The Many Expressions of Abandonment

Abandonment is a universal experience, but it leaves a different signature on everyone.

For some individuals, it may have been an actual separation, a breakup, a rejection, or the departure of a loved one as a painful experience that can gradually be worked through and integrated. For others, abandonment touches upon much deeper layers of the psyche.
It does not merely awaken the pain of losing another person; it can shake one’s sense of security, reopen old attachment wounds, temporarily undermine self-worth, and profoundly reshape our relationship with ourselves and with others.

It is also important to clarify that we do not need to have been physically abandoned to suffer from a deep fear of abandonment.

Abandonment can be concrete – the departure, disappearance or absence of an attachment figure – but it can also be experienced on an emotional and psychological level. A child can grow up with his parents and nevertheless repeatedly experience emotional unavailability, love experienced as conditional, relational unpredictability, a lack of response to his emotional needs, or even the feeling that they must become someone else to preserve the bond.

The fear of abandonment can thus build up without there having ever been a physical departure.

What is psychologically important is not only the presence of the other, but the sufficiently stable experience of being able to count on the connection without having to constantly fear its disappearance, its withdrawal or its rupture.

This is why working on abandonment means exploring much more than the separations we have experienced. It is also about understanding what we have learned to do, to silence, to sacrifice or to become in order to ensure that the other remains.

When Abandonment Becomes Self-Abandonment

And, just as importantly, we will focus on what is perhaps one of the deepest and least visible consequences of the wound of abandonment:
self-abandonment.

Earlier on in our development, we had to try to preserve certain bonds, to avoid rejection or to ensure that we remained connected to important attachment figures, we may have learned very early to abandon ourselves: to silence a need, to renounce a boundary or our needs, to minimize an emotion, to cut ourselves off from certain desires, to adapt excessively, or even to become what we thought we had to be in order to continue to belong.

Over time, these adaptations become so familiar that they cease to be experienced as abandonment of self. They become automatic, sometimes even entirely unconscious.

Part of this psychoeducational journey will be to learn how to identify where self-abandonment might be present in our current life: in our relationships, in our choices, in our difficulty in setting certain limits, in what we tolerate, in the needs that we continue to consider as negotiable, or in the parts of ourselves that we still sacrifice to preserve attachment and acceptance.