Let's Explore: Neglect and Abandonment
To neglect yourself is to forget to take care of yourself.
Neglect and abandonment.
We all were subjected to neglect at some point in our childhood. Although our parents were well-intentioned, our needs had to be balanced with theirs. You may love your father, even adore your mother, but by default, a human has to go through the process of unburdening outdated programming. This programming consists of beliefs, perceptions, and ideas that, although they helped you survive, they also aided in you putting your needs on the backburner.
Needs left unmet by your parents and childhood environment eventually have to be revisited. With compassion and empathy, you begin to view your parents as only being representative of certain aspects in your life. Embodiments of principles, concepts, and lessons learned. To objectively take this perspective, you then shift your responsibility to taking care of the kid whose needs were not fully met as a child.
You cannot look out for yourself while depending on others to fulfill your needs. That's what we're going to discuss today: self-neglect.
There are plenty of ways you can neglect yourself. In hygiene, relationships, avoiding your needs and passions, etc. The problem is, we always turn to external tools and solutions that only band-aid the symptoms because we are such upstanding law-abiding citizens with jobs and responsibilities. We seek the solutions to our problems through an adult lens, which is very rigid, dense, and most importantly distracted.
We can all agree that the time in our lives where we were most free was as a child. Resources were met, responsibilities taken care of. The only thing we had to do was be a child. Over the course of our childhood, this turned into obedience and eventually one day you will have to work like "Mommy and Daddy". This resulted in putting away childish things, maturing, "growing up".
This is all fine and good. However, this process includes shutting off the majority of your brain. You depend less on your intuition and more on your intellect. You see the imagination as an irrational tool for solving your problems; only for those in "creative spaces" and children. You fragmentize everything into a step-by-step process instead of holistically letting everything flow together. Simply put, you forget the kid you once were.
“Oh it's a thing of the past. Oh, that's just a figment of my imagination. Yeah, that's fine and good but what would so-and-so say about this?”
As a kid, you could care less who looked at you while playing with your toys. Meanwhile, as an adult, you have to train yourself to not care what others think. You have to damn near hypnotize yourself into the understanding that it's okay to be seen. As a kid, you could care less what people thought about what you said. Even if it was blunt, it was the truth. You didn't have any preconceived notions of how it would sound, or any parameters of being socially correct, politically correct, or any form of "correct". You said what you said and you left it at that.
Oftentimes, the stress we go through as adults deals with a limitation of solutions. A constricted perspective as to how things can get done. This comes as a result of dependence on logic and rationale to solve all your needs. Contrary to popular belief, this mentality breeds self-neglect, burnout, addictive behaviors, and a deviation from your path, your mission here on Earth.
By healing your inner child, you merge the severed parts of you. Yes, you were severed. You are a spiritual being having a human experience. Apart of that human experience is signing up to "forget" who you are. Returning home to yourself is knowing that the kid in you never left. It only got suppressed, neglected, and deemed irrelevant to the rest of your life.
This severance results in ignoring your intuition. Running into places, situations, and relationships that have absolutely nothing to do with you or your elevation. Seeking external validation to feel the void of neglect and abandonment.
This occurrence, when initiated by the parents, gets taught to the child as a survival mechanism. It is a well-known African proverb that states:
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."
Neglect is an absence of love. It does not matter the intentions of the parents. This is why self-love, self-care, and healing the inner child is of the utmost importance to true spiritual, mental, and emotional growth.
It is not your fault what happened to you. Spiritually adept individuals know that you signed up to experience that anyway. It is a part of being human. A void must be created to be fulfilled one day by the individual.
However, to evolve, one must go through involution. Enfolding yourself and becoming involved in your reality. No longer depending on others but creating from within. Taking responsibility for your creation. Taking care of your kid, the original untainted and innocent part of you.
That is the true power of being a kid again.
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