You simply cannot love abandoned children out of the blues. When a parent or parents betray their sacred cosmic trust to provide for, care about and love a child, there is absolutely nothing a person who loves and cares about the child or adult child the parent has elected to abandon can do. The person abandoned has all the power — and only they themselves can do the necessary work to help themselves and their own life improve.
According to GoodTherapy.org, “Abandonment fears typically stem from childhood loss, such as the loss of a parent through death or divorce, but they can also result from inadequate physical or emotional care. These early-childhood experiences can lead to a fear of being abandoned by the significant people in one’s adult life.”
As the counseling team at Good Therapy further notes, “Healthy development requires adequate physical and emotional care, and unmet needs can result in feelings of abandonment. Sometimes experiences of abandonment can constitute a traumatic event in a person’s life. The death of a parent can be a traumatic event for a child, as can the inability to feel safe due to threatening circumstances such as physical or sexual abuse or the lack of adequate shelter.”
Adults who have childhood abandonment issues tend to go through life entering relationships and existing within them according to unhealthy frameworks. A few questions Couples Counseling Chicago asks their readers to ask themselves before entering therapy or counseling settings include but are not limited to the following:
- Do you suspect you have abandonment issues?
- Has someone told you that you attach yourself to another in relationships too soon and too fast?
- Do you avoid entering into relationships because of an intense fear of getting dumped?
- Do you sabotage your relationships – even when things seem to be going well because you don’t want to have your heart broken down the road?
- Do you look for flaws in a potential mate as a way of ruling out any possibility for romance?
The online counseling web source posits, “If you answered yes to these questions, you likely have abandonment issues. In plain speak, this means that deep inside, you fear being rejected by others, particularly in the romantic sense. This doesn’t mean you are ‘sick’ [meaning mentally ill] or are not capable of love. It does mean, however, that finding intimacy can be a major challenge.”
That’s where the frustration and heartbreak of a targeted parent who is kind and loving being scapegoated or alienated from a child’s affectionate psychology and/or the crushing “ah-ha” moment for a romantic interest of an adult child with abandonment issues comes into play.
If a child was left feeling abandoned, for instance, by one parent, whoever remains is likely to themselves feel alienated, like they themselves are guilty of not being able to reach the soul of the abandoned child to comfort him or her, and the crushing realization happens for both the remaining family and lovers of the person with abandonment issues comes into play.
No matter how much we, as an abandoned child or abandoned adult child’s loved one’s care, try to help a person with abandonment issues overcome them, it’s virtually impossible to psychologically or emotionally connect with them in such a way that they could feel existing love and support in a profound or meaningful way.
The abandoned child will self-sabotage their personal relationship(s) by habit seeking to validate the core of the matter. Namely, that at least one or more of their parents did not find them worth their time to get to know or love as people.
An abandoned child made to feel worthless and disposable by one parent will spend the rest of their natural-born life trying to prove that parent was justified or right leaving them in some way.
Why?
Because in the mind of a broken inner child, parents are GODS — and if God turns their back on you and condemns you to live alone in the wilderness with no sign of care, compassion, or mercy, he or she must have had a very compelling reason to do so, right? After all.. in the mind of a child, both parents — even if they are at war — are RIGHT.
What manifests from that internally held, subconscious belief system is a need to VALIDATE. No matter how crazy or illogical a toxic parent’s thought process, children raised to love abusive people despite their flaws after being socially trained and conditioned to overlook abuse and forgive in order to enable, will have a wounded inner child striving to comply.
But broken children, especially as adults, seldom seek self-validation for their own perspective. What they strive to validate is their selfish parent’s adult irrational and simply cruel decision to walk away.
So, they do what any hurt, unloved, discarded, and unwanted pet does. They [the abandoned, abused, unloved, and unwanted child] end up on the streets — or they lose proper socialization skills by surrounding themselves with toxic peer groups in life.
Many of them will turn and bite your hand off if you try to reach out to help nourish their mind, body, or soul in any way.
Bottom line, the nicer and more loving people are toward them, the more likely they will be to project false and negative impressions on them. After all, if they love them, the person must be trying to trick them in some way, will eventually leave, or is up to some grand Machiavellian scheme to use or abuse them, right?
Yeah… umm… NOT right.
Abandoned children trying to make sense of Cluster B people’s actions are most oftentimes guilty of trying to apply the correct set of rules to the wrong game, metaphorically speaking. It’s like they are trying their best to play soccer with a bat.
What soccer mom fails to notice or point out a mechanical and systems thinking error like that?
Each time abused people behave badly themselves, healthy people are RIGHT to pull away. The opinion of the parent who abandoned or betrayed and brutalized a child then disappeared (including those parents who go to prison, die, or move away) is reinforced — but errantly.
“See? No one loves me. No one likes me. No one wants to be around me. No one loves me enough to STAY!”
Again… umm… NO? All that proves is people with healthy boundaries simply don’t feel compelled to enable or take abuse from a toxic thinker in any way.
These are the claims made in the private mind of the victim, invalidating their own self-worth by manufacturing situations that chase loving people away.
It’s one of the worst Narcissistic Abuse techniques in the book that could possibly be pulled on another human being, to abandon a child, with the goal of an active Abuser doing as much damage to a child and former love interest (the remainder parent) each and every God-awfully long day.
But moreover, it’s not just the day a parent walks out and abandons their child or the entire family that hurts the Abuser’s victims. It’s not something the discarded ever can simply forget or leave in the past.
Abandonment issues hurt for a lifetime. Even if the parent is reunited with a child after a period of time, the lingering damage that was done to the child and other adult victim’s psychology offers a soul insight about Abuser(s) narcissistic and anti-social tendencies remain.
Sadly, so does the persistent desire to help the parent (or spouse) who abandons to avoid blame. It’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome to empathize with a person or peer group who is psychologically abusive or morally flawed in some profoundly toxic and incredibly dysfunctional way.
If a parent who abandons has problems with drugs, alcohol, or is running with a bad crowd, they tend to abandon or neglect familial responsibilities.
If an Abuser gets mixed up with a Cluster B man or woman on the side themselves (sacrificing family and friendship ties with those who truly love and care for them in an effort to let their love interest control and dominate their affections), they are also likely to create abandonment issues in their offspring.
Stepfamily members like wicked Step-Mothers or Evil Step-Fathers as well as stepchildren tend to dramatically heighten an already traumatized person’s feeling of aloneness despite the growing number of forced acquaintances.
Likewise, if they elect to take a job that will knowingly take them away from everyday life with a family, their enablers are likely to tell a youngster or an abandoned family unit that the person who left did them a favor in some way.
This can also create abandonment issues for a young person, but more complex ones because children of absentee parents are oftentimes told the parent left or stays away from home for long periods of time for the child’s own good. And that’s a bad way to teach a child to think, noting that Cognitive Dissonance springs inevitably from such toxic patterns in logical thinking.
If and when this sort of reality-spinning happens, respectfully call it what it is — gaslighting. Seeking validation from the person or people who broke a child or yourself as a person never works.
Abandonment issues don’t strictly stem from a parent leaving or dying.
No good parent leaves a child dangling alone in the wind about ANY family issues or walks out of their life without ever even bothering to explain.
And certainly, no kind or loving parent walks out on a family in favor of another or a love interest or disappears because it’s for their abandoned family’s sake.
Parents drafted into the military have a valid excuse to be away from children. But it does not make it any easier to explain to a child who wishes their mother or father cared more about them than they did a paycheck or civic servitude.
People biologically capable of being that cruel, antisocial, mean-spirited, and selfish are one thing and one thing only — MACHIAVELLIAN. They tend to do or say whatever is necessary to get what they want at any given time.
On some days that might be freedom to party. On others, it might mean they feel entitled to pulling disappearing acts.
Parents who come home and abuse, pick fights with a co-parent, and use the co-parent as an excuse to leave or abandon a child are what they are (quite simply): disgusting. And the more a child tries to think or feel positive about their genetics, the more likely they are to struggle desperately with Cognitive Dissonance about the parent and their own self-opinion in major ways.
Self-esteem is different from self-opinion in such cases. A rational child or adult might know they are a nice person, a loving person, or a worthwhile person at their core but still (thanks to abandonment issues) be unable to shake the gnawing emotional sensation that no matter how great they are, they will never be good enough to keep or retain a parent, friend, family, romantic partner, or even their OWN child’s love and affection long term.
It’s like the gift that keeps on giving gag gifts, that creepy clown surprise. Just when you think you are over a parent abandoning you or dying and leaving unresolved issues, WHAMO! It knocks the wind right out of an otherwise functional and healthy adult child’s insides.
Psychology Today wisely noted:
When children are raised with chronic loss, without the psychological or physical protection they need and certainly deserve, it is most natural for them to internalize incredible fear. Not receiving the necessary psychological or physical protection equals abandonment. And, living with repeated abandonment experiences creates toxic shame. Shame arises from the painful message implied in abandonment: “You are not important. You are not of value.” This is the pain from which people need to heal.
Are adult children of toxic parents who abandon them (or those who are placed in the discard pile by a spouse or long-term love interest who themselves suffer from abandonment issues) ever likely to heal?
Honestly, NO.
But what they (the walking wounded) ARE functionally able to do is to learn to spot the symptoms of abuse in themselves as well as others. By observing rather than reacting all the time or allowing their subconscious to steamroller their conscious desire to establish and maintain healthy long-term relationships, people who are inadvertent products of their toxic parent’s destructive choices are effectively able to learn how to cope.
The more abandoned kids read and learn about the complex side effects of toxic parenting, the more likely they are to be able to realize when they themselves are in downward spiral thinking or habit patterns. Educating themselves is key to being functionally able to make better decisions and choices that will impact themselves and all the people who are close to them (or ever will be) in this particular incarnation of life.
By learning how abandonment issues affect human psychology and becoming mindful about internal emotions as well as being willing to reflect on thought processes from an observational standpoint, any mature child, teen, young adult, or full-grown adult can learn to manage their social and emotional anxiety related to abandonment issues.
It just takes a willingness to self-educate first — followed by a desire to resist the urge to “let things go” in favor of the NLP reframe LET IT BE.
By honoring what actually happened (rather than striving to forgive, minimize, or ignore), the human mind can let itself GRIEVE. And grieving the loss of innocence, the loss of emotional and physical SAFETY, the loss of comprehensive social support, as well as the forced [arguably undesirable] change in PERSONAL SOCIAL STATUS is what actually is most likely to have a positive benefit to an abandoned PERSON’s life.
You see, that’s the rub right there. No matter what age you are or who abandoned you, they abandoned a person.
Abandonment issues happen to people. People who are abandoned people.
That change in social standing — one that is entirely out of the hands of the victim of social and extreme emotional and psychological abuse — is the crux. Kids stop being children when a parent leaves or pulls a disappearing act.
If abuse is involved before they go, the situation magnifies. Not only do kids grow up thinking that in some major way they are biologically flawed — undeserving and unworthy of love and attention or social protection by their “pride” — they will tend to seek out new relationships with people most likely to repeat abuse and abandonment patterns by habit based on personality type.
You simply don’t find an Empath dating another Empath in adulthood or married to one another unless they both have taken great strides to heal from childhood abuse issues or any experienced life traumas. What you find is People Pleasing Empaths and loving personality types who feel worthless at their core due to abandonment issues choosing whatever love interest or career circle of contemporaries most likely to play out the karmic drama of proving their most toxic parent RIGHT.
When a relationship goes south in adulthood for an abandoned child, it triggers massive waves of memory tying current abuse issues to past times. That means the subconscious mind that elects to strive to win the love of an abandoning parent plays a nasty trick on the host personality — if the person gets abandoned or fails with a second, third, fourth, or fifth character, then all of a sudden the abandoning parent can (in memory) be vindicated for leaving.
The mind of a tortured inner child that wants desperately to believe their parents are good and that they come from a good genetic stock family screams out, “See? No one can love you!”
In the mind of an inner child agonizing and left feeling abandoned, the validation the inner nature seeks is not to prove itself worthy but rather to prove the abandoning parent right.
Why?
Because in a weird way, it’s far less painful in the SHORT TERM to believe at the core that a toxic parent who behaves abusively on an ongoing basis without rhyme or reason is or was somehow wise. Long term, an abandoned child suffers daily throughout the course of their natural-born life — if not from the direct pain of the abandoning issue itself then surely from the pervasive side effects.
Adult children of toxic parents seeking to heal can ONLY heal themselves. Oddly enough, the less attached they are to seeking validation of self-worth from being involved in romantic relationships and close-knit enmeshed family circumstances are the faster they are likely to heal.
But detachment is not the ultimate answer, as people who detach after trauma tend to lean to developing anti-social tendencies rather than positive, mindful coping strategies that validate and help heal them from what they have experienced or witnessed. Going GRAY ROCK (rather than becoming conflict avoidant) can help an abuse victim “feel the feels” a la Richard Grannon’s sage advice for guys.
Until a child or adult child can really just sit with the notion they were abandoned and remain on a daily basis subsequently abused each and every day of their life that an abandoning parent survives, they are likely to do silly things like manufacturing chaos for themselves in their personal life.
Some might lie, others might cheat, a few might turn to drugs or alcohol for relief — but the largest group of humans dealing with abandonment issues simply adopt unhealthy coping and communication strategies (again) designed to sabotage relationships for no reason other than to help an abuse victim feel like BOTH their mother and their father were or are inherently somehow biologically GOOD.
If a parent disappears on a child or replaces them with new ones, they’re Cluster B, period. And not just the wimpy narcissistic or Borderline Personality Disorder kind, either.
In order to physically estrange yourself from a child or family unit, an adult — yes an ADULT — makes a decision to do it, plain and simple.
People capable of doing something like that to an innocent child without regard for either the child or the people in the child’s life who for a lifetime will be left reeling themselves while trying to help pick up the child’s emotional, spiritual, and psychological pieces are simply so self-serving and sociopathic by nature that they only way they can pull such a stunt off is if they themselves HAVE NO CONSCIENCE.
[Biologically speaking from a pure science perspective, only people with extreme Cluster B personality disorders, head injuries, or severe physical issues that prevent cogitation lack the emotional ability to perceive how their actions in life affect themselves and those around them comprehensively. If their brain is not physically able to actually perceive the value of acting with empathy, it’s not likely the person will see value in things like love, loyalty, or life conceptually.]
When dealing with people who are narcissistic by nature, having a limited conscience and little to no ability to process complex emotions is COMMON. Kids don’t know that. Neither do adults who do not have an extensive psychological education.
Here’s where the child or adult child can use actual FACTS about Cluster B personality types to help them simply BE OKAY with the fact a parent abandoned them, the entire family, pulled a disappearing act, or set out to “make more just like them” with another person like a paramour or mistress who enables them.
Hang on to your hats, folks… because this ah-ha moment suggestion is a doozy…
If YOU or someone you know was abandoned as a child, let it be perfectly FINE.
Imagine that. No change, forgiveness, or trying to put a band-aid or Neosporin on the wound necessary.
By embracing the truth of the situation and validating that abandonment happened — especially if an abandoning parent is still alive, has a choice about how they act, and they still continue to abuse or devalue the existence of a child throughout the child’s natural born life — a victim can take all the time in the world they need to both grieve and accept their new title in life.
Being considered an “At-Risk Child” or a discarded adult by the general public is a life-changing event — one that happens in perpetuity, not just on the day of the event. Psychologically speaking, being abandoned or discarded by a family member (or pervasively betrayed by them) changes who we are as people.
No one who has been abandoned can say it did not matter or had no real impact. Saying the abandonment was “for the best” is just a crock (even if the absence of the abandoning parent dramatically improves the life of the affected parties abandoned).
Regardless of the positive strides a remaining parent might make to improve the lifestyle quality of an abused child, that child simply will NEVER RECOGNIZE or place value on the remainder parent.
The more toxic the child, the more likely they are to strive to systematically devalue any positive thing their remainder parent tried to do to compensate and they are even less likely to respect the discarded remainder parent — instead most oftentimes electing to see THEM as more flawed than the abandoned child thinks even they are themselves.
[No one wants to dislike, disrespect, or “un-love” one of their own parents. It goes against fundamental human survival instinct.]
It’s a hateful, hurtful, shame-filled downward spiral, the abandoned child plays out throughout adolescence and adulthood. By failing to empathize with remainder adults or to connect the dots that people with NPD or ASPD or a comorbid combination of the two are completely egocentric and lack the ability to have a conscience, the abandoned little one makes themselves into an Abuser By Proxy acting on behalf of the Cluster B parent directly.
The more estranged the child makes himself or herself from loving, caring, remainder elements by choice in young adulthood, the more likely they are to repeat tragic circumstances throughout adulthood. No matter how hard they try to pretend their abandonment issues or subsequent withdrawal from people who are NOT Cluster B influences are affecting their daily life each day, they are impacting both themselves and their loved ones directly.
In order to heal from abandonment issues, a rational, sentient, and adult mind must use what scientists know for sure about people who lack the capacity to empathize with others to help override biological programming that tells a human body that without a complex social system to lovingly support it, it’s simply never going to be “alright”.
Grieve the loss of personal identity as a person who is from a loving family. Accept the reality that there are biological risk factors in play revolving around bad DNA.
Be the change you want to see in the world and let your partner and remainder family’s feelings about you matter. Stop abusing THEM while striving to rationalize a boorish parent’s selfish decision to care more about themselves than the child or children or co-parent’s lives.
If they walked out feeling entitled and failed to show up in any meaningful way to offer the remainder family or child emotional, physical, social, financial, and community-based public face time support, they were and or are acting abusively. Not just to the child or kids they ditched and left for social and emotional destruction in the proverbial dirt, mind you, but to every person that child or adult child comes into contact with throughout their life who loves them.
The abandoning parent abuses the SYSTEM — not just the child himself or herself. Once the child is old enough to reflectively consider the events surrounding the abandonment from the eyes of those who were left holding the bag as their caretaker(s), if they are incapable of seeing things from their true social support network’s perspective, they are likely to end up psychologically aligning themselves with Cluster B habits and thinking patterns.
That’s why so many adults who have abandonment issues themselves go on to abuse their own lovers and family members or kids so pervasively throughout their adulthood. Because the ones who don’t end up striving to be People Pleasers end up being conformists as well as taking on the traits of their active abusers.
If you have Daddy Issues (or Mommy Dearest Issues) because a birth father, father figure, birth mother, or mother figure abandoned you, go easy on your friends and family. It is up to them to decide whether or not they want you in their life — NOT YOU.
Acting bad to drive them away is just as much of a control issue as clinging to their affections in a desperate, compulsive, or needy way.
Deadbeat Dad issues might affect a remainder mother more than a child, but self-absorbed children who refuse to engage rationality and do their own psych research as they age cause discarded lovers or jilted remainder parents to suffer far more at the hands of an arrogant, triggered, issue-ridden child any day.
You are who you decide to be — so if that person is NOT an Abuser By Proxy acting as an agent of the abandoning parent directly as well as indirectly, get a handle on yourself.
Entitlement thinking brings tunnel vision. So does a lack of ability or an unwillingness to display the traits of a well-educated, kind-hearted, and mindful person who strives on a daily basis to demonstrate caring.
The right way to alleviate abandonment blues is to embrace them by nature. There’s a reason why “singing the blues” helps downtrodden people psychologically and emotionally cope with the reality of their everyday life situations.
B.B. King and Eric Clapton never jammed with other people because they were “thinking negative” or they “feel sorry for themselves”. It’s okay to feel sad, hurt, displaced, dejected, unloved, unwanted, and unhappy. It’s ignorant friends and family who were themselves raised with toxic thinking patterns who judge and tell you stupid advice like FORGIVE AND FORGET and GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE who cause toxic shame in abuse victims.
If they want to sweep their own dirt under the rug and pack skeletons in their own closets, that’s FINE. But people who talk and act like that are absolutely the most socially and personally destructive, toxic shame encouraging forces than any person with abandonment issues could possibly elect to allow into their life.
One simply cannot heal from that which produces toxic shame in an individual or that which they feel socially compelled to HIDE. Never trust a person who advises you to stuff your feelings down, to forgive an unrepentant abuser who displays insincere or no remorse coupled with unchanged or worsening behavior, or suggests that it’s in any way okay not to follow sound Psychology with regard to humans needing to validate domestic abuse or trauma impact over the course of a natural life.
BB King and Eric Clapton sing the Blues for a reason. By validating trauma and emotions like loneliness, the mind is able to validate it’s been through trauma and effectively has the opportunity to heal.
In order to save themselves, abandonment victims must learn to sing out loud and proud about their own life. It’s truly the fastest psychological and emotional way to spiritually be able to comprehensively re-tune.
