Healing Abandonment Wounds With Inner Child Work
Many times in life we can operate from a place of fear, anxiety and insecurity because we have this fear of being abandoned. This is often due to our childhood experience of our parents abandoning us. If this emotional wound is left unaddressed, then we will carry this wound into our romantic relationships as an adult. In this article, we’ll talk about healing abandonment wounds through inner child therapy.
In the early stages of my life I experienced a lack of love, emotional disconnection and physical departures from my parents.
This conditioned me to fear endings and fear people leaving me and it manifested into insecure attachment and separation anxiety.
When we experience emotional disconnection, inconsistency in parenting or physical departures as children, we interpret that we’re being rejected, abandoned and that we’re not enough. When this happens we end up feeling sad, lonely and alone.
And because these experiences happen early on in our lives when we’re highly suggestible it creates an imprint in our subconscious mind, and as a result we believe that we’re not wanted, we’re not loved and we’re not enough.
These feelings also get stored in the nervous system and get stored as triggers. So if this experience of abandonment is happening consistently over time and we get the same emotional imprint it becomes its own program or way of functioning.
How the subconscious mind works is that all of our emotional memories are stored in a part of our brain called the amygdala, which is our emotional memory system which carries all of our conditioning. It is also where our inner child resides. This includes the full range of intense emotions such as joy and pain, happiness and sadness.
So if you think of a favourite childhood memory, if you remember that memory now, as you tell the story of that memory you will feel the joy of that memory. That’s because all of those pleasant emotions were stored.
But when you have a negative emotional experience that you couldn’t process. This might be a traumatic memory that you didn’t have the emotional tools to make peace with at that time, what’s happening is that you have all of this negative emotional storage trapped in your subconscious mind, and when something triggers it you’re experiencing all of the intense emotions that are coming from the past.
So if we look at this in the context of being abandoned, if we have repetitive emotional experiences of being rejected, abandoned, unloved and alone, this self doubt, fear and insecurity becomes our baseline for how we interact with the world.
We have all of that emotional storage trapped in our nervous system, so when a person leaves the space, pulls away or rejects us, we might find ourselves going through a rollercoaster of emotions.
If we find ourselves emotionally reacting or being hysterical with our emotions it’s because what is hysterical is historical. If we experience ourselves experiencing intense emotions that outweighs the event of the present moment, we can see that we’re not reacting as adults, but as the powerless and helpless child that we once were.
Because when we were a child our basic human fears were abandonment. As a child we’re dependent on our caregivers for survival and without them we’d die.
So at a young age when we feared abandonment, at the time that was about safety and survival.
So fast forward later in our lives when we’re an adult, we’re touching an emotion that makes us feel like we can’t survive without a person. It’s an extremely deep core wound that gets embedded into our psyche and our nervous system can go into complete dysregulation. This is why healing abandonment wounds is key, so we can consciously choose secure and healthy relationships.
Consciously we might know that we need to be cool and calm in relationships, but if our inner child is spilling out all of the emotions and we are experiencing those unresolved emotions of rejection, abandonment and pain.
This might show up as extreme anxiety, nervousness in our stomach, adrenaline shooting down our legs and tremendous trapped emotions in our heart area and throat.
It also often manifests into the pattern of chasing emotionally unavailable partners who fear commitment, intimacy and can’t give us the emotional support, consistency and reliability we need to feel emotionally safe in a relationship.
When we have abandonment issues it’s not just our thinking that gets consumed by fear, self doubt and insecurity, but we have this physical response in our nervous system when we anticipate a departure, and we feel it in our heart, mind, body and spirit.
So it’s important to understand that healing abandonment wounds is key for healing the nervous system, so that we can shift our minds, our emotions and our bodily responses.
We need to be able to look at it as a deep emotional wound that we can heal, otherwise we will carry this wound in our friendships, relationships, work and we’ll continue to experience this extreme response in our nervous system when we experience a physical departure from somebody.
Now, what will heal these wounds on a permanent basis is the ability to self connect and self regulate.
When it comes to healing abandonment wounds, most of the time, we have a fear of rejection and abandonment and we spend our lives focusing on what’s happening outside of ourselves.
We become hypervigilant and hypersensitive to our environment and we’re consumed by what others are saying to us, what other people think about us, what others feel about us, rather than focusing on the relationship we have with ourselves.
If this is where most of our energy is, then I invite you to ask yourself: who is here in your business meeting your emotional needs? Who is looking after you? Who is present with you checking how you feel?
Nobody, we’re out there in everyone else’s business trying to get approval, get liked, protect ourselves from being abandoned, not be rejected, which means we have this disproportionate balance of where we’re putting our energy, which further fuels this need to not be rejected or abandoned from others as we think that’s our only source.
We think this is our only source of getting our needs met and that isn’t true.
And this is because we’re desperate to be seen, heard and understood and this neglect from childhood and lack of emotional connection becomes our obsessive focus as adults, so what we do is we emotionally abandon ourselves to get approval and validation from others.
Awareness
So one of the first step to healing abandonment wounds is awareness.
Until we acknowledge and address the root of this abandonment wound, we will never be able to truly heal it.
So I invite you to ask yourself: what are the ways in which I experienced abandonment as a child and as an adult? How was I abandoned physically and emotionally?
What has been the impact of the physical departures, of the neglect, the divorce and of the deaths?
Reflecting on our childhood experiences is important because it allows us to cultivate self awareness and release all of the stored memories and emotions we have.
If we experienced physical departures as a child we might have learned that love is conditional. It will have affected our self worth and created an identity wound that we don’t belong. We don’t feel loved or wanted and we learn to not trust others. When we repeatedly experience people leaving us we don’t trust that good things will stay.
So this might show up as separation anxiety in relationships or panic when we anticipate people leaving or when things end. Because we’ve been conditioned to believe that when people leave us they don’t return we become hypervigilant and hypersensitive to any sense of people leaving us, rejecting us or abandoning us.
So we might hold onto unhealthy relationships because we believe that we won’t be able to find someone who treats us well. We might over emotionally invest in people early on to avoid being abandoned.
We might also have had parents who overlooked our emotional needs and experienced Childhood Emotional Neglect.
As a result, we believe that we don’t have the capacity to be loved or for people to stick around or to stay with us. We might think to ourselves “who is going to love me?”. Because of these repetitive physical departures and experience of emotional disconnection it has made us feel like we are unworthy and nobody is going to love us.
And so being aware of whether it was neglect, divorce, abuse or death, there may be wounds you are carrying into your friendships and relationships that are sabotaging you.
And when we can acknowledge the root of our abandonment issues, we can cultivate self-awareness and see the patterns that this wound is creating.
We can ask ourselves what do I create in my life as a result of my abandonment fears? Or what do I allow because of my fears? Or what do I choose because of my fears?
And we can ask ourselves how has this fear created more stress?
Once awareness is there, the second step to healing abandonment wounds is trauma therapy, such as inner child healing.
Internal Family Systems therapy is a transformative approach that helps individuals heal by addressing the various “parts” or subpersonalities within them.
In the context of abandonment wounds, IFS therapy can help individuals:
- Identify wounded parts: IFS helps clients recognize the parts of themselves that carry the pain of abandonment, such as an inner child or an insecure part.
- Develop Self-leadership: The IFS model emphasizes the importance of cultivating a compassionate, wise, and grounded “Self.” This Self can serve as a source of stability and reassurance for wounded parts.
- Heal wounded parts: Through the therapeutic process, clients learn to connect with their wounded parts and offer understanding, validation, and support. This allows for the emotional healing of abandonment wounds.
- Develop healthier relationships: IFS therapy can help clients establish healthier patterns in their relationships by addressing the underlying fears and insecurities that stem from abandonment wounds.
Conclusion
Healing abandonment wounds is a critical step toward achieving emotional well-being and cultivating healthier, more secure relationships. Internal Family Systems therapy provides a powerful framework for understanding and addressing these wounds, promoting self-compassion, and fostering personal growth. By embracing the transformative potential of IFS therapy, individuals can overcome the lingering effects of abandonment and move toward a more fulfilling life.
If this resonates, go to my home page to view my current availability for booking a session. I offer virtual therapy for those in the UK, US & Europe.