Healing Emotional Abandonment

Abandonment doesn’t always have to do with a physical aspect of a person leaving you. It can stem from the primary caretaker, usually the mother, being unable to be present emotionally for her baby. She is usually replicating her childhood experience, but it may also be due to another stressor. “Abandonment happens later, too, when children are criticized, controlled, unfairly treated, or otherwise given a message that they or their experience is unimportant or wrong.”*

Emotional abandonment can occur when parents:

Stifle their children’s emotional expression
Put down or ridicule their children
Hold their children to standards that are too high
Rely too heavily on children for their own sense of worth
Treat their children as peers

The experience of being abandoned, either physically or emotionally, prompts a very predictable response in your brain and nervous system. Your brain automatically goes into high alert, becoming hyper-vigilant for anything that could lead you to be hurt by another abandonment. **

Signs abandonment may be affecting a relationship:

Trust issues
One partner “gives too much” or is a “people pleaser”
Feelings of insecurity in the relationship
A need for one partner to control the other
Lack of emotional intimacy
Settling in a less-than-satisfactory relationship

Energetically, abandonment occurs in the Root Chakra where you “pull up your roots” and shrink your energy so that you feel safer. You are trying to protect yourself from emotional pain and keep your energy close in to avoid getting hurt. Many of my clients will tell me they feel “ungrounded” and this is exactly what is happening to them. You also may attach your energy to other people that you trust to get your security from instead of grounding your roots to the earth. It is as if you are physically holding someones arm to feel better– an energetic “don’t leave me” but done with cords instead of your physical arms.

How to Heal your Fear of Abandonment:

Becoming conscious of your fear of abandonment is the first step. Acknowledgment and acceptance are key to shifting this pattern.
Examine your childhood and any instances that may have caused this fear in you. See if you can recount the earliest time that this feeling comes up. Try to help inner child feel the feelings it couldn’t process as a child. Working with a therapist on inner child work is very transformative if you cannot do on your own.
Breaking the cycle of abandonment and healing the wounds around it is more about being a good loving parent to yourself. Giving yourself the love and attention you need instead of looking for it externally. Tune into the needs you have in relationships and when you have and haven’t received those needs. Find small ways every day to give yourself those needs and love.
Work on grounding into the earth and root chakra meditations. This is something that should be done daily to create a new pathway in your mind to change the pattern in your body.
You can do a mantra meditation or just repeat to yourself one of the following or any that feel relevant: “I am safe”, “I am lovable”, “I belong here”.
Energy healing is a way to move this energy faster and help change the patterns from early childhood.

*What is Emotional Abandonment? By Darlene Lancer

**yourtango.com