Where do you find the cure for abandonment? People who suffer from abandonment experience such excruciating pain that they will do anything to make it go away. Usually, however, they spend most of their lives looking in all the wrong places.
People with abandonment almost always look externally for relief from their pain. They scour the shelves at the local bookstore, or lament about their pain with their friends or therapist. They work the dating sites, or hound their spouse to fill their needs in just the right way. When none of that works, they find a way to medicate – drinking, getting high, binging, raging, going outside the relationship, high achievement, proving their worth materialistically, shopping, living in denial, etc. But the cure will never be found in any of those external places, which is why they stay plagued with excruciating pain and searching for relief.
The cure for abandonment is found inside of us, it is in learning how to stop abandoning ourselves! There is no lonelier or emptier feeling than when you have been abandoned by the one person who will always be with you – you! Think about it, when someone abandons us, we spend all of our energy focused on the pain they caused. We may even waste hours trying to figure out why they would do such a hurtful thing. But how much time do we spend thinking about how we are going to care for ourselves and heal our wounds from it? This is what I mean by abandoning ourselves.
We abandon ourselves when we:
- Belittle, shame, and constantly put ourselves down
- Aren’t in touch with our essential needs
- Put others’ needs before our own to the extent that our needs go unmet
- Do things we don’t agree with in order to please others
- Trust someone else’s judgment over our own
- Don’t listen to our gut instincts
- Trust someone with our heart who isn’t trustworthy
- Don’t pursue our own interests out of fear of rejection or abandonment
- Continue to investing our time and energy in someone who treats us poorly
- Don’t stand up for ourselves
- Minimize how others have hurt us so that we can stay in the relationship
- Believe lies that don’t make sense
- Stuff our anger instead of exploring the reason we are angry
- Kill our pain in destructive ways that ultimately get us abandoned by the ones we love
- Spend our time with people who sap our strength instead of energize us
- Focus on the emptiness instead of learning how to fill it
- Don’t treat ourselves as special
- Engage in any kind of addictive behavior
- Don’t have healthy boundaries with ourselves and others
- Wait for someone else to give us what we need
Learning to stop abandoning yourself means digging deep within your soul to find what it is that you really need and learning how to give it to yourself. It is in learning how to be a friend to yourself, be kind to yourself, and ultimately, to love yourself. When we stop abandoning ourselves and learn to love, trust, and respect ourselves, then no matter what other people do, we always have the peace and security of knowing that we are going to be okay.
Learn more about how to deal with abandonment pain in Mark Smith’s book, Managing Abandonment Pain Through Recovery . .http://www.familytreecounseling.com/ebooks.php?eID=2&hop=kaahenry
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