Nothing can shake the soul of a person more than abandonment. No matter what time of our lives it happens, it is excruciating and life-altering.
This article will focus on abandonment and ways to heal from its effects.
What is abandonment?
Abandonment is an act carried out by someone who leaves someone alone and feeling helpless. Often, the person doing the abandonment is running away from their responsibilities as a spouse or a parent.
For instance, a woman who has two children and her spouse decides they want freedom, so they go away, leaving broken hearts in their wake. This example is only one possible scenario, as there are many ways to abandon a person, including death.
Emotional abandonment also occurs when a parent or caregiver is physically present but absent emotionally. Perhaps they grew up in a home with a neglectful or traumatic family and are now absent from their own family.
There is not one cause of abandonment, and it is unclear why someone would do so. As mentioned before, experiencing abuse or poverty might play a role in the person’s not connecting or interacting with their child or spouse.
Abandonment Issues
Abandonment issues often arise when an individual has experienced being abandoned in the past and lives the rest of their life afraid of losing someone close. Fear of abandonment is a form of anxiety and often begins in childhood due to traumatic loss.
Abandonment issues can also significantly affect a person’s life and relationships. Fear of abandonment is not considered a mental health condition like depression but is a form of anxiety.
People living with abandonment issues often experience problems with their relationships in that they are terrified the other person will leave them. There are other signs and symptoms in adults, including:
• Being a people pleaser
• Having an inability to trust others
• Giving too much in a relationship
• Avoiding others to avoid rejection from them
• Being codependent
• Insecurity when dealing with friends or family
• Needing to control others
• Sabotaging their relationships
• Unable to express emotional intimacy
• The inability to form and maintain healthy relationships
While all children can also form abandonment issues, it is normal for children under 3 to fear being left alone. Below are the symptoms that show you should be concerned.
• The child constantly worries about being abandoned
• Clinginess
• Having a fear of being alone
• Frequent illness without an apparent cause
• Isolating from family and friends
• Low self-esteem
Abandonment issues are heart-rending and, when paired with a mental health issue such as complex post-traumatic stress disorder or dissociative identity disorder, are destructive.
The Long-Term Effects of Abandonment
When children face abandonment, they grow up feeling unsafe and that people around them cannot be trusted. The emotions accompanying abandonment include feeling they do not deserve positive attention or adequate care.
Physical abandonment may include:
• Lack of supervision
• Physical or sexual assault
• Narcissistic abuse
• The inappropriate offering of nutrition
• Inadequate clothes, heat, shelter, or housing
People who are victims of abandonment are more likely than others to develop devastating mental health disorders. Mood swings, anger issues in later life, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, and depression are a few mental health conditions that can form.
It isn’t only behavior that is changed by abandonment; also, the long-term consequences affect future generations. Research has found that offspring born to abandoned and neglected parents inherit brain abnormalities. The regions most affected are the amygdala and medial prefrontal regions of the brain.
Self-Abandonment
Those who lived through rejection from their caregivers have difficulty trusting themselves and tend to hide their feelings, beliefs, and ideas to fit in and please others. Self-abandonment occurs when you don’t value yourself or don’t act in situations in your best interest.
Here are a few examples of self-abandonment:
- Not trusting your instincts. Overthinking and ruminating on decisions and assuming others know more than you or are better than you.
- Not recognizing your feelings and needs. Not seeing that your needs are valid and feeling unworthy of self-care.
- Judging yourself. Being critical and judgmental, being mean to yourself and saying hurtful statements often accompany abandonment issues.
- Not honoring your values. Doing things to please others even though you do not believe in and go against your values.
- Having the inability to speak up for yourself. This includes not asking for what you need, having problems setting and enforcing boundaries, and allowing people to take advantage of you.
It is difficult to treat yourself well if you believe the lies that were told you about your self-worth.
Treatments to Heal Abandonment Issues
The treatment of abandonment issues focuses mainly on establishing healthy emotional boundaries and building many new responses when old thought patterns of fear emerge or reemerge.
Two primary treatments that work together to treat abandonment and neglect issues include the following.
Psychotherapy. While psychotherapy is not for everyone, seeking a mental health professional’s help can help those who were the victims of childhood abandonment and neglect. They can learn to overcome their fears of being abandoned again. Therapists work with their clients to understand where the fear originates and how it affects their relationships.
Self-Care. Self-care includes ensuring the survivor healthily meets their emotional needs by forming friendships and relationships and allowing themselves to trust.
Should you love someone who has abandonment issues, there are ways you can support them while they heal such as validating their fears.
However, treatment can teach new ways of thinking and cope with ending the overarching and debilitating power of abandonment in childhood.
Why Does Being Abandoned Hurt So Much?
Children are hard-wired to depend on their caregivers for their emotional and physical needs. When caregivers neglect their children, the kids internalize that behavior as rejection and nothing harms a child more than rejection.
The child grows up believing they are not enough and have no place in the world. How could they believe any differently? Weren’t they told those messages by the rejection of their caregiver?
The old tapes of you are not nor will you ever be enough plagues adults neglected as children.
Adults who experience abandonment also may feel they are not enough. They are told either verbally or nonverbally that they are inferior and should never have been born.
Is it any wonder that people who experience abandonment feel suicidal?
A Note for Those Who Care for Someone with Abandonment Issues
You should acknowledge the feelings of your loved one’s fear of abandonment without judgment. This move is vital to maintaining open communication.
Validating a loved one’s fears doesn’t mean agreeing with them but supporting their feelings to build on trust and compassion.
The treatment of abandonment anxiety can be very successful, but it requires commitment and self-care.
Many people with abandonment issues do not see how destructive their behaviors have been to their relationships until it is pointed out to them, and they begin to heal.
You are Enough
If this piece leaves you with no other message, I’d like you to remember that you are enough.
Not because you are rich
Not because you are beautiful
Not because of your education
You are enough simply because you exist, making you automatically a worthwhile human being. Use this piece to change your opinion of yourself by recognizing that the emotional damages you have incurred have robbed you of your self-respect and dignity.
That can change.
You can build yourself up by using affirmations, meditation, or whatever means you choose to reassure yourself that what I have said is true.
Say to yourself several times a day especially when you are stressed that you are enough because you are.
“It’s about waking up in the morning and saying: No matter how much is done and how it’s done, I’m enough and worthy of belonging, love, and joy.” – Brené Brown.
“Don’t dilute yourself for any person or any reason. You are enough! Be unapologetically you.” – Steve Maraboli.
“Live life. Be brave. Believe in yourself. Be kind to others. Smile daily. Love as much as possible, and always remember, you are enough.” – Unknown
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As of May 7th, 2022, the current book will be – “A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD: Compassionate Strategies to Begin Healing from Childhood Trauma.”
by Dr. Arielle Schwartz.
Here is an Excerpt –
Repetitive trauma during childhood can impact your emotional development, creating a ripple effect that carries into adulthood. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a physical and psychological response to these repeated traumatic events. A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD contains research-based strategies, tools, and support for individuals working to heal from their childhood trauma. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your past.
Learn the skills necessary to improve your physical and mental health with practical strategies taken from the most effective therapeutic methods, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), eye movement desensitization, and reprocessing (EMDR), and somatic psychology. When appropriately addressed, the wounds of your past no longer need to interfere with your ability to live a meaningful and satisfying life.
This book includes:
• Understand C-PTSD—Get an in-depth explanation of complex PTSD, including its symptoms, its treatment through various therapies, and more.
• Address the symptoms—Discover evidence-based strategies for healing the symptoms of complex PTSD, like avoidance, depression, emotional dysregulation, and hopelessness.
• Real stories—Relate to others’ experiences with complex PTSD with multiple real-life examples in each chapter.
Start letting go of the pain from your past—A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD can help show you how.
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My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with over 40-years- experience writing short stories and poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has become the best way to communicate with the world. My interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science and read several research papers per week to satisfy my curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that most interest me.
I am working very successfully w women w CPTSD using IFS and kate mines assisted psychotherapy. http://Www.boldembrace.org
I just wish mental health would be considered vital. I try so hard to find resources and there is very limited access for people like me who are lacking financial means. Im a single mom of 8 children. 2 of them are adults and live outside my home, one just turned 18 and is making that transition, one is 16, one is 14, and the 3 that I took in because my sister is a horrible person are 10, 7, and 5, two of them I have already had for over 4 years. All my resources go to my babies, there is nothing left for me. I’m fighting so hard to give them a different outcome then I had as a child.
I deal with this every day. I was doing really well for awhile then I sent a text to my father wishing him a happy father’s day. He informed me that if I was ready he’d be willing to talk to me. He’s the one who told me he needed a break from me during one of the worst times in my life. Instead of being there for me and helping me he told me that I was an adult and he couldn’t fix me that I needed to fix myself and get back to him when I was better then went to Hawaii with the rest of the family and told me I couldn’t go. When what I needed most was to be around family who loved me. My father has been abandoning me my whole life and I keep letting him back in to do it again and he does every time. The damage my parents did to me is so much that I don’t think I will ever be unbroken. I think I’m just one of those people who will never be loved. I had a bird who I loved more than anything. I used to have nightmares about something happening to her. I loved her more than life itself. I shared my life with her for 16 years. She was given the title of emotion support animal because she helped me. She was always there for me comforting me when I cried and making me laugh when I was sad. A vet killed her this year. My father said she was an animal and to get over it and wondered why I was still sad a month after she was gone. She was my whole world. I just think some people, like me, can’t ever be fixed. I’ll never be good enough or deserving of my father’s love. My mother was awful to me but I spent the last months of her life taking care of her because she was the only mother I had. After she died my sister turned the rest of the family against me telling them things that weren’t true. So, I have no family, by precious bird is gone and I cnt make myself be unbroken.
I just need someone who cares about my agony. Doing this alone is killing me.
Well written article.
Completely understand.
What good are self-affirmations when they are coming from a source (me) that has little more than contempt for myself. I was taught that and wired that way.
It is a lifetime of agony when nobody cares, your foundation is quicksand, and you are yelling into the void.
My days of being empathetic to others, the way I was for YEARS (helping professions, always listening, etc) are now over.
Good article. I have been suffering of abandonment depression for my lifetime.
Thanks to a good therapist I was able to take a step in distance and minimize the deepness of my sadness.
But I know this will ever be my underlying feeling: a desperately deep sadness and loneliness.