CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - How Parental Rejection Embeds Into Your Nervous System

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Parental rejection hurts more than almost any other kind of rejection, and it’s a pain that doesn't dissolve with age. If you've ever minimized what happened by saying "they just weren't that affectionate" or wondered why you can't just get over it, this episode reveals the research-backed truth about how early rejection embeds itself into your nervous system, personality, and every relationship you have as an adult.Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic PositivityThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to Calling Home. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of the Family Cycle Breakers Club, our membership community at Calling Home. Today, I want to talk about something that is deeply painful and that we are focusing this month on inside of our membership community at Calling Home. Why parental rejection hurts more than almost any other kind of rejection. We're going to be exploring parental rejection, emotional abandonment and the long-lasting impact these experiences can have on adults. If you want support that goes beyond this episode like private community discussion boards, therapists-led groups, worksheets, practical tools, and more personalized content,

you can join the Family Cycle Workers Club anytime at callinghome.com. This theme is specifically designed to help you understand and heal from these wounds. Let's get into it. The first thing I want to talk about is why this is why this is. pain goes so deep. When a parent rejects or abandons a child, emotionally, physically, or relationally, the pain doesn't just dissolve with age. Time does not automatically heal this wound. It embeds itself into your nervous system, your identity, and your self-worth. Because as kids, we are looking to our caregivers to know, am I safe? Am I loved? Do I matter?

is the world safe and predictable? And when a parent is unavailable, rejecting, critical, or inconsistent, the brain doesn't interpret that as, oh, this adult is struggling. They're having a hard time. I should be a little bit more patient with them. They interpret that as danger. This is especially true for very young children. And parental rejection is so different from peer rejection, romantic rejection, or getting

rejected in the workplace because it happens at the exact moment that you are forming your sense of self. It happens during some of our most sensitive developmental periods. And it becomes your story before you even know that you're telling yourself a story or that you're developing one about your life. It shapes ultimately how you learn to operate in relationships for you. years to come. Something I've realized about this work is that many adults don't recognize what happens as abandonment. They try to minimize or reframe what they experienced. So they'll say things like, my parent just wasn't that affectionate or we weren't that close. They worked a lot. They loved me. They just weren't very emotional. They only withdrew when they were disappointed in me.

And that was my fault. I shouldn't have done that thing to disappoint them. These are often just socially acceptable ways of describing emotional abandonment. And there are ways of maintaining that fantasy bond with the parent. And a lot of the adults that I work with and that join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home and listen to this podcast, ask themselves, like, was it really that bad? Shouldn't I be over it? The research is incredibly clear on perceived parental rejection. And this is not always just overt abuse, but it's how you experienced the relationship with your parent. And if you feel that you were rejected and abandoned by that parent, you are more likely to have

higher physiological reactivity distress, experience more shame, have difficulty trusting others, experience things like depression and anxiety, have chronic self-blame and have problems in your adult relationships, romantic friendship, and it works. And these effects persist into adulthood. And that's not because you're fragile or weak or you can't get over it. But your nervous system really doesn't forget where it first learned that connection was unsafe, especially if you have not had repetitive, reliable, safe connection sense of that. The most powerful and I think debilitating aspect of parental rejection is the internal narrative that it creates.

So these are the stories that we tell ourselves. after that rejection to make sense of it. I said this earlier, but children do not think my parent has limited emotional capacity. They're just struggling. They think there must be something wrong with me. Why can't I get my parent to love me? And this often becomes like the organizing principle and storyline of their emotional life. They carry that narrative and start saying things like, I'm too much.

I'm not enough. If I were lovable, they would have acted differently. towards me. If I perform better, maybe I will earn the connection that I never got from them. And some of these adults over-chase connection, like they cannot be alone or they over-function and over-perform to avoid being abandoned again. And others shut down and they preemptively reject other people before they can be rejected themselves. And they find themselves really isolating and not wanting to seek out relationships. Every small moment of disconnection. So a delayed text, your partner being quiet or in a bad mood, a friend who is distracted,

can become this really enormous thing because you're seeing it as rejection and rejection equals danger or I'm about to be abandoned. So it's not that you're overreacting. Your body is remembering what it experienced. One of the first. One of the first, of the biggest consequences of parental rejection and abandonment is shame. And shame is one of the heaviest legacies that these adults carry. And the shame tells you, it was my fault. And if it was my fault, I can control it and I can change it. As a child, that belief feels safer than acknowledging that someone who was supposed to love you like your parent didn't, wouldn't or couldn't. And shame also allows those children to preserve their fragile sense of security.

If I'm the problem, the world is still predictable because I can control myself. If I caused this, maybe I can fix it. If I see my parent as good, I can maintain my attachment to them. But in adulthood, that protective strategy often becomes much more self-punishing. than self-protective, right? You start to engage in things like perfectionism, emotional withdrawal, you have constant self-doubt, never feeling good enough. And people-pleasing and over-functioning become a lot more common. These are strategies that you are utilizing. And the research on this really shows that building emotional competence, like naming your feelings, tolerating emotions,

understanding your triggers is one of the most effective ways to weaken shame's grip on your life. Shame ultimately is able to dissolve and not become like the driving force in your life. When you look beneath it and see that there's actually a lot of grief there or maybe longing for something different that that shame has been covering up and making it impossible for you to move Ford. What I want you to remember and really take away from this episode about parental abandonment is that their rejection is a reflection of their capacity, not your worth or your ability to be loved. Parents who withdraw, leave, or punish with silence are often dealing with unresolved trauma, mental health challenges, addiction, emotional immaturity, systemic stress, or a

a lack of skill. They don't know what they don't know. And so the healing that we're working on this month inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club and the resources that I am giving you are about shifting this story. Instead of saying they left because I wasn't enough, you are moving into they left because they couldn't stay. And that shift doesn't excuse their behavior. But it frees you from carrying the responsibility for a wound that you didn't cause. And so each time you can replace that self-blame with context, you release a piece of your own shame. And you can start to see yourself through this more accurate and compassionate lens.

Now, you might notice that this rejection wound is showing up often in your adult relationships because this wound doesn't stay confined to childhood. often it gets healed in those relationships. So for many of you, you might experience like a fear of being forgotten, have a lot of panic that comes up during conflict or distance. You may overextend yourself a lot to feel loved or accepted by someone to earn their love. You may shut down emotionally a lot, especially when you feel like you're being rejected or someone is pulling away from you. you have difficulty trusting others or depending on them. You stay in unhealthy relationships for far too long because self-abandonment feels pretty familiar and like something that you are supposed to do

in your relationships. Or you push healthy partners away to avoid being hurt because you feel like it's inevitably going to go there. And these aren't character flaws that you have that can never go away. They're protective adaptations. And your nervous system learned early on that relationships can just go away. They can disappear without any warning. And so it tries to keep you safe, even if the strategies no longer are serving you. This month, we're focusing a lot inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club on actually healing from parental rejection and doing something about it, because we can't go back and erase what that parent did and the impact that it had, but you can start living differently today. And so I really think that healing from parental rejection isn't

about pretending that the past didn't matter or that it didn't happen. It might be even about acknowledging that your parent is rejecting or abandoning you today in adulthood for whatever reason. And so we have to work on rebuilding self-acceptance and accepting who you are. and developing the emotional skills to do that. You also have to learn to regulate your stress response so that you can form safe, reliable connections and learn to trust your own internal signals that might be kind of off because of what you experienced during childhood.

And then this all allows us to rewrite that narrative from self-blame to more self-understanding and putting the blame where it lies on the adults, not on you as a child for being unlovable or being someone that should be abandoned. And then when you get to rack up this like good amount of new experiences that include consistency, empathy, and repair, you start to learn a new truth and you override some of that old programming. You learn that love can be safe, that people can be dependable, and that you don't have to earn connection. Like, yes, you should be a good partner and be kind and respectful and loving.

But after that, like, you deserve love from the people that care about and love you. And this is how adults can create something called earned secure attachment, which is something that you can develop in adulthood, even if you didn't experience that as a child or in adulthood with your parents. And you don't do that by erasing the past, but you build a future and a present that is really grounded in safety. Okay? So after listening to this, I want you to remind yourself if you've experienced this type of rejection that it's not because you were too needy or too emotional or too difficult to love.

You were a child that was asking for connection. And this is the most human, normal, expected, necessary things that a child will do. and when you are rejected or abandoned, that wound will shape you in ways that are not great for your adult life. But it does not have to define you forever. If this episode resonated with you, I want you to know that you don't have to work through this wound alone. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home, we are spending the entire month of February diving deeper into parental rejection. So therapist-led support groups with me and other therapists, private community discussion boards, guided worksheets, scripts, healing tools, and personalized content that is tailored just to what

you need. This is a space for adults who want to understand their wounds, change their patterns, and build healthier relationships. Not by pretending that this didn't matter, but by finally giving themselves the care they deserved. You can join us at callinghome.co. Thank you for being here. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review, or a comment, and I will see you again for another episode soon. Bye. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services.

It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.