Episode #4: Feelings of Abandonment

Hi everyone. It's Dr. Lurve. So I thought on today's episode we could talk about abandonment. This comes up quite often, more often than I actually thought, but these issues of abandonment are quite complex. So I thought let's take some time to have a talk about it because it's really important because these issues arise in our intimate relationships a lot. So I thought we need to dedicate some time to this, not only to identify it, but give you a couple of tips on how you could probably work through it.

Now, these are really deep-seated issues normally. So what I'm going to suggest here is just a few little suggestions that can take the tip of the iceberg. But let's try and identify whether or not you've got some issues around abandonment.


Abandonment can take many forms and people deal with abandonment and their issues in their very own way, very different way to each other. So I thought, okay, if you've experienced any type of abandonment in your past, you actually are probably, or you may be projecting these issues or the repercussions of this abandonment into the experience of your new or your existing relationships without even knowing it.


These fears that you've brought along with you are dictating how you do relationships and you're not even aware. So I guess let's get aware with the different types of abandonment and there's two I want to talk about in particular, and one is emotional abandonment. This is the detachment from your emotional support and the conditions through your childhood and your upbringing. It may have been where a parent didn't provide a healthy environment for your emotional development and they didn't give you an opportunity to build your resilience.


If you think about in the home, when issues probably arised in the household, they may have been dealt with maybe through some verbal abuse or sometimes the issues may have been ignored completely, which really hasn't been a good role model on how to handle it. Emotional abandonment usually occurs when the child feels like their emotional needs are neglected or when they need to hide a part of themselves or who they are so that they can be accepted or loved by the parents or the family they're in.


Could you imagine as a little five, six, seven-year-old, you're in a home and you feel like you've already got to hide part of you with the people that you look up to and love and trust? What do you think happens for you into adulthood in your relationships? Is that you grow up hiding a part of you because you feel like that's the only way you can do connection, life and be accepted.


So if the child feels they need to hide part of who they are to be accepted or loved by the parents or if there is this absence of a parent where they have left the family dynamic without an explanation, like they've just disappeared, they've left home. The child knows nothing about it. They're expecting their parent to come home after work and they just don't turn up. And the child is young and unable to comprehend why this has happened because that's not how it was supposed to happen. Although there's conflict and although there's issues in the home, you're still supposed to come home. So what happens to the child is that it causes feelings of rejection and unworthiness.


I don't know if that resonates for you, but could you imagine as a little child and... You probably don't even need to imagine. You know, some of you have probably gone through this where you're waiting for a loved one to come home and they don't, and that feeling of sadness and longing for them to come home and you wait and you wait and you wait and that person doesn't come home and you constantly wonder why. Why didn't you come home?


Did I do something wrong? Did you not love me enough to come home for me? Because it doesn't matter about the conflict because we've always done conflict and you've come home and as a child, that although toxic and although dysfunctional, it was still consistent. But the minute that person decided never to come back is the minute you started to question your worthiness. If they can't love me, if a parent can't love me enough to come home, then who else will? So that's emotional abandonment, a bit deep, but true.


The other type of abandonment is physical abandonment. This is the absence of appropriate supervision during childhood, right? So being looked after physically. You know, these people may have experienced physical or sexual abuse. The child's needs may have not been met, like just insufficient food or water or housing, clothing, safety, whatever it was. All of that would cause a significant amount of unrest and insecurity in the child causing issues of abandonment and safety. Right?


Who feels safe when you don't know if you're going to eat at night, if you don't know where you're going to sleep. As a child, they're really the underlying needs that they need to flourish as a functioning, a fully functioning adult and especially in relationships, right? So when a child is filled with fear and the adults in their lives have failed to provide them with these fundamental rights, it creates trust issues. They don't trust. How do you trust when you can't be looked after by your parents, the people that are supposed to love you unconditionally and provide you an environment to be safe?


What actually happens is when they start to not trust their parents, they also may not start to trust authority, authority figures, older figures or people of significant in their lives as they go through life. You know, these people tend to, and I'm not generalizing, sometimes these people tend to fill themselves up with drugs, crime, sex, whatever, risk-taking behavior because they have no regard or trust for humanity really.


So going through either or both of these types of abandonment can have serious impacts on the way a child copes with stress, the way someone makes the right decisions and also the way they deal with interactions in relationships as a child, but also as they get older. Really impacting all types of relationships whether it's work, intimate, family.


Because you have to think about this. If it's impacting your trust around authority, what happens when you're becoming a teenager or when you're breaking the law or what happens when you go to work and you are highly dismissive of your boss because you have no respect for authority, and so it impacts you in every part of your life.


Depending on the type of abandonment you've experienced and how you've personally dealt with it, there is definitely a number of ways it can affect your relationships. So I want you to listen out and just hear and just work out if any of these resonate with you and if it's affecting your relationship because that's what I want out of today. I want you to be able to identify whether the abandonment issues that you've had are really affecting your relationships.


I want you to ask yourself, are you a giver in your relationship? Is your relationship unbalanced? Do you give too much too often? Have you become a people pleaser in your relationship, desperately wanting to keep your partner happy so they don't leave you? This is a real indication of the codependency in this relationship is the unbalance of communication and commitment in the relationship.


I want you to have a think about that. Is that something that's affecting you? Do you have trust issues? Do you think some trust issues have happened due to your early abandonment? Can you never fully trust your partner when they're out with their friends or when they go on a trip? Do you subconsciously or unconsciously think in the back of your head, you know that little voice, that they will find someone better than you and they will abandon you just like the people that you've relied on as a child, and does it eat at you? Is that something that comes up for you as well?


Another thing is, do you feel envious of other people? Do you constantly look at other people's relationships and wonder why yours isn't like that or why you can't find someone who will see your worth? You definitely are looking outside of your picture and you become easily jealous as you're dreaming of what you would want and want to create. And it starts to really poison the relationships you're in because you're forever comparing.


Look, I get this. We're in a world of digital media and the social platforms we're on at the moment don't help us in this regard. We are forever comparing and I would say it can become toxic and poisoned. Just run your own race, keep your eyes on your own track because really those people you're looking at are not going to affect your relationship in any positive way because they're experiencing that and you're not. So concentrate on where you want to go with your relationship.


You know, it's like that saying no woman, no cry, right? Are your walls so high up that you rarely show your emotions or you don't get close enough to a partner to give them that little space in your heart and you've got this silent motto is if no one can get close, well then no one can actually hurt me. You're doing yourself a real injustice here, but I get it because there's no way you would ever want to experience a hurt like you've hurt before and there is no way you want to experience waiting for someone to come home and they don't ever come home to you. I get it.


The other thing, you could be doing quite the opposite as well, and that means in relationships, you're constantly in the driver's seat. You constantly need to take control of the relationship and where it's going and your partner really has a say in plans, holidays, what you're going to do with your future businesses. Now, this is obviously you're taking control out of a place of fear and fear of being abandoned, fear of not trusting, fear of being hurt.


A lot of people sit in the driver's seat for way too long. But what happens is they get bored driving and eventually it affects the relationship because like any long drive, you get fatigued and you need to pull over and have a rest, and someone else needs to take over the driving seat. That's what normally happens in relationships. You can only be in control for so long before you get tired or the other person gets tired of just being led somewhere.


I want you to have a think about that as well. The other thing is sometimes you settle very early, so you're in a relationship that has a lot of lows, more lows than highs, but you're very comfortable, probably too comfortable to leave and even though you know it's not for you, but you're willing to compromise and stay. Because of your fear of loneliness, you've really settled for a mediocre relationship with no real spark because you would rather have that than have nothing. There's some work to do around that. But this is something I see come up with quite often.


The other thing I like to say is that we have a Freudian slip, right? So your abandonment issues are so deep and they're entrenched into your subconscious that you seek a partner that will actually treat you the same way, a very similar way to how you were treated growing up. You don't even realize this. You've grown up saying, I will never want that. I will never have someone treat me like that. I would never want to go through that again. But what you find is that you attract people very much the same.


If they're not abandoning you and they're not leaving you at home waiting for them, they're not available, and that's another form of the same thing really. It really leads to a cycle of abandonment and a feeling of pain and rejection for you constantly.


So they're some of the things that come up, and I'm not sure if you identified with one or more of how these issues have really impacted your relationship, but I'm going to ask you. When is it time for you to start to overcome these feelings and finally break free of your abandonment issues before it actually takes over your life if it hasn't already? And maybe even before you move into your next relationship, it's probably something you need to revisit or visit if you haven't gone there for you to really start to have some deep connections with people.


So what I want to say to you is probably, I'll give you a couple of tips, but the first thing you need to do is accept and understand the trauma that you went through. Like most of our issues, the only way we can begin to overcome them is to acknowledge them, right? We need to acknowledge our past and accept we can't change it and what has happened to us has happened, and although we may not agree with them, it is what it is.


This is a saying I do say a lot of the time, and I don't say that to disregard or to say that what you've been through wasn't traumatizing because I understand it probably was, but if we're going to stay in the past of how traumatizing it was, we will always stay there. So abandonment comes with the unlikely chances of closure, yeah, from a parent who caused it, which makes it harder for you to create closure with yourself. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.


So while there may be no last words or an official goodbye or you don't have an ability to ask the questions that you need answered, you're still able to emotionally cut ties to your sense of abandonment. Now, you may feel resentment towards this person for making you feel this way, for not protecting you, for not showing up, but being able to rebound and come back from that pain will definitely make you stronger and more resilient.


So we can make this as an excuse for shutting people out of our lives forever, but that's going to be a lonely journey. Overcoming abandonment means trusting yourself to trust the right people. I get the dilemma in that because you are brought into this world wanting to trust the people that brought you here and you couldn't, but that doesn't need to be your experience forever.


The second thing is you can break the bad habits. So you've ticked a few things off the list of how your issues have affected your relationships, and although the old habits die hard, you're now able to break them and move on. Whether you're a control freak of the relationship or you're keeping your partner's arms at length and keeping that distance from them, it's really time to find a balance that allows you to let your partner in and create a sense of mutual trust.


Your connection with your partner, if you can do this, will be one that you haven't experienced ever and the scary thing is it feels so great that you become even more fearful that you'll lose it. But staying in a place of fear is never ever going to give you the ability to be in a place of love.


I want you to be honest with yourself and take small steps to create a safe space so your relationship can blossom without smothering them, without them smothering you or without you being deprived and without them being deprived. A really good balance. It might take some planning and some thinking and some journaling, but I want you to think about what that might look like for you.


And then obviously, you've got some abandonment issues and they're the ones that you need to abandon. Let them go. You know, it's time to do a 360 and get rid of all of these issues for good. The people you have around you, your support system, your tribe is really important at this time when you're deciding to take a step to really step into who you are and saying, "You know what? I'm going to own my shit. I'm going to accept that this actually happened to me, but I'm not going to keep myself in the same space to let it keep happening. I need to leave it in the past so I can now be set free."


So you need to keep people you trust close to you and gain a sense of power in putting trust in these people but also new people. While we can't be a hundred percent certain that our relationships are all going to work because that's unrealistic, we've got two different people coming into our relationship that brings two different types of baggage. It means that we need to be vulnerable, but it's very valuable for those with abandonment issues or issues around trust to accept that not everything is in our control and sometimes people will leave us. And although not ideal and it can be very hurtful, it is a reality.


So hanging onto the fact that someone will walk out on us or leave us or not be there for us is really a real fear. But are you going to miss out on love because you're scared of that happening? I guess the most important thing to remember is that people have been removed from your life probably for a reason, and at the time, we didn't know what that reason is. Even now through our healing, we might be able to look back in hindsight and go, now I get it.


The loss of relationship can be taken as a lesson for you to use in your life right now and in the future and with your future experiences, whether it's you being a parent and making sure you do that better, whether you show up in a relationship and make sure you're present, whether it's you self love, and make sure that you are loving yourself enough so that people can actually love you the same way so that you're setting the standard for yourself.


You can also learn to read your behaviors before jumping into the next relationship. That takes some awareness and work, but it's really good because what I find is that when you've gone through a place of abandonment and have had to let go of someone that you love, you develop a sixth sense. You develop almost like an intuition and you haven't trusted yourself enough to use that.


Once you start to accept and let go of those abandonment issues, you can start to really tap into that and use it to your benefit, use it in your next relationships and it will give you the ability not to settle, not to settle for anything less than you really deserve. You will start to build up your worth bank. It's something that I talk about is the more permission you give yourself to set standards and boundaries is like we deposit into our worth bank and we start to build ourselves up.


So for today, I really wanted to get some of those little things out that might be able to help you in relationships in regards to your abandonment experiences. I hope that's really helped you identify maybe and come up with a plan on how you could probably say yes to love again and build trust in your relationships, because that's really what I want for you guys. There is no way I would want anyone to go through life without having experienced at least an amazing love affair. So for now, I'm going to leave you with those little tips and little bit of insight. I'm Dr. Lurve. I'll talk to you soon.