In today's episode, we discuss the abandonment wound. In this episode, you'll hear: - What the abandonment wound is and how it can manifest, such as through over-attachment, overreaction to small separations, hypervigilance, and self-abandonment [10:52] - The underlying beliefs that often drive the abandonment wound, such as feeling unlovable, unsafe to depend on others, and needing to earn love [21:43] - Practical steps to heal the abandonment wound, including cultivating self-awareness, making a commitment to never abandon yourself again, practicing self-forgiveness, and allowing yourself to feel a sense of belonging The key message that the abandonment wound is not something "broken" that needs to be "fixed", but rather a natural response that can be healed through self-compassion and new patterns of relating to oneself and others
If you want more time with me to work through your abandonment wound, let's talk more about it. Message me on Instagram @sarahcurnoles or send me an email at hello@sarahcurnoles.com. Let's talk more about how I can help you.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah Curnoles, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them Each week, tune in to get a pep talk, to heal your heart. Let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:44)
Hello there, my friends, Sarah Curnoles here, and I am talking about a really big and important topic that is, and when I say that it's big and important to me, and I know that this is going to resonate with some of you because I talk about it a lot with my clients and I know that this is a big driver of how we show up in the world, and I also think it's at the root of a really big misunderstanding around attachment theory. So today we're talking about the abandonment wound and I'm going to be talking about what it is and how to recognize if you have this and what you can do about it. I also do want to talk a little bit about attachment theory, and I'm not going to go too deep into it. I think that might be a whole other episode to discuss sometime because I found attachment theory a long time ago and I was dating somebody that it was the very classic I was anxiously attached and he was the one that pulls away, I can't even think about it anymore.
(02:04)
Anyway, avoidant, that's what it's called. He's avoidantly attached, and it's the classic push pull that you hear about of I needed a lot of reassurance and felt like I was constantly feeling like I wasn't good enough and that I wasn't getting enough validation in the relationship and that's how I was feeling internally. And then when I was trying to play the cool girl and not show it so that hopefully he would give me what I needed and he would just pull away and get really distant because that was his pattern. I found attachment theory and I thought I unlocked the keys to the universe because I finally understood what was going on in my relationship. And if I understood it, then I could fix it. Well, here's the thing. I think attachment theory is helpful to have the language, but the problem is that when we get the language, we over identify with it of like Aha, I am anxiously attached.
(03:04)
And when we start identifying as I am anxiously attached and we say those really powerful words I am, then we start behaving that way. And it not only becomes a diagnosis, but it becomes who you are and how you show up in the world and you over identify with it and you start behaving that way instead of looking for the ways that you can grow. And I think people become overly attached to I have to heal this and I have to figure this out so that I can become securely attached. And you know what? I don't think that's the answer either because relationship dynamics are always going to be about the tension between the two and the push and pull, and it's going to be sometimes a relationship dynamic is going to create that tension. It's going to find it in different places. Even if you do become securely attached, there are going to be other ways that there are tension.
(04:11)
And it's going to be the same thing of I have to fix it. I'm broken, I have to fix myself. And so I'm talking about attachment theory here because I don't want this to become your diagnosis that I have an abandonment wound and I am broken. There's nothing wrong with you that is first and foremost, you're not broken, you are not unfixable. Honestly, there's nothing to fix. But what we are looking at are how are the ways I can take care of myself and nurture myself so I feel good and I feel confident and I can go out and create healthy dynamics in the relationships around me so that I have a fulfilling life? That's what this is about, of really understanding yourself, your habits, your patterns so that you can make a different choice that feels more self-honoring and self-fulfilling so that you feel happier and more satisfied and you're not left wanting and longing and heartbroken all the time.
(05:20)
And so the idea for sharing this, I could tell a hundred stories from my own life and really what struck me of why I need to tell this or talk about this right now was actually I had a client reach out and needed to move her coaching session earlier. We had been scheduled for later in the week and she reached out and she's like, can we move it up? And she actually moved it up even further of, I need to talk now this weekend now. And I was happy to do that. Been someday I've been working with for a long time and I actually had the availability so I could meet that request. And as a coach, I'm not doing therapy, I'm not looking at your childhood and really lingering there. I actually will use childhood information sort of as a touchpoint so that I understand how you can learn how to parent yourself, and that's really what the work is.
(06:29)
So this quote came to me very recently from Dr. Gabor Mate, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly and I'm going to summarize the quote. He said, trauma isn't what happened to you. It is what happened inside your body in response to what happened to you. So that's what the wounding is. It was we had a response to what happened in our lives and we made that mean something and it created a disconnect so that it created a wound inside of us, something that wasn't healed, something that created us deep pain. And my client had a date with somebody recently and she thought it went okay, and the person she went on the date with texted right after the date and was like, I just don't see it. Which really surprised her because they had been talking for a while and done some video chats and she had felt pretty vulnerable going into it and even said, what if you don't like me? And he said, oh, I'm sure that's not going to happen.
(07:47)
And then ended up sending that text afterwards and that really hurt her and it really brought up a lot of feelings of rejection. And what I could really see was it was really activating her abandonment wound. And so that's really where this initial spark came from to share talking about what is the abandonment wound and how can we go about healing it for ourselves? So I will share everything that I did with my client because those are the same tools that will help you if you identify it with this. But before I go too far into that, I really want to talk about what even is the abandonment wound. So I talked a little bit about reframing trauma because trauma isn't about a certain event. It's really that it was something that happened to you that you didn't have the tools to deal with at the time, and it was beyond your capacity.
(08:45)
And so it created this rupture inside you. And the abandonment wound specifically is an emotional injury caused by the feeling which could have been real or perceived. Remember, it's something inside you. It's not actually what happened that mattered. So it's the feeling of being rejected, neglected, or left behind. And oftentimes this does happen early in life, but it doesn't necessarily have to. And it could be any kind of particularly painful experience that felt like being left and to the point where it felt traumatic to you. Okay, so this is a really big distinction I have to make for people in my own life because I was adopted and I think for myself, the way that my little baby self interpreted it was that I wasn't safe and I felt neglected. Not that that was ever the intention of any of the people around me. I actually very loving care.
(09:52)
It was the best choice that my birth mother could have made at the time, and I really do think it was the best choice and my family provided a very loving home. But internally, the way that I processed it was it became the root of my abandonment wound. So this is really, I want to make sure you understand that it's not just always about physical absence because I did have loving presence throughout all of those phases. It was about the emotional disconnection and that I didn't have the tools as a baby to soothe and connect and to allow myself to feel safe, to be loved. And so this could happen from any number of things that you could probably imagine. It could even come from maybe your very first relationship ending in a big way and it created a big heartbreak for you. And maybe that's something that you've carried around ever since then.
(10:56)
So how can, if you have an abandonment wound, so let me go into signs of what it might look like. So it may show up as over attaching to the relationships in your life that you feel a little extra. I am so hesitant to use the word clingy, but that's what it is of you might feel really clingy to your relationships, whether it's romantic or friendship or family, and it's almost like an overdependence on those relationships. You need those and you are very afraid of losing that connection that it feels really unsafe and anxiety producing if there's any threat to the loss of that connection.
(11:43)
There is also an overreaction to small separations. I remember in the early days of dating my last boyfriend, he was going away for a bachelor party and we were on good terms in the relationship. Things had been going really well, and I think we were a couple months in and we were supposed to have a date before he left. And he said, I can't meet up tonight because I have to pack. I never packed. And I got really upset at this, which I stand by because he wasn't, he had let me know. He's like, I'm really just going to be present for the weekend. I'm not going to talk to you for the weekend and I'm just going to be with the boys. It was like, well, we're not going to see each other for, I think it was like two weeks because our schedules had been so busy and that was our date night. And he was canceling because of what I perceived to be poor planning that he didn't pack ahead of time.
(12:51)
But I overreacted. I went above and beyond and I lost my ever loving mind, not necessarily at him because I still had this narrative that I had to play the cool girl in order to be loved. I did get pretty upset, but I really lost it in private with friends and was crying all weekend and basically inconsolable. And so that's an overreaction to a small separation, and I hope you hear, I'm not making myself wrong for it because I now have a lot more compassion for what I was going through in that time. And also I think some degree of that is reasonable, but in a different way of expressing. So I felt out of proportion, levels of hurt that he was canceling a date and that he wasn't going to be in contact and that I was going to be alone for the weekend and that we weren't going to have a date for a long period of time.
(13:59)
I had a really big, big, big reaction to that. And so that might show up for you as somebody is late and you have a really big reaction or they cancel plans and you have a really big reaction, or much like my client, you meet up with somebody for the first time and they say they're not, they don't feel a romantic connection, and you take the rejection in a really big way, it hits you really, really hard. That might be a sign of an abandonment wound. Another sign might be hypervigilant because you are so afraid of being rejected that you are hypervigilant scanning the room, reading the room to take care of everybody to avoid the potential of being rejected. So this might show up as people pleasing or over-functioning to the point. And what those two terms mean, people pleasing and over-functioning, people pleasing is when you are overly concerned with the emotional states of the people around you, that you are going out of your way to assume best of what they want and you're taking care of them to the point that you are abandoning.
(15:11)
Checking in with yourself and over-functioning means that you are checking all the boxes, doing all the things for everybody else, and you are sort of an overdrive that person that's always like, I got it. I got this taken care of, and there's no space for anybody else, and you are doing this all because you want to be loved and accepted and you are ultimately too afraid of being rejected or left that you wouldn't be able to handle it if that happened. Okay? So notice all these behaviors you are doing at the expense of yourself, you are assuming that what's best or what everybody needs or what everybody wants, you are assuming all those things that you're doing, all those things almost automatically. I'm not even saying this is even conscious, but you have to notice the behavior that you're doing it and it's at your own detriment ultimately because you are acting out of fear and not from a place of love.
(16:18)
You also may be trying to earn your love of if I act in a certain way, if I behave in a certain way, then people will love me. If I do X, then I will get Y. It's so transactional when we talk about it that way. But in reality, the ways that it shows up of you might notice trying to, it might also look like walking on eggshells of if I smooth everything over, if I make everything nice and pleasing and I take care of all the rough things. I remember trying to be overly concerned with having dinner ready for when my partner at the time and he was done work, I was really trying to make sure dinner was ready by the time that he would be done so that he wouldn't have to worry about anything. That was me going out of my way because in some ways that could be really kind and generous, but I was doing it because I was afraid there would be not a blow up. It was never that dramatic. I was afraid there would be discomfort if it wasn't smooth and even, and that he couldn't just transition out of work mode and transition into boyfriend mode. I was really scared that if dinner wasn't ready when he was ready to eat, that there was going to be some fallout.
(17:47)
He really wasn't a bad guy. It was just in my head the way that I was processing it was like I needed to go out of my way for this. You might also feel constant feelings of emptiness or neediness or needing a relationship to feel happy or fulfilled or your life is worthless if you don't have a romantic partner. And this is really like you're seeking a relationship in order to fill a hole that you are feeling inside, right? There's a really, really deep longing for a romantic partner and to be emotionally seen and heard and understood, and that is such a deep, deep hole inside of you that you are feeling constantly. You need to fill it with romantic attention.
(18:53)
And I mean also you could also say self abandonment is also another way that this shows up that you ignore your own needs so that you can put the needs of others first in order for you to keep the relationship. So I keep saying I kept acting like the cool girl thinking I needed to be the cool girl of I needed to show up in a certain way in order to stay in the relationship. So I hid a lot of my natural reactions knowing there was something wrong about them of like, this is too big, this is too much. Nobody wants to see this. This is too messy, this isn't all right. And hiding all of that and just trying to play it cool while inside I was screaming. So I had both. I was doing both. I was having the huge overreaction and I was concealing it because I perceived they needed me to be cool and a little bit unattached and playing a little hard to get, playing a little bit of the games. I tried to play those things, but internally I was a mess.
(19:59)
So I hope some of those examples not only show you how it shows up, but what it might look like exactly in your life. And if you can relate to any of this, I would love to hear from you and we should definitely connect on Instagram. I'm just there under my name Sarah Kernels. I'd love to talk about this more because it's like I said, it's a big thing for me. So what is really underneath, if we get to the bottom of the abandonment moon, what are the beliefs that are running the show and these beliefs? I'm going to be really clear. A belief is not the truth. We think it is. That's why we believe it. But really all a belief is it's just a thought that you've had a lot. It's a thought that you've practiced. That's all. So when it comes to an abandonment wound, we've adopted these beliefs, these thoughts that we think a lot and those beliefs are everyone leaves. Eventually, I have to earn love or I'm not good enough as I am, or I'm too much as I am. If someone really knew me, they'd leave. And it's not safe to depend on anyone. I better do it all myself.
(21:24)
So you can even hear in these, it's almost self-fulfilling for that feeling of loneliness and the feeling of rejection. There's an under underlying, if you believe those things, you can see how it would lead to feeling really lonely and to bringing about more rejection. So it's really important to understand what are the beliefs underneath, because once we understand these things, and once we raise our awareness of what are the behaviors and habits in my life that are coming from the abandonment wound and what are the beliefs that I have that is really driving my behavior? Those are the two pieces. Once we understand that we get to work with healing the wound, and I want you to think about healing the wound, not like there's something broken, there's something wrong with me. But if you had an open cut on your arm, you want to find the ways that support it to naturally heal.
(22:27)
Our bodies want to heal naturally and so do our hearts. We just have to create healing conditions for it that support that so that we can move to be in recovery from the wound. We can be in recovery from feeling abandonment instead of constantly re-injuring it and keeping that wound open. And if you had a big enough injury that might leave a scar, it doesn't go away. You might still always carry some of that with you. However, you can choose to find new ways to relate to the world, and you can always choose to come from a place of love rather than a place of fear. And that doesn't happen overnight. It's not like a magical, you hear this podcast and poof, you're fixed and you're healed, then you're going to be all rainbows and daisies. It's a consistent practice, and I've been practicing it a long, long time, thanks to support that I do for coaching myself through it.
(23:29)
I have a therapist, I work with a coach. I put a lot of work into this so that it has become more of a regular practice, but I still notice it. I still notice ways that I can pull away from really being seen and known, pulling away from vulnerability and intimacy because I'm scared. So I still have those moments where I see like, oh, that's me acting out of my wound rather than from the place where I have healed. So I bring all that so that you can bring compassion to yourself in the process. So here's what you can actually start doing to start practicing this, and self-awareness is always the first step. So start noticing where are you behaving in these ways? Where are you thinking these beliefs? Notice what's happening. And it can be really useful to journal through this process because journaling is a way that you have to slow down. You have to be present with yourself, and you have to, it's almost like you are witnessing yourself. And that is some of the most healing practices for especially this kind of work because you deep down desire someone to see you and know you. And if you are not taking the time to see yourself and know yourself, you can't expect other people to. Okay, so journaling is an excellent practice through this of noticing what's coming up or noticing where you're thinking those thoughts.
(25:09)
I highly recommend also creating regular check-ins with yourself where you can notice what am I feeling right now? Where in my body do I feel that? And just pay attention and describing the feeling. Use the senses. What does it feel like as in, is there a touch? Is there a temperature? Is it hard? Is it soft? Is it gaseous and permeable? Or is it really solid? How big is it? Is there a color? What do I see? Do I smell anything? Do I hear anything? For me, anxiety shows up like a thousand bees buzzing in my chest. So there's a pretty loud hum.
(26:00)
So setting, I actually used to put this in my calendar when I was really serious about creating this connection with myself. I did it on the hour, every hour throughout the day, and did I do it every hour on the hour? Not necessarily. I'm not perfect, but I did it more often and I created more of a habit. So now it's more natural. So if you're really serious about this, of really showing up for yourself, and this is a way that you stop abandoning yourself, is that you create these appointments and you create a regular check-in that it doesn't have to take more than two minutes, that you check in with yourself, what am I feeling right now? Where am I feeling it? What does it feel like? And breathe breathing into it. And you might ask yourself, what does this feeling need from me right now?
(26:54)
Just see what happens and be curious and open. Okay, so another practice I want to encourage you to do is to, this is a big one, to make a promise to never abandon yourself again. When you feel ready, this is a big one. When you feel ready to really have your own back, to really be there for yourself and you're willing to commit to yourself with that, you might even want to do a little commitment ceremony of like I promise to always and forever have my own back. It's not about being perfect with that. We're humans. We make mistakes, but the act of committing to yourself of I will always be there for me. I will always make the time to listen to myself and to see myself and to take care of myself, even if that means I have to abandon others, but I have to put myself first.
(27:59)
That's a big one. And that might look like you're willing to set boundaries in your life, or you're not going to date a certain kind of person anymore, because in the past that has really harmed you. My therapist very gently encouraged me to stop dating the people who really needed a lot of coaching and support. She said, well, maybe for a little bit you stop dating the people that have a lot of potential, and you start dating people that are just already really kind and open and ready for relationship, not the ones that have the potential to be ready, which is what I was doing.
(28:40)
Or I date the people who don't have as complicated backgrounds. I was dating people with really complicated traumatic childhoods, right? Not that I always knew that going into the relationship, I would figure it out, but she said, well, maybe you pick some people for a while that don't have that. And as a way that I don't self abandon myself, of putting myself always in this position of being rejected because the person's not ready for an emotional commitment. And part of this commitment to yourself is also putting in place. How do you want to practice self-forgiveness when you do abandon yourself? And how do you want to create repair? Because it isn't about being perfect. Sometimes we build trust by making a mistake and then choosing to forgive ourself and repairing what was broken.
(29:37)
I can take that an example of when I self abandoned, I can take that and I can learn from it, and I won't make that mistake again. And I really try to honor myself of like, oh, I'm so sorry self. That was a choice that really moved away from what was true for me. And I apologize to myself and I say, I'm not going to make that mistake again. I'm going to learn from this, and here's what I learned, and I do this all in my journal. Again, that journal is a really big tool. And then the second big piece for me, which I think this will be a whole episode on its own someday as well, is allowing yourself to belong. The way that my abandonment wound shows up is that I reject the idea of belonging somewhere. I really do have that belief of if someone really knew me, they wouldn't love me. That's a belief I'm working on untangling so that I can believe something more.