What triggers childhood abandonment - A personal perspective

Hi everyone, thank you so much for stopping by today. In today's video I wanted to talk about the abandonment wounds that we have from childhood trauma. This is something that we can be triggered into quite often and in this video I'm going to talk about the different things that can trigger this feeling of abandonment. Now obviously when you have suffered childhood trauma you can be physically abandoned by your family. So you may have an absent father or an absent mother that actually physically left you. But the most painful wound is when we are emotionally abandoned and this can be re-triggered a lot in adulthood. Now when we are ostracized in childhood or we are emotionally abandoned this hurts terribly and in adulthood this grief of being abandoned can be re-triggered again and again. When we are triggered every time we were emotionally abandoned in our childhood will come back to us as an emotional flashback. It doesn't necessarily mean that we will have a memory of this but the flashback will have an emotional component. One example of being emotionally abandoned could be when you were only a baby and this isn't actually something that you have a memory of. It could be that you were just a young one-year-old or two-year-old crying in your cot for attention from your parents and this attention was not met soon enough. You were left to cry for a very long time and this in itself is traumatic for a young baby and this is something that your body will remember. Another way that you're abandoned in childhood could be if you had a parent that was giving you the silent treatment and this could be when you were older and you were able to understand. It could be when you were always walking on eggshells around your parents and any change in behavior like a parent banging a door or a parent leaving every time they had an argument. This leaving can be extremely triggering when you're an adult and you're in a romantic relationship and in the middle of an argument your partner walks out of the room or leaves the house because they can't handle the emotional dysregulation that they're experiencing and this is a huge trigger for someone who has had abandonment wounds and trauma. Other things that can be extremely triggering can be if you have been bullied as a child, if you have ever been left out or not invited to a party or a very special event. So now in adulthood every time you are not invited to a special event or every time you notice that you've been left out of something this can bring up so much grief and this grief is associated to your early life abandonment trauma. So being left out, being ostracized, being in a group of people can be very triggering for you if you don't feel that you're speaking up enough or you're contributing enough or if nobody talks to you in that group and you are feeling quite uneasy. All of these things will bring up a lot of anxiety, can be very triggering for you and can make you feel very uncomfortable. An experience that I had with an ex-partner was when this partner would emotionally shut down. Now this partner had a lot of mental health difficulties and when he was overwhelmed or when he was really upset about something he would literally shut down and he wouldn't talk much, he wouldn't give me any attention and it could take him a whole day to come out of this state of mind and even though I knew that this was his way of dealing with his emotions, that this was the only way he could handle whatever it was that had upset him and that at a later date he would come back and talk to me and we would work it out and it would be fine, that shutting down that he used to do was extremely, extremely triggering for me and I would feel very much on edge for a very long time afterwards. Another trigger for me which may also be true for you is when I notice that other people are happy all the time, other people are always enjoying themselves, other people are always finding social settings easy and they just breeze through them whereas I do not find this easy, I find it very difficult and I don't always find it easy to just let go and relax so I get very sad when I see how easy this is for other people and I always wonder well how would it have been if I hadn't had that childhood trauma, would I have felt more confident or more comfortable around people? Obviously if I'm in a group of people with friends then it's not so bad but if it's in a group of people that are new or that are friends of friends and I've just met them this can be a bit challenging and I always have these worries in the back of my mind that I've said something that sounded stupid or that I've said something that has maybe been a bit more of an overshare so I'm always trying to keep an eye on these things and I do feel very stressed and very triggered by these sorts of situations. Another situation that is very triggering in regards to your early childhood abandonment can be when you feel that someone is judging you or you feel like someone has been really condescending towards you or you feel like someone is giving you unsolicited advice. All of these things can be extremely triggering. They can remind you of that feeling of not being listened to as a child or people not acknowledging your point of view or validating your emotions. You can feel like you are not good enough in those moments because the person who's giving you this unsolicited advice thinks well you're not coping with life but it really isn't about you that is actually about them and the people that judge you again that is about them that is not about you. Lastly another trigger that I find is quite uncomfortable is when you have some family that you are still in contact with and they have a wedding or they have a big event and even though they're really nice to you and you get on and they're generally supportive they don't actually invite you to the wedding so when that happens of course you feel very left out you think well if they've been really kind and they you know they talk to me and listen to me why didn't they invite me to the wedding and you do feel ostracized you do think well that is the last bit of family that I am actually in contact with and yet they don't actually include me so to not feel included can be very very painful. Now if you would like to share your own experience with this feeling of being left out of being ostracized or if you've noticed that this abandonment that you had in early childhood has been triggered please feel free to share this experience in the comments below the video and if you have any questions at all then please feel free to send me an email at Thank you so much for your attention today everyone and I will see you very soon in my next video. Take care, bye.