Last week I introduced a phrase I want to stay with a little longer.
Emotional starvation.
I used it in the context of hunger — how when you don't eat, your body eventually stops sending hunger signals. Not because you're no longer hungry. Because your body learned that the signal wasn't going to be answered. So it goes quiet. It conserves. It protects you by asking for less.
Emotions do the same thing.
Think about what happens when a child cries and is told to stop. Not once. Over and over. Year after year. The child doesn't stop feeling. They stop showing. And eventually, they stop noticing. The signal gets buried so deep that by the time they're an adult, they genuinely don't know what they feel. They're not avoiding their emotions. Their body stopped sending the message because it learned, a long time ago, that the message wasn't welcome.
That is emotional starvation. And most of us are carrying some version of it.
It doesn't always come from something dramatic. Sometimes it comes from a home where feelings were simply not part of the conversation. Where the answer to "How are you?" was always "Fine." Where tears made people uncomfortable and anger made people leave the room. Where the unspoken rule was: feel what you feel, but don't let anyone see it.
That's not abuse. But it is a kind of deprivation. The body needed something — to be heard, to be held, to be allowed — and it didn't get it. So it adapted. It learned to need less. Or at least, to ask for less.
As a doctor of psychology, I've seen this pattern more times than I can count. Adults who describe themselves as "not emotional." Adults who feel numb and don't know why. Adults who can think their way through anything but can't feel their way through a Tuesday afternoon. They're not broken. Their body did exactly what it was designed to do. It protected them by going quiet.
Here's where this gets important for us as parents.
Because many of us who were emotionally starved are now trying to feed our children's emotional lives. And that is beautiful, and hard, and sometimes confusing, because we're offering something we were never given.
You might find yourself doing everything "right" — naming feelings, staying close, offering presence — and still feeling like you're performing it rather than living it. That's not failure. That's the gap between what you know your child needs and what your own body learned to expect.
Your child says "I'm scared" and you say all the right words, but inside, your body is tight, because no one said the right words to you. Your child cries and you stay, but part of you wants to fix it fast, because that's what was done to you. Your child rages and you hold the space, but your nervous system is screaming, because rage was never safe in your home.
This is not a parenting skills problem. This is a body memory problem. And it deserves tenderness, not more pressure to get it right.
The good news is that the body can learn again.
Emotional starvation isn't permanent. The signals didn't die. They went underground. And they can come back — slowly, gently, the same way you'd re-feed a body that hasn't eaten in a long time. Not with a feast. With something small and consistent.
A sip, not a flood.
This is what re-feeding looks like emotionally: you start answering the signals again. Not the big ones. The small, ordinary ones. The tightness in your chest when you're overwhelmed. The ache in your throat when something touches you. The heaviness in your body at the end of a long day. You notice it. You name it, even just to yourself. And you let it be there without overriding it.
That's it. That's the beginning.
A small River & Ember practice: The Re-Feeding
This isn't a one-time exercise. It's a daily practice of answering what your body sends — even when the signal is faint.
- Catch one signal today.
It doesn't have to be emotional. It can be physical. Hunger. Thirst. Tiredness. Tension. The first step is simply noticing that your body sent you something and pausing long enough to receive it.
- Answer it. Not with words. With action.
If you're hungry, eat. If you're tired, sit down for two minutes. If your chest is tight, put your hand there and breathe. The answer doesn't need to be big. It just needs to be real.
- Do it again tomorrow.
Same time if you can. Same kind of noticing. The body doesn't trust one response. It trusts a pattern. You're teaching your nervous system that the signal will be heard — not just once, but again and again.
You are not too far gone. Your body is not too quiet to hear. It's just waiting to see if this time, someone is listening.
If you want one line to carry with you this week, try this:
"A sip, not a flood."
For the grown-up heart
Sit with these — not to answer right away, but to notice what comes up:
When I say "I'm fine," how often is that true — and how often is it a habit my body learned a long time ago?
What did I learn as a child about which feelings were allowed and which ones weren't?
Where in my parenting do I feel the gap between what I know my child needs and what my own body is able to give?
What is one small signal my body has sent me today that I could answer instead of override?
P.S. This is the piece I promised in last week's letter. And it connects to something bigger that's coming — because when we understand emotional starvation, we understand why the nervous system behaves the way it does. That's next. Stay close.
A gentle invitation: Hit reply and tell me — what's one signal your body sent you this week that you actually answered?
With warmth,
Tenisha
River & Ember
