A review by bluejayreads
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb, Christine Musello

3.0

Before we get into the actual review, I have to add some context. This review is probably going to come off significantly more scathing than I intend, and I’m hoping by providing some context to my comments and the book itself, you’ll have a better idea of where I’m coming from. 

First, I’ve been working on the whole “dealing with childhood trauma” thing for eight years, which includes reading a ton of internet articles and many books on related topics. So I’m already incredibly familiar with not just the basics of mental health, childhood trauma, PTSD, and trauma treatment and recovery concepts, but also things like generational trauma, the physical effects of emotional trauma, and interpersonal and capitalistic factors affecting mental health. I would even go as far as to say that there are very few layperson-accessible concepts around mental health and trauma that I haven’t read at least a little about (although if you want to introduce me to something new I’d love to hear about it). So I’m already going into this with a strong foundation. 

Second, this book was published in 2012. I didn’t start my journey to work on my childhood trauma and mental health until 2014-2015, so I’m not very familiar with what was going on in that space before then. For all I know, this book was groundbreaking and revolutionary at time of publication. However, I’m reading it a full decade after it was published with eight years of mental health and trauma reading behind me. All of which strongly affected my opinions. 

Now let’s do a review. 

The whole idea of the first part of this book seems to be built on convincing readers that emotional neglect is an actual thing. It has a “quiz” asking if you’ve experienced any of these symptoms that are common with emotional neglect – although I noticed that many of the questions were phrased so broadly that almost anyone could legitimately say yes. Then there were examples. So, so many examples. Part one discussed the different types of emotionally neglectful parents, and each type was illustrated with examples, often multiple examples. 

The book states at the beginning that it’s written for both patients and clinicians. (It clearly also has a third audience of parents who don’t want to emotionally neglect their children, who get a whole chapter in part three but don’t get mentioned as an explicit audience for the book.) I have to assume that clinicians are familiar with many of the concepts involved, and I imagine that patients who seek this book out have some level of awareness about the problems going on. The excessive examples got annoying fast. 

This book also implicitly contradicts itself almost constantly. It’s a “do as I say, not as I do” situation – the stated opinions are completely opposite to the tone and attitude of the writing. Part one states to not blame your parents, but then spends the rest of the section teaching you what specifically to blame your parents for. It kept claiming that you don’t have to be perfect to be a good parent, but everything else about the book seemed to say that if you aren’t a perfect parent your child is doomed to loneliness and suicidal ideation. 

It keeps telling you that just because you were emotionally neglected in childhood doesn’t mean you’re irreparably broken, but it spends so much time talking about all the different ways emotional neglect damages you that it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that you are irrevocably doomed. It may claim you can heal the damage, but the ratio of “discussion of the damage” to “here’s how to heal yourself” is significantly skewed towards descriptions of the mental anguish and shattered relationships that result from emotional neglect. It spends so much time describing the problem that the solutions feel inadequate, like offering a band-aid for a bullet wound. 

The few solutions provided seem better described as “paltry advice” – inspiring but vague, more concepts than action plan, and incredibly meager compared to the sheer volume of pain the book describes. Most of the ideas are things I recognize from the concept of re-parenting yourself. And all of the practical advice is worksheets. Literally all of it. Jonice has some worksheets available on her website and that’s the one tool you get to help overcome a childhood of emotional neglect. I actually was curious about the enjoyment worksheet and went and looked it up, and it turns out they’re not even worksheets. They’re tracking forms. The enjoyment one has boxes for every day of the year and asks you to count how many times you prioritized enjoyment each day. That’s it. 

This book really feels like it was trying to introduce a brand new concept into the public consciousness. And perhaps in 2012, it was. But I was aware of the concept of emotional neglect long before I heard of this book (so I guess if that was the goal, it did its job) and found this book-length definition depressing and unhelpful. Emotional neglect is a great concept for both personal and clinical work to identify and describe a particular type of childhood trauma. But while the idea is good and useful, the book itself is not. 
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