Abandoned as a Child?

The Origins of Childhood Abandonment Fears

Many of these patterns are present in abandonment and cast back from their prior early childhood or previous abandonment traumas and have little to do with their immediate relationship circumstances and more to do with learned behaviours from childhood.

Substance abusing, workaholic, emotionally disconnected, depressed or generally disengaged parents are most frequently the common denominators and precursors to establishing these destructive abandonment related behaviours in abandoholic adults.

In their childhood seeking their parents attention and approval and not receiving formative validation would leave these individuals with an inherent sense of self-doubt and would naturally begin to question their own self-worth. Emotionally neglected children begin to establish their own means in which to cope with their own emotions in the absence of direction or resolution from their parents.

With children’s inherent limited physical capabilities, they are not able to a deal with traumatic events in “fight or flight” as adults would naturally do in a threatening scenario.

Children cannot run away, they cannot fight and their only defence it to psychologically disconnect… In those murky pools of emotional neglect children are forced to develop avoidant and psychological fleeing mechanisms that can be further characterised as dissociative behaviours.

As children we enter the world with a clean slate, we do not understand dangers of our environment about as much as we do not understand our own emotional needs. We develop and we learn by imprinting or copying our parents and will naturally develop our emotional responses over and above the fundamental physical nurturing and care we require as infants.

Appreciation, empathy, validation and recognition are the central pillars in establishing our future confidence, individuality, pride and self-worth.

Naturally parents applaud good behaviour and validate a child’s progress into the world, until the point where they are able to manage and regulate their own emotions and make cognitive sense of their life.

In cases of childhood abandonment this validation, appreciation, empathy and recognition does not happen or happens to a diminished degree. These emotional validations from parents and caregivers are fundamental prerequisite to establishing a sound mental picture for a child. Abandoned children thus begin to dissociate from situations that they cannot cognitively process or where they have feelings that are not validated and / or not brought back to a suitably calming resolution.

They escape from the trauma of trying to understand their emotions and the reasons why they are not being validated onto their own minds and imaginary worlds. Nowadays those worlds are fuelled by extreme infotainment and direct exposure to incredibly leading and misleading content sources and media channels.

As children they begin to adopt a broad range of coping mechanisms to obtain parental attention, acceptance and validation. As adults these behaviours would have formed into maladapted attention and validation pleas that add fuel these complex abandonment and engulfment interactions which play out in their later lives and relationships.

I stopped listing this stuff 20 points in as I realised the scenarios are endless.

• Complete or partial memory blocks of childhood traumas connected to low self-esteem, low sense of entitlement and a broad range of performance anxiety issues. The memory blank spots dull the reality of your childhood abandonment traumas.
• Fear interferes in forming relationships in adulthood as intrusive insecurity inhibits many social life and goal achievement objectives. Anxiety in and around authority figures is an all too frequent trait of abandonholics which they abandonholics overly avoid or excessively confront in their adulthood.
• Abandonholics are plagued by self defeating patterns to sabotage their lives, goals and careers. Career hopping and constant self evaluation perpetual goal setting and goal avoidance. Repeatedly subjecting themselves to people or experiences that may or can lead to another loss, rejection or trauma.
• Abandonholics subconsciously and consciously reawaken past losses, feelings of vulnerability and fear with heightened memories of their traumatic separations are part of the package and are brought into their new relationship dynamics.
• Continued feelings of emotional detachment, or being “numbed” to past losses with great difficulty in concluding or letting go of the painful feelings of past rejections.
• Overreacting to normal emotional ups and downs of adult relationships with and inability to mindfully handle day to day conflict and disappointment within their present relationships. Abandonholics are over-sensitive to seemingly perceived criticisms, rejections, abandonment or exclusions.
• As their emotional pendulums swing between a fear of entrapment or engulfment and their continual fear of abandonment; they often feel like they are losing control if a person gets too close to them as love starved childhood insecurities hijack their adulthood emotional states.
• Even when they are cognitively aware that a past relationship could not meet their basic needs abandonholics dive at the opportunity to revive these these relationships under the misconceptions of romance or as a means to bring closure.
• “Emotional hangovers” are the nett effect of being in contact with these past relationships. Abandonholics create a climate of intense emotional difficulty for themselves where they are unable to distinguish their true feelings or sifting through their blur of emotional upheavals.
• The avoidance of close personal relationships or the alternate tendency to dive into relationships and hold on to them too quickly.
• Abandonholics day to day life includes a over sense of responsibility for others (People-pleasing), constantly rescuing or attending to other people’s needs above their own for acceptance or approval.
• Unrealistic expectations over reactions towards specific social scenarios that creates undue conflicts and eventually burns bridges and connections.
• Alternatively under-react to emotional triggers and cues from partners and to dissociate from their.
• There are many Co-dependency issues whereby abandonholics devote their attention to others and then feel abandoned then they don’t receive enough attention back.
• Overly impulsive actions, even when you are aware of the negative consequences to your actions.
• Abandonholics frequently have unpredictable and uncontrollable outbursts of anger or are triggered by specific social or relationship scenarios that are beyond their control.

So how does one deal with childhood abandonment issues as an adult?

As much as you would like to you cannot re-live your childhood. What is done is done and dusted the only path forward is to establish a cognitive path that recognises the detrimental behaviours and then sets in motion a simple and effective strategy to learn new and better ways of handling these situations in the future knowing full well that they will undoubtedly reoccur.

1. Be aware. Be aware of your emotions at each moment in time. Look for scenarios where you become stressed to the point where you are angry. Now that you are there bam stop! You now know exactly what you need to work on, don’t ignore it.
2. Take a break. Relationships have a tendency to trigger us into emotional states that are hard to apply a meaningful and mindful response to our partners. It’s at those junctures where the fear of abandonment has shrunk your brain cortex and ability to have a true and mindful and meaningful response to your partner. That’s where you call time out. Your emotional responses have been hijacked and you are not equipped to mindfully or progressively respond. Give everyone space to breathe and calm down. Go back in with a positive and mindful suggestions of your and their respective roles.
3. Practice proactive empathy. Empathy is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes before a situation explodes out of proportion. By acting in a way that demonstrates the behaviour you want from your partner you will begin to reverse engineer your crap childhood programming and play this instrumental role of gaining mutual and healthy control of positive relationship dynamics.

Apportioning due blame

As adults these experiences are long past and dealing with them may almost seem ridiculous. All too often the behaviours outline very real and immediate adult circumstances but if we can identify and recognises origin of these behaviours we are halfway up the stairs in re-learning to resolve them through forgiveness.

As human beings we find it hard to not blame others.

I blame my parents for emotionally starving me as a child, I blame my girl / boy friend for not dealing with my emotional outbursts and drama in a more mindful and adult way. I blame society for just being a bunch of assholes. I blame my government for the rest and I blame you for being you.

I,I,I, you, you, you, blame, blame, blame, me, me, us, us, us blah bla need a hug.

It’s gotten you nowhere in the past and it will probably not get you no closure in the future.

There are always mitigating circumstances beyond everyones control and as a parent looks down upon their new born infant they are not plotting the ways in which to psychologically scar this new baby for life.

Your ex partner was a human being that did not get into a relationship with you for the express intent of turning you or themselves into fire breathing monster. (even tho they are still a bit of an asshole)

They were all doing the best they could at the time. With such a limited grasp of the greater processes in play, they knew not what they did.

Each life circumstance is unique including that of your parents or ex partners and all their experiences of you. However they entered or exited your life is part of your and their particular journey. At this point however, those experiences are your future guide to navigate toward your new and better future self.

Learning to let go of blame and allowing forgiveness into your life is a humbling and worthwhile exercise. The first person you should start with is yourself, seek professional help, talk to a therapist, open up let what needs to come out come out.

There is a wonderful prayer from the anonymous groups called the serenity prayer.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

The context of this prayer is about letting go of pain caused and not causing further pain to yourself or others, bringing closure to the person you were and opening up to being the version you are that you want to be.

This time slightly wiser.

Only we know what is right for ourselves and for the people around us and our learned destructive behaviours skew our authentic sense of direction.

The serenity prayer directives are the phase two.

Once you have started truly dismantling your own intrusive thoughts and coming to terms with yourself, accepted your shortfalls, only then and will you be ready to enact the the wisdom of serenity.

On the upside and from the psychological perspective, your abandonment responses can be strengthened just like your muscles.

Practice does make perfect and it begins with looking at each of the stressors that trigger your abandonment responses. Only once you are able to identify these stressors will you be able to diffuse any undue emotional outburst before it actually happens.