Many people enter relationships with a deep fear of rejection and abandonment, or they stay away from relationships to avoid experiencing these fears. If you do, what do you usually do regarding relationships when your fear of rejection and abandonment is triggered? What are the ways you are abandoning yourself? Let’s look at a few of them:
- You judge yourself. What are the judgments you level at yourself? If you had a child and you treated her with the same kind of harsh judgments that you might be leveling at yourself, your child would likely feel unloved, abandoned, alone, inadequate, anxious or depressed. Imagine that your feeling self is your child within — your inner child. When you abandon yourself with self-judgments, your inner child feels just as alone, rejected, abandoned, anxious and depressed.
- You stay focused in your head rather than being present in your body. If you had an actual child who came to you upset, and you ignored him or her, then your child would feel rejected and alone, and possibly anxious or depressed. When you stay focused in your mind, you are ignoring your feelings (your inner child) which makes you feel alone and abandoned within, and likely leads to anxiety or depression. You’ll feel especially abandoned if you are judging yourself and then ignoring the pain you are causing with your self-judgments, instead blaming others for your pain.
- You turn to various addictions. Again, if you had a child who was upset, and instead of attending to your child, you gave him or her a cigarette or you grabbed a drink, your child would feel abandoned. The same feelings of abandonment occur on the inner level when you use addictions to avoid and numb your feelings — addictions like alcohol, drugs, food, nicotine, TV, work, Internet, sex, porn, spending, shopping, gambling and so one.
- You make someone else responsible for your feelings Once again, if you had an actual child whom you kept trying to give away to someone, the child would feel profoundly abandoned by you. Likewise, when you make others responsible for your feelings, you are abandoning your inner child. Healing Abandonment Issues Abandonment issues get healed when you stop abandoning yourself and instead learn to love and value yourself. No matter how much someone else loves you, as long as you continue to abandon yourself, you will continue to feel insecure, inadequate and unlovable. Others’ love feels wonderful, but it needs to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. Your love for yourself needs to be the foundation from which you are then able to share love with others, rather than always trying to get love to feel safe and secure. You CAN learn to love yourself, and this will make all the difference!
