HOW TO HEAL ABANDONMENT FEARS BY CHANGING THESE 10 COMPULSIVE RESPONSES

the most heartbreaking thing about having a childhood defined by neglect wounding inconsistency a lack of predictability rage whatever it is in the parents is often this idea that deep inside because we believe as kids that things are our fault that we must live in a state of fearing that at the end of the day we cannot count on humans humans are not safe as I often say humans are the trigger and the biggest wound about living in a state of a lack of trust which at the core is the heart of living with a fear of abandonment it's that you can't safely relax and Trust in your body as a child that the parent will be there consistently it's high highs it's low lows it's they're there they're gone whatever it is and the heartbreaking piece is that in order to survive the fear of Abandonment by a parent you were forced to abandon yourself and it starts in your cells so early in your experience that it often becomes your entire trauma personality which is living in a state of fear of people not being safe and what happens in these childhoods is that you spend all of your time your resources your coping strategies protecting yourself and often scanning for threat in hyper vigilance or complete collapse let's say in shutdown of a freeze mode you spend it you spend it in trauma responses that takes away from your ability to develop a whole sense of self so you spend it abandoning yourself who you are your beliefs your sense of unique humanness in the world in order to serve preparing yourself to not be abandoned right I must fawn over the parent this way I must suppress my needs that way I must live in hyper vigilance over here I must hide in my room over there whatever it is you are trying in your effort to not be abandoned because in childhood you sense that in some way you are forced to abandon yourself and so you wake up in adulthood and you live with this fear believe deep inside that people will leave you that they're not safe and not trustworthy and it's such a part of who you are that you don't even know where to begin and I'm going to tell you this right now that I fully believe that it plays out in this compulsiveness because in our childhood while we were protecting and scanning and all of those things like a reflex we compulsively did these next 10 things and to me if you really want to cure and heal as much as you can these abandonment wounds and fears which if you have a significant one or even just whatever it is it's probably always going to be there in some form but hopefully over time you don't live in that it doesn't pop up when you're triggered at some point you're able to see it and then you know what to do about it so let's talk about what that looks like this is how you abandon yourself in the service of not being abandoned in childhood and this is what it plays out in right number one compulsive shame so you compulsively go into situations believing that you're not enough you're not worthy you're bad there's something wrong with you you're unlovable and in some ways it acts to protect you against the even possibility of rejection of Abandonment so you sort of read the world through the lens of these glasses and if you want to work on healing this you have to deal with your shame you have to look at your literal posture internal and out external of this which is literally trauma and shame living in the body to come into a sense of openness and strength and to really lean into the resilience that if you made it this far you already have so that's the first thing you want to work on dealing with your shame and oftentimes that can come from Identity work boundary work self-actualizing the things that you wanted to grow into and learn how to do Hobbies it's really a building up from the inside out of a sense of self that you didn't get the luxury of doing because you were so focused on rotating around not being abandoned that you abandoned yourself number two a compulsive caretaking so this is very common people pleasing fawning compulsively focusing on others to therefore not have to feel the pain of your own self-abandonment if I am taking on your needs and your desires a I get a reward from that usually I get something out of it from you B I don't have to feel my own pain and see it distracts me from ever having to deal with the fact that maybe I don't even know what my own needs are because I'm so good at abandoning myself and neglecting myself so you want to work on saying no and when you say yes if you're if you're focusing on caretaking you want to work on am I actually enabling people by doing too much for them even your own children as they grow as I've talked about my difficulties with certain boundaries around like chores and things like that because I didn't want to be a yeller like my mom or dad I took too much sometimes right so not all the time but there were definitely it's definitely a space I've had to work on and probably always will but you know Shifting the focus from what do they need to like what do I need or what do I need also obviously if your kids are younger or certain roles in life there's not a lot of space for us but the problem is you don't even know what the space for yourself looks like or how to ask for it or even demand it so you want to work on that number three compulsive self-reliance really common with a more avoidant attachment pattern but basically you're so good at just doing it on your own because you had to that your self-abandonment is about not being able to hold other people in your life right it's only safe when you're on your own you only feel peace in your body safe in the world or in control like it's scary to ask for help to reach out and so that's part of your work if you want to work on your self-reliance celebrate that in yourself it's amazing it's why you take risks and why you can do things on your own but your challenge if you want to heal is to work on asking for help communicating your emotions and feelings with others and letting others into your life number four compulsively needing to know through addictions through binge watching through distractions whatever it is because it was so painful in your childhood to be in your own skin that you don't know how to relax and calm your body without something to help you literally turn down the volume inside and so you you just compulsively reach for things maybe you're maybe you can't stand the sound of quiet because it's too much in your head or maybe it's like if I didn't binge watch Netflix for 10 hours I'd have to deal with my loneliness so looking at that and then of course challenging how you're numbing and what you want to do to switch that number five compulsive perfectionism extremely common for those of us with childhood trauma because we and this little child brain believe that but if I'm perfect and I get it right this time I won't be abandoned this time I'll get my needs met and so what we do is we have this inner and outer critic like Pete Walker talks about right in the book on cptsd and this little critic kind of pops up and tries to get in front of everything be perfect you're gonna make a mistake you're gonna screw it up because remember if you're perfect you'll be loved right we all know that that's a complete illusion there is no such thing as Perfection and I have had this argument with more than a few clients who tell me but yes there is uh there's not there's just not and so you want to work on how you over focus on the bad or how you're wired for the negative which we all are but how you're putting that on yourself that you're abandoning yourself every time you don't give yourself the love and compassion and the sort of support that you deserve and like let yourself be a human being you are a human being right not a human doing as they say the next one is compulsively choosing unavailable people you guys know about this this is how we go out in the world and we recreate the same story in childhood we tell ourselves it's different but it's often not but if you sat down and you did a human inventory on who you've let in your life your friendships your bosses your your close neighbors certainly your romantic Partners your crushes all of it if you start to live for patterns you can probably find them what were the main issues and why or how did it end and so you want to look at that how often you're doing that and maybe not recognizing it wanting to slow down and pace yourself not letting yourself be loved by love bombed or love bombing others like it really is about pacing yourself and letting people bit by bit share vulnerability and show you who they are and working on yourself too so that you're attracting healthier people as well not perfectly healthy just healthier the next one is compulsive dissociation and often compulsive maladaptive daydreaming so we're literally just going somewhere else we have we use this tactic and it lives in our body in our nervous system and our mind and it works really well to go somewhere else and for many of us have helped us survive our childhoods right fantasizing or building you know creative worlds which can be a great thing if you're you know a novelist maybe or a fiction writer but at some point it's another way to avoid and Escape ourselves to abandon our hunger our thirst for love for companionship for Joy for anger whatever it is it removes us from that and in the fantasizing part can help us act out entire parts of our lives that we're only letting ourselves live within our mind but not letting ourselves feel in our bodies and so you can just kind of create a whole other world that's not really grounded in reality so grounding techniques mindfulness things like that can be helpful number eight compulsively distrusting everyone and accepting that there's a very good chance that deep down inside you believe that nobody will ever fully be there for you and the truth is that at the end of the day we are all walking ourselves Home Alone on some level now I know if you have a spiritual practice that maybe it helps that part of your belief system is that you're walking with this belief system that you have but even with that there's I would argue at some point you are still at least and on some levels alone and so you are never going to be assured that nobody will ever hurt you or break your heart or lie to you human beings are complicated but how we work on that is we start to let people in a little bit more we start to share vulnerabilities and see how that goes we take a little step forward and we just keep trying right we want to not walk into every situation assuming the worst which for many of us going back to hyper vigilance made a lot of sense in childhood if I didn't scan for the worst how was I going to survive so it can be very counter-intuitive in general but you want to work on trusting that you yourself can handle whatever comes because that's really the bottom line you maybe can't always trust everybody in the world but can you learn to trust and believe in yourself about who you are and what you need my sweet daughter is texting me have you left yet for pickup and I'm almost done okay let's keep going I had to remake this video because I made it and I just talked way too long and I was like everyone's gonna be bored so okay compulsive self-disregulation so compulsive dysregulation this is a huge one for so many of us in childhood we just we we were so focused like I said on Survival that it's like emotions were like whack-a-mole they just popped up or or or come out in our body like a headache would be you know a somatic response to something else in our life to anger whatever it is we don't know how to calmly in our bodies through things like polyvagol Theory nervous system regulation how we're thinking about things checking our distortions our core wounds our negative beliefs we hold deep inside and all of that makes it harder for us in addition to things like of course genetic difficulties and biological brain Dynamics and neurological challenges but at the core we don't know how to feel contained and regulated and we don't even have the skills and tools so it doesn't work for everyone but things like breathing techniques I love guided meditation sometimes I literally feel so much anxiety what for what seems like no reason and this happens to me a lot in the morning probably because I'm having coffee I shouldn't espresso but honestly it's not just that I've had in my whole life is I will have to just stop and I will go lay on the floor for 15 minutes with my timer on my insight timer meditating practice just listening to music just saying you've got to literally stop your body because nothing I'm doing is helping but if I don't learn to recognize that I can't go lay on the floor and calm down and I have an amazing meditation pillow hold on I want to show you really quickly just really quickly [Music] I got these on Amazon um they're so amazing to show you it's this big it's like a potted big um floor pillow and then you can use this little thing to sit on you know to do like a meditation or I use it for a pillow so I lay them like this one here and then the bottom one below it I am telling you when I feel myself on that mat I know that I have to calm down so building a little corner In Your House a place to meditate a little special you know area with flowers or a blanket whatever things like that so working on your regulation skills and Googling things like DBT regulation skills which is dialectical behavioral therapy which is initially created for those who have borderline which we know for that particular Dynamic is often the core is certainly trauma in most not all but most of all most cases but not all and this idea of fear of Abandonment is the core wound but this fear of Abandonment can play out in anxiety disorders depression and borderline and lots of things so I don't want to pathologize this so I think that outside of the place where it collects into something like BPD where we you know we need to understand what to do to help people who are struggling is that so many of us are living with this on some spectrum of fear of Abandonment and so we have to learn how to deal with our little bodies that we didn't have any tools we did the best we could and that's the truth you did the best you could but oftentimes it's so stressful and we use all those other compulsive things that might make it worse if we're not aware and lastly our compulsive hyper vigilance which I talk so much about and I've called it chronic and toxic hyper vigilance but I like the idea of compulsive too because it's like a reflex it's like literally I go into scanning because I miss scanning my whole life and yes I might have sensory issues or yes I might overread facial expressions or tone of voice but that is what I learned to do in childhood so outside of neurological reasons why I might do that in many of our childhoods it paid off to be hyper Vigilant except for now we live in that chronic state so back to nervous system regulation managing your body dealing with how you approach situations and your underlying beliefs and things like that and certainly things where like I'm saying you learn to calm and soothe the trauma in your body because that is what is happening is that at the core if you want to heal from self-abandonment I just said it if you want to heal from your fear of Abandonment you have to deal with your self-abandonment and start with the concept that you did the best that you could you survived in whatever capacity and you spent all of your resources trying to survive to manage to cope to protect to scan that you didn't get the luxury of a certain safe space to develop who you were and part of what you have to do is stop abandoning yourself an honor that it was never your fault in the first place you didn't choose that childhood you didn't and you might love your parents with all your heart but still feel anger and sadness and guilt and fear and that's okay too but you have to switch that over focus on the fear of others abandoning you and frankly be more afraid of the abandonment of your own self because that is where the biggest wound occurs and when you can work on all these things that you were compulsively doing you start to build from the inside out a love for yourself and a strength that it was always there but you're finally giving yourself these sort of techniques and love and support that you never got in your own childhood and you are worthy of it but you've got to stop abandoning yourself and say I deserve to be here there's a space for me and you know these all these things it's not just like check a box like these are lifelong strategies because this has been wired in your body and your mind and your heart your entire life before you even had words for most of us if we're talking about attachment attachment patterns of our parents and our parents nervous system meeting us at Birth or whenever we arrived in their home and how that set us up alongside our own genetics our own biology so we have to find a way to stop abandoning ourselves and to me these are 10 of the best ways to start to do the work so I hope you found this helpful I hope you know that you are worthy of not being abandoned unto yourself but that who you are is someone the world needs to see but you have to see that you deserve it and need to be the those parts of yourself first thanks for being here please stay safe and well and I will see you tomorrow thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Dr. Kim Sage, Licensed Psychologist

Views: 309,324

Keywords: abandonment, fears of abandonment, abandonment issues, abandonment wounds, abandonment wound healing, triggering abandonment fears, triggering abandonment wounds, attachment wounds, attachment issues, attachment trauma, healing attachment wounds, healing fears of abandonment, healing fear of intimacy, cptsd, complex ptsd, dr kim sage, hypervigilance, cen

Id: pYt2p5LulTw

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023