Most of us know the experience of being disturbed or irritated by someone or something, but few of us realize that this irritation comes from our abandonment wound.
It gets activated whenever we are not deeply connected and grounded inside and something on the outside is out of tune with our feeling, ideas, or experience.
A part of us wants to feel safe and connected and attempts to find that connection with other people or outer circumstances. When that attempt fails the pain arises…but rather than being with that pain we often either judge, criticize, or try to change the other person, outside event or environment.
Without understanding this inner dynamic and without having the tools to deal with it, accept it, and move through it we often end up in a lot of pain, anxiety and drama with people we are close to.
This issue is particularly relevant because of the current crisis that is causing so much isolation, deprivation of our normal routines, and in some cases having to spend so much time together with partners and children.
Most of us learned very early to be focused on other people, because we needed that for our survival as we were very young and helpless. The problem is that most of us never matured, grew up emotionally and recognized that we are not helpless in the same way now as we were then, and that we do have the ability to be with ourselves when the other person or outside event is not happening the way we would like it.
Without this awareness we often naturally move towards some destructive behavior when our abandonment wound is activated in an attempt to soothe ourselves perhaps with an addiction, a distraction, or even anger and violence.
If we have lived only on the outside trying to change things, we have never practiced the inner capacity to be with uncomfortable feelings.
It’s almost like a muscle that has atrophied as we have not used it….. We may not even realize that we have the potential to develop that inner muscle that gives us inner space and grounding to be with whatever life brings. Just like a big tree not trusting the deep roots holding and supporting it, we are behaving as we only have small weak roots.
Let’s look at some of the faces of our wound of abandonment.
It can show itself in difficulties being alone, when we experience rejection, feel jealous, have difficulty recovering from a loss, or feel disappointed, frustrated, and even betrayed when our expectations are not met from a partner, friend, or spiritual guide.
It can be very intense when a partner or close friend is not present, communicative, or available and we miss the connection with that person.
This can easily cause us to become dissappointed, irritated, restless, and angry. Then we may move into some kind of reaction such as judging the person, or trying to fix, change, analyze, or even attack him or her. These reactions may be very compulsive, automatic, and even feel justified.
Another common symptom of the abandonment wound is that we avoid any kind of intimacy either in the name of freedom, or holding onto the idea that we can’t find “the right person”.
When this wound is triggered either from a loss, a rejection, or from feeling a lack of connection and closeness with someone, it can feel like very intense frustration and fire inside or a general sense of not being at ease and not being able to relax.
And because this wound when triggered can activate such a powerful physical reaction, we may find it hard to sleep, to continue with our daily routines, moving more compulsively to an addiction or comfort food, or even feeling profound shame and depression.
Anna recently separated from her partner of 10 years. For a long time, she felt that the relationship wasn’t nourishing for her but she’s had a difficult time letting go because she doesn’t like being alone. So, having a relationship even if it wasn’t good for her seemed better than having no one to share her life with.
Raised with an absent and anxious mother and an angry father, she lacked holding as a child and didn’t feel safe in her home environment. Because of this difficult childhood, she has always had to deal with a high level of inner activation and found some solace and warmth from being with her ex-boyfriend.
Now that it’s really over, she’s desperate. At home alone in the evening, especially on the weekends, she suffers and tries to fill the emptiness with TV or food. She is slowly able to penetrate the terror of loneliness and begin to get a sense that she can be with herself and gently learn that it isn’t as scary as she originally thought it to be.
It’s a journey for all of us to learn to be with our inner emptiness because we can’t avoid it. We can try to cover it up, but underneath it is still there, until we consciously decide to face it and allow it to transform us. It is naturally very scary as it feels like dying, particularly at first. And it truly is a death of the old sense of ourselves.
Another very common way that this wound is triggered is when our expectations are not met. This can be so subtle because we may not realize what we unconsciously expect from our lover or friend until we don’t get it.
Or, as is the case with Richard, we may have a strong belief that our partner “should” provide what we need. Richard’s father left for another woman when he was 4 and his mother never recovered from the shock of his leaving. She became chronically depressed and turned to Richard, her eldest son, to take care of her.
This was a profound abandonment for him because that way energetically, he had neither a mother nor a father. Naturally, he turns to his girlfriend now to meet the needs that were never met as a child and he has the strong belief that love means that his girlfriend, Louisa should comfort him when he’s not happy or having a difficult time with something.
Louisa was engulfed by her mother’s needs and anxiety and has become highly sensitive to anyone making emotional demands on her. This is her childhood abandonment. So, their wounds clash. He wants connection especially when he is distressed and when she feels his “neediness”, she retreats.
Our abandonment wound may also be strongly triggered when a parent becomes sick or dies, especially if we still rely on one or both for emotional support.
Anita lost her mother four years ago and she is unable to recover from the loss. Even up until the time she died, she went to her mother for support and felt that she was her anchor in life. Now without her, she feels lost and finds herself depressed and has lost the energy and motivation to live a fulfilling life.
There can be many automatic behaviors that we use to avoid facing or feeling this emptiness inside such as anger at unmet expectations, dependency, isolation, addictions, and endless distraction – rage attacks, trying to fix, change, blame, attack, or analyze the other person, isolating, pretending that we don’t need anyone, or hiding behind our roles and masks.
Very often, when this wound is triggered, our emotions get highly activated and when we don’t realize that the wound is up and we don’t have the willingness to feel it and take responsibility for it, we move into some kind of reaction very quickly.
Of all our wounds this is in some ways the deepest and most profound…and because of this depth it also has the potential to take us to our core; our silence, stillness and joy of being.
To deal with our abandonment wound, it’s true that we have to face our emptiness and aloneness, but that is most often not possible to feel unless it first gets provoked. Many people say to us that they have no trouble being alone. It’s their relationships that are the problem.
In some ways, this wound doesn’t show up in its full force until we have allowed someone to be so important to us that this love connection has woken up all our earlier needs that were not met.
The longing for connection is perhaps the deepest longing that we have. When we allow ourselves to come close to someone, to make someone really matter to us, to drop our defenses and masks and become truly vulnerable, then we become acutely sensitive to big and small feelings of lack of connection.
The real fire is when we open because that’s when our conscious and unconscious expectations for ultimate connection come up and we get disturbed when we don’t get what we want and expect.
As a child, we naturally have a deep need for the “perfect mother”– a mother who is unconditionally loving, supportive, warm, welcoming, present, calm, centered, wise, in tune with us, and sensitive. And a “perfect father” who can guide and inspire us to find ourselves and our gifts, who is calm, centered, and wise, and who can show us how to manage in the world.
When we didn’t get this kind of good parenting as most of us didn’t, the longing to receive it or at least some of it doesn’t go away. We project what we missed onto anyone we come close to – partners, friends, siblings, authority figures, therapists and spiritual teachers and expect them to fill us.
And that tendency may also show itself in our unconsciously wanting to melt and merge with the other rather than feeling how important it is to strengthen our own individuality when we come close to someone.
We may also feel threatened and disturbed by people who are different than we are; whether it is about the color of the skin, a different sexual preference, a different diet, different way to live…anything that is different from us because we are in this immature state of not having connected with the emptiness inside.
We may turn to fixed ideologies or find comfort in being with others who are similar to us…these are all attempts to shield us from feeling the discomfort of being alone.
To reach a point when we’re truly able to be alone and joyful, we’ll have to face our wound of abandonment and go through the missing that we experienced as a child or later in our life.
Furthermore, this inner emptiness is not just psychological, it’s also existential. It comes from having been expelled from our mother’s womb into an existence where perhaps we were not wanted or didn’t feel a sense of belonging.
The inner growth journey involves facing the pain of that separation and the deep helplessness that we all face as humans. Allowing that painful passage becomes a new birth where we begin to feel that existence is our womb and is welcoming and loving us just the way we are. It is a deep letting go into life…into allowing existence to take over….
And this is not something that happens once, it’s a process of opening deeper to the pain that comes up when we’re not getting what we want from somebody or from life. Each of those precious moments is an opportunity to go deeper, to soften and feel the pain, instead of being in a fight with life. Allowing existence to truly teach us instead of believing that we know what should happen. Having the courage to let go of control, be vulnerable and open and move into uncertainty…letting go and letting life happen.
It is not easy to come out of the trance of believing that we don’t have the inner space to be with discomfort, emptiness and pain. And it is something that we need to practice.
Luckily life keeps giving us many opportunities to practice this….each time another person or life is not the way we would like it to be.
All of those moments when we are not getting what we would like from life…are opportunities to go deeper….to find that space inside and connect to the beautiful existence inside each one of us.