Abandonment Wound: Healing after a Breakup

Breakups are truly awful, but if you're going through extreme grief, extreme pain that goes on for an extended period of time, it might be a sign that you have an abandonment wound. If you feel like you need your ex for survival, if you feel like you're in an extreme panic without them, these are all signs. And I will unpack those in the lesson today, and I'm going to show you how to start healing your abandonment wound. And the good news is that you don't need to get back with your ex to do that. Make sure you stick around to the end of the lesson because I'm going to give you one very powerful tool I give my clients in Heal Your Heart School. I will show you today in a video so that you can get started on your healing journey. And if you're new here, welcome. My name is Amy, and I help women who are stuck in patterns of self-abandonment that keep attracting them unhealthy and toxic relationships to learn the discipline of self-love and heal their trauma so they can be free to be their true authentic self. And if you want more content on this topic, please click the subscribe button and hit the bell so you get notified when I post new lessons like this every week. Before I get started, Heal Your Heart School is open for enrollment, so if you'd like to know more about how to apply for that, stick around to the end of the lesson. So all breakups come with them a period of grieving, a period of withdrawal, and there's a natural period of withdrawal. It might happen for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, depending on how long the relationship is. But over time, you should naturally notice you start to heal, right? Time allows that. But if you have an abandonment wound, time doesn't really change anything. You notice that you still have a lot of anxiety, you might be crying a lot, you might be still trying to get your ex back, and you just can't let them go. It feels like there's a thread connecting you to them. These are all signs that you might have had your abandonment wound triggered. Now there are patterns associated with this. This is where you obsess over your ex for an extended period of time, and you might actually start dating others, but you're actually not really over your ex at all, and you're still actually stuck on the feeling of rejection, or hurt, or betrayal, or whatever it was that happened that ended the relationship. And you might also have a pattern of attracting emotionally unavailable men, or attracting just unhealthy relationships that never meet your needs. Now when your abandonment wound is triggered, it feels like a switch gets flipped, and if you've seen Stranger Things, it feels like you go into that upside-down world where everything feels really awful and toxic, and there's a lot of grief, and there's a lot of shame. And you might be in a lot of panic and desperation to get your ex back, and you feel incredibly unsafe in your body, you even might feel like you're going to die. And you might notice that there's a bit of a split in your personality, because on one hand you are done with them, right? You can see why the relationship didn't work, and you hate on them, and all those things, all those anger-based emotions are there, but then there's this other side of you that's limbic, it's primal, it needs to get them back, and it might feel like a binge or an addiction as well, and so you flicker between these two kind of states. And what's actually going on when you're in this state is it's got actually not a lot to do with your current breakup. It was triggered by your current breakup, but you're actually experiencing old emotions and memories subconsciously and somatically in the body, although you might not be consciously aware of it. Now, the great sign is that this is the best time to heal this wound, to heal these patterns for once and all, because the abandonment wound is closest to the surface when we go through a breakup that triggers our abandonment wound. And if we don't do this, what will happen is your old patterns will just continue to resurface. You'll keep having the same relationship again and again, just with a different person in the role of the partner, right? And now I just want to mention it's important to know that your abandonment wound can get triggered, whether it was a long-term relationship that ended months or years, or it could have just been a really short-term thing. You might have only had one or two dates with them, and you got super, super attached too early, and then your abandonment wound gets triggered. So this can happen in either of those scenarios. And it's because this person is really, particularly in an early stage, they're just more important to you in your world, in your attachment world, than they should be. Now there are some other patterns that are signs of an abandonment wound being triggered that you might know of already if you're here on YouTube looking around these kinds of videos. If you have any kind of insecure attachment, particularly anxious attachment, that's actually being run by this abandonment wound. If you notice you attach too soon or you don't have any boundaries when it comes to dating, that's a sign of abandonment wound. And if you want some specific boundaries if you're dating at the moment, I urge you to check this video out next. And if you notice that you make them become the center of your world really quickly and you hyper-attune to this person, and you notice you're measuring their behavior, like how soon are they texting you back or are they the one organizing the dates or not, now it's really natural to have these kinds of dynamics when you're dating. But if this is causing you anxiety, it's causing lack of sleep, all of those signs is that there is something subconscious that's actually being triggered. And what's going on is you've got a general fear of rejection, right? It just makes you behave in a way that could potentially push someone away. Ironically, that is the irony of what this wound does, because the wound exists to protect us, so you can't leave me if I leave first, right? So you actually enact that rejection in the poor behavior that the abandonment wound and the fear of rejection makes you do. Now let's look at the causes of your abandonment wound. And firstly, in childhood, there's a really great quote by relationship therapist Terry And that's a great quote to illustrate the fact that when you experience abandonment for the first time, it actually happens when you're a child, whether you're consciously aware of it or not, and that part of you gets frozen in time. So in adulthood, when you experience more and more rejection, you actually kind of regress back into that very young part of who you are. So anytime you're really stuck in this abandonment narrative, they rejected me, they abandoned me, know that it's coming from a younger part within you. So here's a list of childhood situations. And it's actually not necessarily the situation that causes it, but it's the meaning you place on the situation and what that has to do with yourself, your sense of self, and what happens when we're really young children, like ages two, three, four. So you probably won't have a memory of this, is that when something happens like a divorce or a parent is really absent, we actually personalize the situation. We make it about us. It's because of me that my parents are breaking up. It's because of me that they're not around. And this is actually a protection mechanism because it's safer for you to believe it's about you than it is about the parent that is providing you connection that is primal for your survival. Now this is all happening completely subconsciously. So if you haven't done any subconscious or shadow work or somatic work, you probably won't know the meaning you placed on your parents' divorce when you were super young, but that meaning is deep down there and is potentially feeding your abandonment wound. If you have a lot of memory gaps in your childhood where you were probably disassociating from really traumatic experiences, there's a high chance that if any of these things happened, and it overwhelmed you and it created some kind of trauma in the system that feeds and creates this abandonment wound, and this emotion that you experience as a child gets imprinted in the body. So I'm just going to reiterate again, you might not have a conscious awareness of the meaning you placed on your parents' divorce, and you might think, oh, that was fine. I moved through it fine. But emotionally and subconsciously, there's an imprint there that's causing these patterns to reoccur. Then it feeds a lifelong abandonment narrative that you are somehow not worthy of love. There's something wrong about you. There's something broken about you. It's like you're permanently wearing these glasses that you see your life through, and you just kind of get used to living life like that. You don't know any different. But when you break up and experience rejection, the wound gets triggered. That's when the wound comes to the surface, and that's why I said earlier it's a really great time to actually work on it. So any circumstances in your adulthood that we have on the screen now, and screenshot this if you like, these can also contribute to the abandonment wound as well. And actually, this is a very, very common wound for people to have. It's common, and it causes really dysfunctional behavior in relationships, in life, like people pleasing and all kinds of things. But it's actually an unhealthy, dysfunctional pattern and way of behaving. Like I said earlier, it's because our nervous system has been imprinted with these emotions. It actually becomes an integral part of our personality, and it informs our personality as well. If you ever maybe suspect someone else that you know has an abandonment wound, and you say, how did your parents' divorce affect you when you were younger, or how did this affect you? They'll probably say it didn't affect them at all. They're not aware of it, and probably what happened when it actually did happen when they were really young, they disassociated, and they don't have much of a memory of it. And someone that has a lot of abandonment trauma and a lot of wounding throughout their life might be disassociated from a lot of their life, and just generally have a really poor memory. So it's important to know that it varies from person to person, and we're just specifically talking about you today, and remember that it was the meaning you created subconsciously, and maybe even consciously if you recall, the effect of that on your sense of self and your identity as well. Now let's look at the abandonment wound ecosystem, and this has just come from me and my research and work with hundreds and hundreds of women, and from my own personal experience of healing my own abandonment wound as well. There are three parts that I've identified that are really important to look at, and they work symbiotically. They actually feed each other and kind of bleed into each other in how they appear. And our abandonment wound can get triggered and appear in all sorts of different ways, in all sorts of different relationships, and because I talk mainly about intimate relationships, it will appear right from the very get-go, even when you're swiping on apps if you're dating online, or when you start dating them, or when the relationship gets more serious. So it's really important to kind of understand the different aspects of the wound. The first aspect is that you are going to be assessing the danger of your attachment figure, and that's going to cause you to kind of obsess over them. Are they a safe person to be with? What is it that I see that makes me feel safe, and what is it that I see that are potentially unsafe things? So you'll notice that you become hyper-attuned to them and their behaviors, and I see this a lot with people's texting behaviors, right? You get really hyper-attuned to changes in how they text, and whether they use that smiley or that emoticon, or how frequently they text. So that hyper-attuned state that you're in is a sign that your abandonment wound is running and that you're assessing some level of danger. Now other patterns of behavior, like stalking the social media a lot, or overreacting to very small things that they don't do well, and I see this a lot in the dating scene as well, like we overreact to something that we don't actually know what their reasons were for it. And the other even more dangerous thing is that we underreact to red flags because we are not seeing the significance of what's going on, and because they're an attachment figure, we're trying to make it perceived for ourselves that they are a safe person, right? We're doing some fantasy bonding and we're kind of clinging to them, so we underreact to those red flags. So this kind of need to assess danger is one of the parts, and like I said, they bleed into each other. Now the second one that is very connected to danger is that you need to have a level of control, and this is where you measure their availability to you. This is why the texting frequency thing can be so feeding of the abandonment wound, because if we know that they are going to text within a certain amount of time, and whatever that time is, you make it up, it's kind of arbitrary in your mind, but that gives you a level of control to know that they're going to text you back in that period of time. Now of course, if we're dating someone healthy and everything's going great and they're being available to us and they're texting us frequently, this is all fantastic. So I'm not saying the scenario is bad, I'm just talking about your internal reaction to this. If you notice you need to have the control and the certainty that they're going to be texting you back, it may be a sign your abandonment wound is running, but it may not as well. So keep that in mind and please be discerning with this advice. You might also notice that you are testing of their behavior, and whether this happens in dating or relationship, but you notice you have these kind of like should statements going on. In order to feel that they like me, he should do this, or if I say this, he should say that, or respond in a certain way. This kind of black and white statements we can get stuck into, we might think that we're actually discerning and seeing whether they are a healthy match, and that may be the case, but it might be a sign that if they don't do that and your anxiety gets activated, it might be a sign that you're actually needing an excessive level of control in this situation because there's intimacy going on and that is quite a scary thing to have to happen for someone who has an abandonment wound. So this control piece of the abandonment wound is actually covering these vulnerable feelings that might be forming, and these are healthy feelings of vulnerability that we get when we connect in healthily to someone. That is healthy intimacy, but we feel like they're unsafe feelings, so we kind of layer this control over the top. You might do that in other aspects of your life, right? You might notice that you tend to self-soothe in an unhealthy way by drinking a lot or overeating a lot or being addicted to something in a certain way, so you already have a bit of a pattern of self-soothing of these emotions that you can't deal with, and those emotions are coming from this fear of abandonment. So in my opinion, an abandonment wound is also one of the reasons why we do have other addictive behaviors in our life as well. Now the third piece that works and feeds symbiotically with the other two pieces is safety, and this is our need to get to safety. So because we feel vulnerable and these feelings are coming up and we're trying to get control and we're assessing the danger, we also feel the need to get to safety, and we're going to do that in one of two ways. An avoidant way by giving them a silent treatment if they don't do the thing that we wanted them to do. We push them away. This can look like a whole lot of different things, and if this is coming from a place of, you know, get away from me, I don't like you, when you know there's healthy intimacy there, that avoidant behavior might be a sign that there's that abandonment wound running. The opposite, which is the anxious, I need to avoid conflict in order to keep the connection together, that is another way we get to safety when our abandonment wound is triggered. One of the reasons we ignore big red flags is because we need to get connection with this person. We've already attached to them as our primal attachment figure. We've obviously not done well with assessing the danger side of things, so our abandonment wound isn't our best discernment, isn't our best way of discerning things at all. We're actually just trying to get to safety and get connection with them, and that might even look like you becoming a caretaker in the relationship, always finding a partner that needs saving or needs help. These are also ways that we can both get control and get safety in a relationship because we've got a role in the relationship. Now, when all of these things are kind of operating together, and hopefully you can see that they operate in varying ways, and we need to be discerning about whether it is actually coming from an abandonment wound or it's coming from a place that's healthy within you. When it's coming from the wound, we're feeling very anxious. We're flooded with a lot of emotions and hormones, a lot of cortisol, a lot of dopamine, the hits of they're replying to my text. It feels like we're on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. That's a sign that the wound is playing underneath. At this point, what you need is not more hormones and emotions, but you need emotional sobriety. It's interesting how people that have a strong abandonment wound running in their life, it actually integrates with their personality. They just are very anxious people, or they're people pleasers, or they don't have boundaries because this abandonment wound has been running their whole life and they've been unaware of it. All right? Now, how do we know whether this abandonment wound is really playing out in our life? What's the one thing that I could, if I could say to you now, test this, and then if this is the case, it's definitely at play? That would be, is there a pattern in your life that you're noticing that you don't have control over? Often that pattern is, and if you're here on this channel, that's why you're here, is attracting unavailable partners or emotionally unhealthy partnerships. This is where the common denominator is you, and you keep having effectively the same relationship, but you just are switching out the role of the partner, right? If that kind of a pattern is running, there is a high, high chance that you have an abandonment wound running. Now, let's briefly look at the attachment perspective around this because attachment theory has so much to offer us in terms of understanding where our patterns come from. When we were first receiving love and experiencing love at a very, very young age, we formed what's called a love blueprint. If in our childhood, we experienced any kind of abandonment, any of those scenarios that I've mentioned earlier, that actually affects our love blueprint and what we think love is. We then get attracted to the same feelings, feeling the same way in adulthood. If mom or a caregiver acted in a certain way that made us feel really lonely and really rejected when we were really young, we're actually going to be attracted to feeling those same feelings in relationship as adults. That is how we keep creating these same patterns that I've mentioned and what is actually part of this abandonment wound. It's important to know that this is all feeling-based. It doesn't matter what the actual scenario was. We're not always replaying the same scenario like if I had an alcoholic father, I then am attracted to an alcoholic partner. It's not always an exact scenario. It's to do with the feelings that we feel with our partner. This is a subconscious blueprint that happens. We're trying to replay this dynamic in adulthood in order to heal what happened when we're in childhood. It's like when you're in adulthood, you're trying to heal your partner and to get them to finally love you the way you did so that you can somehow subconsciously heal the parent that never loved you the way that you needed to be loved. Ironically and unfortunately, this pattern means that we attract emotionally unavailable people, which means this pattern gets reinforced, the self-belief that we're not worthy of love, that we're broken, that we'll never be enough. They all get reinforced as well. The pattern strengthens and continues. How do we go about actually healing our abandonment wound because there's so many different aspects of it that can be really destructive in our emotional relationships. At the very end of the day, it really gets in the way of healthy intimacy. I just want to point out a few things you should not do because there's a lot of advice here on YouTube and I just want to explain in my opinion why some of that advice is just not helpful. Some of it is helpful as well, but some of it can really actually work against you if you take it. The first example is that if you are taking advice to somehow change your energy, change your behavior, become more feminine, more magnetic in order to have men attract to you, that may give you the subconscious belief that my energy right now is not worthy of love, I'm not going to attract someone by being myself. That's going to feed your wound because your wound is getting you to try and change yourself in some way. It's trying to do all of those kind of controlling things, those safety things that we mentioned already. Be very careful with advice like that that gets you to change parts of your inner self and your inner energy. Also, make sure that any of those advices around this is what you should say to a guy Obviously, they're all manipulative tactics. They're all external things that people are saying for you to do in order to change a circumstance. Those external circumstances are exactly the kinds of things that your abandonment wound was getting you to do when you were a child in order to get your parents to love you. That's partly why some of that advice is actually so sticky and click-baity because it actually feeds into your abandonment wound. Guess what? If you start changing your behavior, changing your words, changing your personality, you are just going to be feeding this wound and it's going to get stronger and stronger and you won't heal. The other thing is there's a lot of advice out there in order to get your ex back and heal the relationship with the avoidant person. I'm not saying all avoidant people are emotionally unavailable. I don't mean to imply that at all, but there's a lot of advice around how to get people that are emotionally unavailable to you back. The problem with that is those people are always going to move on. That's why they're emotionally unavailable. You really need to focus on your own internal integrity and healing patterns and just trust that in this healing process, which I'm going to tell you about in a minute, you are going to uncover and become your truest authentic self. That might include more feminine magnetism or whatever it is that other people are telling you to have, but actually let's focus on our internal integrity here and let's get to know what the unique flavor of us is and allow that process to naturally happen because that is what's going to ultimately make you attractive, not only within yourself to feel great about yourself, but of course to obviously then attract a partner who's compatible for you, someone who actually matches with you, not someone you've chosen, I need to have him and I need to do whatever it is to get him. This is someone that actually fits well with you. How do we actually heal? Obviously this is quite a large, this could be a 20-hour video and I teach all of it step by step in Heal Your Heart School, but the basic principles of healing your abandonment wound is that they start in your body. Healing happens in the body because the experiences that triggered and reinforced the abandonment wound when you were young lie in the body. A lot of this is subconscious. You won't have a lot of conscious memory of it. You won't be able to say how you created meaning around your parents' divorce or whatever it was because it's just a feeling sense that lies in your body. Your love blueprint, when it gets formed and when it gets influenced, it actually affects your emotions, your emotional home, and it affects your nervous system and affects how your hormones are produced. There's incredible biological repercussions of the nurture aspect of how we were raised and how our love blueprint gets formed. Look at firstly what your baseline is. What are you like when you're in your resting state? What's present for you? What emotions are present for you? What physical sensations are present for you and what emotional homes do you tend to go to? Like for instance, I used to spend a lot of my time worrying about things and I used to spend a lot of my time in fantasy scenarios where I would just be making up something that someone said so that I could get angry, so I could feel that way because that was an emotional home for me because it was a really frequent emotion I had in my childhood and re-experiencing in my adulthood. That was flooding myself with the same emotions and the same chemicals that I had and I had to get off that emotional rollercoaster. Firstly, just do a stock take of what kind of emotional patterns, what kind of emotional rollercoaster you're on. If you notice you are doing those unhealthy self-soothing tactics like overeating or over-obsessing, I want you to really look at what the emotion is underneath. Are you really lonely? Are you really sad? Allow yourself to lean into those emotions. When you lean into an emotion that feels uncomfortable, you're going to feel a level of softness that you can actually feel in your body. If you notice you go rigid, that's generally when the control part of us takes over and we're trying to say no or we're trying to reach for a chocolate bar or we're trying to get our ex back. We actually want to allow ourselves increasingly to feel those more vulnerable emotions that our abandonment wound has made it really hard for us to feel. It's important to know that those deeper emotions underneath can actually be released really quickly if you have the right tools to do so. Once you actually feel those emotions, once an emotion is felt, it is released. It happens really, really quickly. Identifying the patterns in your life at the moment, what's going on is going to get you aware of your emotional baseline and getting you started to feel those uncomfortable feelings underneath it that you don't want to feel. Of course, we do all this Inheal Your Heart School. We move through these stages in a step-by-step way. I have specific tools that work with different aspects of the abandonment wound as well. Like I said, these steps will get you started. Know that the point is not to find someone who doesn't trigger you. I'm not telling you to go into a relationship where you're never triggered if you have an open abandonment wound. The point is to find a healthy match who you can safely work through your intimacy issues and your abandonment issues and whatever they are. If you struggle with actually finding a healthy match, I want you to watch this video next. It's going to give you a good look at what a healthy match actually looks like. There's a lot of other dating content here on my channel for you to look at. I want you to know that you are not your wound. What is underneath you is this most incredibly beautiful, authentic, true self. It's just layers of layers of abandonment wound and feelings and emotions have covered it up. It's just about uncovering it. You are already whole. You don't need to change your energy. You don't need to become more magnetic. You don't need to learn tips and tricks to do whatever. It's underneath. It exists in you. We can slowly peel these layers of the onion off to get back to it. The powerful exercise that I want you to try now with me, or you can just listen to it now and then just do it straight after this video, is I want you to recall an abandonment memory in childhood. Actually go back to it. You can close your eyes now if you want to. Just recall it. Imagine that you're there. Something happened. Whatever it was, something was said. But I want you to imagine that you are walking up to you as a child. You might be super young in this scene. Imagine yourself walking up to you, your younger self, and putting your hand on your shoulder. This might be your little inner child that you're feeling is in this really awful situation. Just say to that child what the child you needed to hear in that moment. Just say that out loud and that might be, I'm here for you now. You're going to come with me now. It's safe for you now. I love you. In your mind, allow yourself to really reparent your child and bring that child with you, effectively taking them out of that memory and into you, into a part of you now where you're safe, into your heart. That's the process. Well, that's the very start of the process of reparenting. There's obviously a lot more steps to it. Actually, if you'd like to know the three steps to self-love after a relationship ends, I want you to watch this free webinar next. I also have a free Facebook group. I would love to see you in there answering questions. I do lives and all sorts of things. If you'd like to submit your application for Heal Your Heart School, there is a calendar link in the description below. Please comment below with any questions that you have, anything that came up from this video. I would really love to hear from you how you found it. Here are some next step videos for you to watch to help you move one step closer to embodying your true authentic self, free of all the patterns, free of your old abandonment wounds. I will see you in the next video.