Abandonment Is The Longest Lasting Injury

Abandonment on the part of the person we love, of our parents during childhood or even of society generates a wound that is invisible, but that we feel dawning every day.

It is indeed a root that we have torn, a link that we have broken and which previously fed our emotions and our sense of security.

There is now an aspect that we must take into account. Abandonment does not occur only after a physical absence. Most frequently, it arises when an emotional authenticity ceases to exist, when disinterest, apathy or coldness appears.

The perception of this void knows no age. It’s something every child feels one day, and one that can devastate any adult.

The psychological implications that derive from an early experience with quitting are usually quite severe.

Although each child faces events in their own way, the traces of trauma are frequently seen to remain, and time does not heal trauma because it must be dealt with in the right way.

An intimate and personal battle that many people are going through right now …

Abandonment: drifting boats laden with absences

The feeling of abandonment can manifest itself in many ways. We turn into drifting boats when, for example, we lose our jobs and we can’t find a way to re-enter the labor market.

We are stranded, like a child who feels lost after being abandoned by his mother at an early age, or like a man who would one day come home and find an empty house and the absence of the woman he loved.

There is an interesting site called “Abandonment.net” where anyone who feels the need can share their personal experience of giving up.

For many, it can be therapeutic to be able to share their experiences, but in most of the testimonies, one perceives above all a trauma which arose during the childhood: the death of the father or the mother, the fact of having had an alcoholic parent or to have grown up practically alone …

The fact of experiencing a certain type of abandonment during childhood is something decisive, so much so that experts even speak of a second birth.

If the first was painful, but full of hope, the second supposes having to be “reborn” in a world where we do not feel loved, and where we must learn to esteem ourselves by going through the cut-off. this umbilical cord that united us to a heart, to emotions, to needs that must be satisfied …

The consequences of emotional abandonment

When we talk about consequences linked to a traumatic psychological dimension, we must know that there is a great variability.

Not everyone lives and expresses their pain in the same way. However, we could summarize it as follows:

• Experiencing abandonment in childhood often leads to serious difficulties in forming stable relationships in adulthood.
  It is common to be suspicious, to feel vulnerable, to experience certain periods of apathy, and it is therefore very difficult to deal with emotions such as anger or sadness.

• When someone is abandoned by the person they love or even by society, they can even “sabotage themselves” by thinking, for example, that they don’t deserve to be happy or loved, that he has no capacity, and that it is no longer worth fighting for his dreams because there is nothing more to do.

• Codependency problems also appear. The person needs approval and recognition and, in turn, ends up giving too much of themselves feeling that later what they receive is not equal to what they gave.

• In turn, it is common for the person to suffer from certain “emotional reminiscences”. Sometimes something or someone reactivates their feelings of abandonment and their whole world becomes paralyzed again.

All this is a trace of serious post-traumatic stress that you have to know how to manage.

How to heal the wound of abandonment

The wound of abandonment must be healed by paying special attention to self-esteem and, above all, being able to forgive, to free oneself from this past as if one were cutting the thread of a very black and let it fly away.

• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, for example, is often very helpful in detecting and transforming traumatic childhood memories. It allows the person to free their mind and body and to open their heart to give them the emotional relief they need.

• In turn, traumatic experience experts suggest the importance of learning to communicate emotional needs.
  Through words, injured people will be able to connect with the people around them who can help them and on whom they can lean, thereby building more secure relationships.

Something as essential as learning to take care of ourselves on a daily basis and to put ourselves at the top of the scale of our priorities, to gradually move away from anger and resentment, will allow us to free ourselves from our injuries from yesterday.

Memory cannot erase the sufferings of the past, but it can calm them and soothe them like one who sees a river flowing. 

Eventually everything passes, and even though the coldest and darkest stones remain at the bottom, clear, pure water flows over them. We can start over again …