The Silent Impact of Childhood Neglect: Recognizing and Healing Invisible Wounds with Ruth Cohn, ATW

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Ruth Cohn, MFT, delves into the often-overlooked #trauma of #childhood neglect—the experience of "nothing." Drawing from her 25 years of research and practice, Ruth reveals how #neglect shapes lives, relationships, and self-perception. Learn practical tools to identify the signs of neglect, validate its impact, and offer meaningful support. This video is essential for therapists, #caregivers, and anyone striving to understand the hidden scars of neglect. Discover how to become "neglect-informed" and make a difference in the lives of those who feel #invisible.

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#EmotionalWellness
#selfcare
#ChildhoodNeglect
#NeglectTrauma
#InvisibleWounds
#NeglectInformed
#EmotionalNeglect
#Psychotherapy
#MentalHealthAwareness
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Transcript -
Ruth Cohn MFT (00:00)
Hello, I'm Ruth Cohn and I want to talk to you about nothing. And you may think, wow, that sounds boring. There's nothing to say about nothing, but actually I have a lot to say about nothing. Let me ask you this. Have you ever had a client come into your office and they don't even know why they're there and they say nothing happened to me? In fact, I've never really.

been able to stay in therapy very long or wanted to stay in therapy very long because there was nothing to talk about. mean, nothing happened to me. There's no reason why I should feel bad. I have nothing to complain about except I really feel bad. Well, the word nothing began to stick in my mind because I kept hearing it and I began to

realize that they were telling me about their history of childhood neglect and that neglect is the story of nothing and all the things that didn't happen, that should have happened, that needed to have happened, that developmentally children need and that is what I came to understand we need to help

And that is what I became interested in studying and have been studying and writing and teaching and working with for the last 25 years. I want to start by telling you a story. My mother died about 20 years ago. And when she did, my father was beside himself with grief. And he was a

was a really traumatized man he was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust so when my mother died and my father was so kind of catatonic with grief he asked my sisters and me to call everyone to let them know that my mom had died. One of the people on my list of people to call was my father's memoir writing teacher.

Now he'd been in the group for five years working on his memoir. Every week they'd go to group, they'd share what they had written, read it out loud to the group, and they all really knew a lot about each other's lives. So I called this woman who was the leader of the group and I said to her, you know, this is Ruth Cohn, I'm the daughter of Hans Cohn, and

I wanted to let you know that our mom died. And she said to me, she said, I didn't know he had a daughter. And I said, he has three.

felt almost like a ghost.

I started thinking about all the ghosts that are floating around in their parents' lives, kind of invisible. And that is another window into this subject area, which was already an important subject area to me. The world of childhood neglect, where the child

is one way or another not on the parent's radar, not on the parent's screen. I want to tell you a little bit about how my journey began of working with neglect. My whole practice was working with women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. This was in the early 1990s and

Many of my survivor clients had partners, even spouses, and many of them complained about how their spouses didn't get it, didn't understand, particularly around sex and how they were kind of hounding them for sex and not understanding how they were so compelled and sad and preoccupied with their trauma. And so I thought, well, I need to do something about this. I need to bring in these partners.

and teach them about trauma and sexual abuse. I need to make these, most of them were men, I need to make these men into better support for my clients. So I decided I had a great idea. I would have one day workshops for male partners of women who had been sexually abused in childhood. So I put out my little flyer and I got a response from eight men. And so here I was in my office with

eight men. So eight men and me in this little office for a whole day to for me to teach them about childhood sexual abuse and what trauma recovery was like for their wives. So they come in, I get this group of men, they were really accomplished. I had a physician and an author of many books who was a professor. had an electrician, a tech guy, all kinds of really accomplished smart...