Abandonment and Neglect

Abandonment wounds are difficult to deal with because we often don’t realize we have them. We sustain these wounds from childhood, and they remain with us as adults. They affect many different parts of our lives and relationships, shaping the way we feel about ourselves and the things we believe about others. It is possible to identify where our abandonment wound is and how it’s affecting us. As we begin to confront our beliefs and behaviors connected to our wounds, we will find ways to overcome them and free ourselves from fear and mistrust. Where It All Begins Sometimes, it helps to relive our past and talk about our childhood experiences. Certain events that we go through as children leave us feeling unsafe and uncertain. Adults, and our parents especially, are supposed to make us feel seen, heard, understood, and safe, but sadly, not every parent manages to do this. There could be many ways that we felt neglected, abandoned, or even betrayed by our parents, whether they were aware of their behavior or not. Plano Christian Counseling offers compassionate, faith-based support to help individuals process childhood wounds and move toward healing and restoration. The relationships we have with our parents in childhood affect the connections we make as adults. If we feel unsafe and uncertain as children, the chances are we are going to struggle with trusting others in our adult friendships and relationships. If we were left yearning for a stronger bond with our parents or wished they had been more constant in their care of us, we might be clingy and insecure in our adult connections. We might never have framed our parents’ actions as neglectful or damaging, but we still find ourselves triggered by certain things as adults. Sometimes, these triggers are small, like an [...]

Abandonment looks different from person to person. People frequently second-guess themselves. They might question if their perception of events. Likewise, they may feel as if they are overly sensitive when others who experienced the same event were not affected in the same way. Sometimes it is the events that seem to be so ordinary and commonplace that cause people to feel the deepest stabs of abandonment. Everyday Abandonment People often imagine that violent or extreme events cause trauma. However, people frequently experience abandonment trauma from subtle things they experience in relationships. These things can seem so slight, or even hard to identify, that we often overlook them, or even make excuses for them. This leads to us feeling as though we shouldn’t feel a sense of abandonment, or that we are being overly sensitive. For example, you may have a friend who cancels plans at the last minute. They gain reputations for being unreliable, and other friends might joke about their inability to commit to anything. They might have a deep reason for being this way, and because their behavior is predictable and joked about, we might make excuses for them or dismiss our frustrations with them. Plano Christian Counseling can help individuals and families explore underlying issues in relationships and foster healthier, more understanding connections through faith-based support. However, if we are honest with ourselves, we might find that we feel more than frustration with them. Their constant cancellation of plans makes us feel less important to them, and we feel like we can’t rely on them anymore. Sometimes it is the common, everyday behavior that friends, family, and loved ones do that makes us feel abandoned. These are difficult things to confront because we can feel self-conscious that we are overreacting to the situation. It is only [...]

The concept of “attachment issues” has become a bit of a buzzword, with a distinct lack of clarity around what it means and how it plays out in practice. The picture that comes to mind is of someone who has trouble maintaining healthy adult relationships, who is overly clingy, or behaves in a toxic way. Plano Christian Counseling offers faith-based counseling to help individuals understand and heal from attachment issues. Understanding Attachment Issues Understanding attachment issues requires getting to grips with attachment theory and attachment styles, which relate to how a person experienced attachment as a child. Four attachment styles. The attachment theory which was pioneered by John Bowlby in 1946 defined attachment as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings”. His work focused on babies who had either strong or weak emotional connections with their mothers. The four main types of attachment, which can apply in childhood through adulthood, include: 1. Secure attachment. If a baby trusted their primary caregiver and formed a close, healthy bond with them in their early years, this caregiver gave the infant a secure base from which to explore the world. This is the best possible situation because it hardwires the individual’s brain to feel valued and accepted by other people, and they in turn value and accept other people. In adulthood, people who experienced a secure attachment will likely function well in relationships, trusting people (who merit trust), and being able to regulate their emotions apart from others. 2. Anxious-preoccupied. If a mother or other primary caregiver was inconsistent or slow in responding to an infant’s needs or failed to meet them in some way, a child may demonstrate an anxious-preoccupied attachment style. This can lead to attachment issues in adulthood, with the person generally experiencing a negative view of themselves in [...]