Because people are so relationally dependent and need relationships to thrive, abandonment is one of the very most painful things a person can experience. Because it is so painful, people have all kinds of strategies to avoid it. These strategies are not usually good ones. Today, we’re going to look at the most common and most detrimental adaptive strategy that people have to avoid abandonment.
The very most detrimental adaptive strategy that people have to avoid abandonment in relationships is to abandon parts of themselves. To understand this adaptive strategy, we need to begin in childhood. When we are young, our entire existence depends on our adult caregivers. But even when we grow up, we are a species that needs other people in order to thrive. Every person has dependency needs. And this is true for the totality of your life. This means, you have dependency needs as an adult. These are needs that you either cannot give yourself or that even if you can give them to yourself too, that does not remove the need get them from others. In order to thrive and be healthy on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level, you need these dependency needs to be met. Because of this, relationship security is one of the most important things in a person’s life. Aside from this, the single biggest cause of pain for people is other people. Throughout history and today, we have proved that we can harm each other and make each other very unsafe. For this reason, social confluence is a way we guarantee that we can stay safe from other people. What all this boils down to is that we use adaptive strategies in order to get our needs met and stay safe in this human world.
So, let’s say that a little boy is highly sensitive. And this child is born into a household with parents who have an issue with emotions, because they are afraid to feel negative emotion themselves. When the child’s sensitivities kick up and the child displays negative emotion as a result, the parents will not react well to this. This will be perceived as a rupture in closeness to the child. This response could range all the way from them displaying negative emotion in disapproval to outright shaming to punishment to isolating the child. Essentially, the child will feel the threat of abandonment by the people he or she needs and loves and depends on most. The child will get the message that he or she cannot have their sensitivity and have their parents at the same time. Their sensitivity is a threat to the relationship security with them and therefore their needs and safety. As a result, the child will abandon this aspect of themselves. They will suppress, deny, disown it and definitely not caretake that aspect of themselves. They will not own and caretake their sensitivity. As a result, they are no longer loving themselves.
Or let’s imagine that a little girl came down to a father that really wanted a boy and was disappointed to have a girl. In order to not be abandoned or feel abandoned by her father, she may disown her own femininity. When she does this, she will start to act like the boy she knows her father wants and reject anything “girly”. Every feminine trait gets rejected, suppressed, denied and disowned. None of the decisions she will make for herself or in relationships are conducive to her femininity. In fact, they are likely to be quite abusive to it.
When you think of how many parts of ourselves we can potentially abandon so as to not be abandoned by our parents, it is overwhelming. And this process does not just end with our parents. It extends to anyone with whom we want to not be abandoned by. You will see themes though that carry over from childhood. When we abandon aspects of ourselves, we don’t make decisions for ourself that are conducive to the wellbeing of those aspects. Just like a neglected, rejected and abandoned child, we are not doing ANY of the right things for these aspects of ourselves. And this includes in our relationships. We are likely to get into relationships with people who are not conducive to the wellbeing of these aspects of ourselves also. After all, using the example above, if we really owned our sensitivity, we would not put ourselves in a relationship with someone who didn’t like and didn’t caretake our sensitivity. When we don’t positively own parts of ourself, we end up in relationships with people who also don’t positively own those same parts of us. Rather, we end up with people who abandon them and perhaps abandon us entirely. That there is the sick irony of the situation. We abandon ourselves to avoid being abandoned by others. But instead, it dooms us to more abandonment by others.
To reverse this process, what you have to do, is to re-own the aspects of yourself that you have disowned and by doing so, to caretake them and start to think, speak, make decisions and act in their best interests.
To start identifying these abandoned parts of self, you can identify what about yourself you are ashamed of. The mechanisms of shame relate directly to the dis-ownership of parts of the self. If you want to understand more about this, you might like to check out my book titled: The Anatomy of Loneliness, which has an entire chapter on shame alone. You can also think back on your childhood to what you felt was disapproved of, rejected, opposed, denied or ignored in you by your parents and by your school and by your culture.
If you would like to level up this process of re-owning these parts of yourself, you can do parts work with them. For example, the woman in our previous example could do a parts work integration between the aspect of her that is her femininity and the aspect of her that abandons her femininity. To understand more about how to do this work, you can watch my video tited: Parts Work. What Is Parts Work and How To Do It.
Abandoning parts of yourself so as to not be abandoned by others, is something that nearly everyone in human society does. But it is a one-way ticket to living hell. A life of painful relationships and the building of a life that is not right for you. So, re-own those parts of yourself that you have abandoned and watch those right relationships and that right life for you start to manifest before your eyes.
