is the feeling of being left behind and it’s a primal fear, a fear of losing life-sustaining support. Its pain can be acute, a burning feeling of rejection and betrayal. Or it can be chronic, an under-the-skin anxiety you can’t trace back to a specific event but which has left you feeling hypersensitive to rejection and loss.
Abandonment can be an intermittent feeling; you might occasionally feel aftershocks of old losses when a friend drops out of your life, when your partner just doesn’t seem to understand, or when you worry about ever finding someone to love. These anxieties rise up from your core, unwelcome reminders of your vulnerability.
Abandonment can also run like a current beneath your conscious awareness. Left unresolved, the primal wound of abandonment festers below the surface, silently eroding your self-esteem, infecting your relationships, and triggering your most self-defeating Outer Child patterns.
Depending on your earlier losses, your abandonment wound can be tender, a raw nerve highly sensitive to anything that makes you feel . . .
excluded
misunderstood
overlooked
unappreciated
taken for granted
ignored
belittled.
My aim here is not to explore the whole abandonment spectrum but to zero in on one aspect that’s particularly relevant to our work: self-abandonment, the emotional root of self-sabotage.
LEAVING YOURSELF BEHIND
The important message here is that while adults can feel abandoned, they can’t actually be abandoned by another person. Unlike children, who depend on caretakers for their very survival, able-bodied adults can take care of their own basic needs. Only children can truly be abandoned.
However, adults can abandon themselves.
My colleague Peter Yelton once created a metaphor that he called “the invisible drain of self-esteem.” As Peter explains it, abandonment trauma is powerful enough to create a drain deep within the self that leaks self-esteem. No matter what you do to bolster your self-image, the invisible drain is always working to funnel away feelings of self-worth.
The invisible drain of self-esteem is driven by self-abandonment. Why do we flush our self-worth away? It’s something we do to ourselves unconsciously. Fortunately it’s something we can undo through the Outer Child program. By administering to our long-neglected primal needs and feelings, we reprogram the trigger points for our automatic behaviors and heal our emotional core at the same time.
WHY WOULD I DO THAT?
Self-abandonment started early, when you were too little to know what to do with your own or other people’s strong emotions. When children feel disconnected, hurt, or criticized they tend to take it to heart and blame themselves (e.g., “Dad’s mad all the time, I guess it’s my fault.” “Mommy never likes to do things with me, I guess I’m just not special enough to make her happy.”) When children feel culpable and disappointed in themselves, they move further away from a core belief in their value and lovability. To a child, rejecting this worthless screwup (who just happens to be themselves) makes perfect sense. And so it begins.
As an adult, a variety of situations can lead to self-abandonment, especially if you happen to be:
• going through a painful breakup
• alone (again) and having trouble finding a relationship
• feeling a loss of love in your current relationship
• dealing with the loss of a friend, a job, or a dream
• experiencing echoes of past hurts whenever you feel a hint of rejection
A major event—someone you love chooses to leave you—can trigger a full-blown abandonment crisis, one that throws your whole sense of reality into an emotional time warp. Old familiar feelings of dependency and panic rush to the surface. As if a small child again, you suddenly feel you can’t live without that person—that you’ll die without him. We’ve all heard stories about people, aging but apparently healthy, who die just a few months after a beloved partner. Like them, it feels like you too will succumb to terminal heartbreak. You’re panicked and weakened and ashamed about losing someone you love and for falling apart over it. You hate yourself and your emotional excessiveness. This self-recrimination is self-abandonment in its most virulent form. In fact, it is responsible for the severe depression and plummeting self-esteem that accompany a heartbreak.
As painful as feeling abandoned is, it’s the things you do to yourself in the wake of “being dumped” that cause the most damage. It’s the self-abandonment—the self-criticizing, blaming, and shaming—that fractures your sense of self and keeps you mired in a swamp of self-doubt. This attack on yourself heightens your fear of future abandonments. In fact, Outer Child develops its most entrenched patterns in a misguided effort to defend you against these fears.
We are barely conscious of it when we commit self-abandonment. It’s a silent process, one that creates a fertile breeding ground for an Outer Child to secretly gain power within the psyche and create self-defeating defense mechanisms.
IT’S CONDITIONING
The Outer Child is a function of brain activity. It represents the behavioral manifestation of our most deep-seated human fears that reside in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure located within the brain. This tiny organ has everything to do with who you are emotionally and how you react to those emotions. Thanks to what goes on in your amygdala, you’re conditioned (think Pavlov’s dogs) to respond to certain situations with learned knee-jerk behaviors.
Think of this tiny brain structure as the seat of primal fears (Inner Child) and the trigger-point for your reactive patterns (Outer Child) to those fears. Just as feet and noses vary from person to person, so do our amygdalae. Some of us have more prominent, easily activated amygdalae than others.
My amygdala must be huge. I’m a train wreck if I even think about attempting a new relationship.
I have a hyperactive amygdala. My Outer Child is off to the races if my partner disagrees with me. It takes over before my Adult Self has a chance.
Your higher thinking brain can send messages to your amygdala, but that’s a dial-up connection compared to the information superhighway that links the amygdala with the part of your brain that carries out your behavioral impulses. The amygdala’s job is to prepare you to act first, think later. It creates a state of action-readiness to prime you for an instant emergency response. You fight, flee, or freeze if your amygdala perceives any potential threat to your well-being. And this all happens under the radar of your conscious awareness.
Long ago the time it took to react to a threat could be the difference between life and death. You ran or were eaten for lunch by a tiger! Today’s threats to safety and well-being take different forms. And they’re individualized. Your amygdala’s stimulus-response system has been conditioned by your own personal history of emotional experiences, stemming all the way back to when you were born—experiences you’ve mostly forgotten. The way you respond, which emergency defenses you use, that’s uniquely yours too.
The amygdala is always on the lookout
