develop emotional damage from:
Abusive or invalidating relationships
Chronic emotional abuse, neglect, infidelity, or passive-aggressiveness in intimate relationships can shred self-esteem and undermine emotional resilience.
Acute trauma
Events like physical or sexual assault, severe injury or illness, witnessing death or violence, traumatic grief, or natural disasters may cause PTSD and lasting emotional struggles.
Long-term stress
Workplace issues, financial struggles, legal problems, caregiving demands or other chronic pressures strain coping abilities and fray emotional health over time.
Assessing emotional damage
Wondering if you may have some degree of emotional damage? Consider whether you relate to any of the following:
You struggle to name or express your emotions
If you find emotions bewildering, lack emotional awareness or have difficulty articulating your feelings, this indicates problems with emotional development.
You frequently feel empty or numb
Pervasive numbness or feelings of hollowness often stem from emotional avoidance and suppressed emotions. Emptiness signifies insufficient emotional nourishment.
You feel different from or disconnected from others
Believing no one understands you or difficulty feeling close to others points to attachment injuries and developmental gaps resulting from unmet childhood emotional needs.
You often feel unhappy for no reason
Vague chronic sadness, depression or dissatisfaction with life may stem from loss and grief you have never fully processed due to emotional neglect or lack of support.
You cling to harmful habits
Addictions, compulsions, eating disorders, self-harm and other destructive coping methods are common ways emotional pain manifests.
You feel like an imposter
Feeling fraudulent, undeserving, or like you don’t belong could indicate you internalized harmful messages about your worth from childhood bullies, abusers or perfectionistic authority figures.
You have no sense of self
If you constantly chameleon to please others, lack values or interests of your own, or feel unsure of your purpose, your true self likely got submerged due to lack of validation or autonomy.
You perpetually feel unsafe or alarmed
Being frequently tense, defensive, or on high alert signals that your nervous system is stuck in fight-flight-freeze mode due to past danger, betrayals or inadequately processed trauma.
| Age | Event |
|---|---|
| Early childhood | Felt unloved by mother |
| 6 years old | Witnessed parents engaging in domestic violence |
| 8 years old | Experienced bullying from classmates |
| 15 years old | Suffered sexual assault by a stranger |
| 19 years old | Experienced betrayal by first serious boyfriend |
| 23 years old | Struggled with addiction after college |
This hypothetical timeline shows critical events during someone’s childhood and early adulthood that likely contributed to emotional damage.
Healing emotional damage
The good news is that with commitment and support, emotional damage can be healed to a great extent. Some suggested steps for recovering include:
Seeking therapy
Working with a therapist or counselor experienced in treating emotional trauma allows you to explore past pain, gain insight into unhealthy patterns and rebuild self-esteem in a guided, supportive environment.
Processing grief
Naming losses and letting yourself fully mourn what you missed out on or endured can help release bottled-up sadness and move forward. Rituals like writing letters can help facilitate this.
Practicing self-compassion
Instead of berating yourself for mistakes, talk to yourself as a loved one, with understanding of your history. Self-compassion provides the security needed to change unhealthy behaviors.
Setting boundaries
To stop reenacting destructive dynamics, learn to defend your emotions, needs and time against manipulation, neglect or coercion by developing assertive communication skills.
Finding healthy social connections
Relationships with safe, reliable friends who accept you without judgment can counteract damaged beliefs of unworthiness and provide corrective emotional experiences.
Releasing anger and resentment
Letting go of anger through discharge techniques like hitting pillows, talking to empty chairs or writing letters you don’t send protects you from remaining stuck in pain. Forgiveness is for you, not the offender.
Developing self-awareness
Through journaling, mindfulness practices or exploring your beliefs, blind spots, and past, you can gain emotional clarity and reformulate your self-image and rules for living.
Finding purpose and meaning
Exploring your goals, values, passions, and sense of meaning counteracts emptiness and hopelessness. Figuring out how you want to contribute instills hope.
Learning coping skills
Healthy emotional regulation skills like breathing, scheduling pleasant activities, cognitive restructuring, and distraction techniques help you manage difficult emotions and replace dangerous habits with self-care.
When to seek professional help
If emotional damage is severely impacting your quality of life through mood issues, relationship turmoil, self-destructive actions or inability to work or cope, seeking a mental health provider’s expertise is recommended. A therapist can diagnose any underlying mental health conditions fueling your struggles, provide specialized trauma and grief treatment, and help you safely work through past wounds at proper pacing.
With compassionate self-inquiry, time and the right help, you can move forward in your life with self-knowledge, emotional wisdom and hope. The pain of the past does not have to define your future.