“There are wounds that never show up on the body that are deeper and more painful than anything that bleeds.” ~ Laurel K. Hamilton
My sister is four years older than me. As a child, I worshiped the land she walked on. She is very smart, very beautiful, very chic. I want to be wherever I am and do whatever I want.
I was desperate for any attention she might throw my way. I even asked her to remove my baby’s teeth so she could pull one at a time. In the meantime, she was distracting me.
Other than that, she did not want to do anything with me. I mean nothing.
At first I thought it was normal. The age gap is large enough that she has personal friends, personal interests, her personal life, excluding little sister Tagalog. That’s how it goes in many families.
What I did not know was that this was not a stage. It is a model that will follow me for the next fifty years.
She was verbally abusive. That section is easy to name and point to. She would call my name, talk to me, and even bring friends who were intimidated.
She can make me feel stupid right away. Sometimes she was also physically abused. If I ever called her out of her behavior, I would be slapped or punched.
That violence is dismissed as a “sibling” in our family. I never hit her back, but considered normal.
But honestly, most of the physical stuff I can handle. It did not happen often because I had a lot of encouragement not to face her. Words I Can Do Sometimes Laugh out loud.
What destroys me is ignorance. She will not recognize my presence. Not occasionally. Consistent.
I would walk into a room and she kept talking to others as if I had not walked in. I would say hello and nothing at all. Even for a moment. It was as if I could not see the ghost drifting around her premises.
When I try to converse with her, she will not listen. I could be in the middle of a sentence and she would bother changing topics, talking to me, or checking in entirely. Her hands will cut her face, and her eyes will drift somewhere that cuts off my head, as if I had ceased to exist in real time.
The message was clear, though never spoken. You are annoying. You are under me. You do not deserve the energy it takes to recognize.
And I believed her. Why won’t I? She is my sister. She is supposed to love me, see me, protect me in a world that can be very cruel.
Instead, she became my first lesson in what it felt like to be treated as trivial. Those lessons learned from childhood become the foundation on which you build your whole self-image.
The thing they ignore is not declaring themselves. No extreme exposure, no gunpowder. It is an increase.
It penetrates your nervous system like water, searching for cracks in the foundation. You begin to question your own truth. You replay the conversation in your head, looking for when you did something that deserved it.
And that questioning is where the real damage happens.
When someone is indifferent to you, your brain treats their silence as data. It catalogs it. It creates storytelling.
I do not deserve to respond. I do not deserve to be recognized. My words, my thoughts, my presence are not important.
You will not let anyone stand in front of you and tell you these things in front of you. But when they say it absent, through the silence of unanswered texts, through empty spaces that should touch the eyes, it feels different. It feels like they are reflecting the fact that you are always skeptical about yourself.
That is a trap. That’s where the wound deepens.
Trauma research shows that chronic mental neglect triggers the same neurological processes as physical pain. Your body cannot tell the difference between being ignored and being beaten. The same area of the brain is bright. The same stress hormones flood your system.
In neck Study Notes Published in ScienceNaomi Eisenberger and her team scanned people’s brains as they played a virtual shooting game designed to make them feel excluded. What they found was interesting. The same areas of the brain that act during physical pain, especially the anterior cingulate brain, also activate during social rejection.
Your body can not tell the difference between indifference and physical pain.
The message from your nervous system is vague. This hurts.
And it is not just acute rejection that causes damage. Research on Child Mental Neglect from Harvard Center on Child Development Indicates that a continuous absence of responsive care interferes with the development of brain architecture, especially in the areas responsible for executive function and emotional regulation. When caregivers do not respond regularly, the brain will adapt to this absence.
It creates a neural pathway around the prospect of invisibility.
This is what that means in practice. When your family members ignore you, your developing brain is learning something profound. It is learning that your voice is not important, your presence is irrelevant, the effort it takes to speak in a room where no one will respond is not worth it.
Your brain builds itself around that lesson.
This is why they are so deeply ignored. It is not just a memory of pain. It is embedded in the architecture of how you interact with other people, how you see yourself, how you move through the world in anticipation of calm or security.
We like to think that we are more complex than our ancestors, that we evolved past the primitive cords that kept us close to the tribe in order to survive. But our nervous system has not received the memorandum. It still considers social rejection as a threat to life.
For most of human history, being evicted means death.
Therefore, when you are ignored, you do not just feel pain. You are experiencing a threat response. Your body thinks it is dying.
That is why ignoring can feel catastrophic at all and beyond your ability to think clearly about what is happening. Your nervous system is screaming at you to fix it to restore the connection, even if that connection is dangerous. Even if it is killing you slowly.
I finally broke up with my sister, not because of big ideas, but because I found myself again. Over the years of working on myself from the inside out, learning toxic behaviors and how to recognize patterns I have come to understand. I started to see what it really was.
It did not come from my shortcomings. I’m not her problem.
The night I made my decision, I felt a change. As the bone will return to its place after being displaced for a long time, you forget that it has to move differently. The pain does not stop immediately.
The wound did not heal overnight. But the first step is to recognize that I am gradually getting hungry for normal vision surrounded by normal appearance.
What I understand is that they ignore what you are taught about yourself. Those lessons, when left unchecked, will be the mirror through which you see every future relationship. You start to expect silence.
You start preparing for it. You start building a wall around yourself, not because you want to, but because your body knows that the open space is where the pain occurs.
If you are reading this and it brings tears to my eyes, I want you to know something. The damage from neglect is real, but it is not permanent. Your brain has learned to anticipate silence, and your brain is remarkably good at learning new things.
You can teach yourself that you should listen. It takes time. It takes time to surround yourself with people who show the wrong silence, who show those who reflect to you the values that someone is absent trying to erase.
But first you have to stop accepting silence as something you deserve. You do not.
The fact that you are reading this, seeking understanding, tells me that you know something is wrong. Believe in knowing. Your intuition does not matter.
Silence is.
