Nothing bad happened, really. Your parents loved you. You had food, a roof, no abuse, no addiction in the house. And yet there is a kind of emptiness you can’t account for. A sadness with no story. A sense that something is missing, and you can’t tell anyone what. If that sentence is yours, this hour is for you.

This long somatic talk gives language to what is sometimes clinically called childhood emotional neglect — the work of psychologist Jonice Webb popularised the term — and goes further than the clinical definition. It names the specific kinds of nothing most people are actually describing: the nothing of nobody-asked-how-you-felt, the nothing of don’t-make-a-fuss, the nothing of competent-from-too-young, the nothing of the depressed or anxious or just-checked-out parent. It does this without making your parents villains and without asking you to upgrade your story into something it isn’t.

Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this is for the dependable ones. The competent ones. The ones who have spent years dismissing themselves because they don’t have the kind of childhood that would make a memoir. The story is missing because the missing was the story. The body remembers, even when the mind has nothing topoint to.