Abandonment Trauma: 'I don't trust you to stay with me.' - Interview with Rowan Garlow (Part 2)

In this Interview, Completion Process Practitioner Rowan Garlow and I share our knowledge about Abandonment Trauma.

Part 1 of this Interview Series is about Enmeshment Trauma and you can find it here:

"Many people don’t realize that they’re feeling emotionally abandoned or that they did as a child. They may be unhappy, but can’t put their finger on what it is. People tend to think of abandonment as something physical, like neglect. They also may not realize that loss of physical closeness due to death, divorce, and illness often is felt as an emotional abandonment.

However, emotional abandonment has nothing to do with proximity. It can happen when the other person is lying right beside you — when you can’t connect and your emotional needs aren’t being met in the relationship.

Emotional Needs

Often people aren’t aware of their emotional needs and just feel that something’s missing. But people have many emotional needs in intimate relationships. They include the following needs:

To be listened to and understood
To be nurtured
To be appreciated
To be valued
To be accepted
For affection
For love
For companionship

Consequently, if there is high conflict, abuse, or infidelity, these emotional needs go unmet. Sometimes, infidelity is a symptom of emotional abandonment in the relationship by one or both partners. Additionally, if one partner is addicted, the other may feel neglected, because the addiction comes first and consumes the addict’s attention, preventing him or her from being present.

Causes of Emotional Abandonment

Yet even in a healthy relationship, there are periods, days, and even moments of emotional abandonment that may be intentional or unconscious. They can be caused by:

Intentionally withholding communication or affection
External stressors, including the demands of parenting
Illness
Conflicting work schedules
Lack of mutual interests and time spent together
Preoccupation and self-centeredness
Lack of healthy communication
Unresolved resentment
Fear of intimacy

In Childhood

Emotional abandonment in childhood can happen if the primary caretaker, usually the mother, is unable to be present emotionally for her baby. It’s often because she’s replicating her childhood experience, but it may also be due to stress. It’s important for a baby’s emotional development that the mother attune to her child’s feelings and needs and reflect them back. She may be preoccupied, cold, or unable to empathize with her child’s success or upsetting emotions. He or she then ends up feeling alone, rejected, or deflated. The reverse is also true – where a parent gives a child a lot of attention, but isn’t attuned to what the child actually needs. The child’s needs hence go unmet, which is a form of abandonment.

Abandonment happens later, too, when children are criticized, controlled, unfairly treated, or otherwise given a message that they or their experience is unimportant or wrong. Children are vulnerable, and it doesn’t take much for a child to feel hurt and “abandoned.” Abandonment can occur when a parent confides in his or her child or expects a child to take on age-inappropriate responsibilities. At those times, the child must suppress his or her feelings and needs in order to meet the needs of the adult.

A few incidents of emotional abandonment don’t harm a child’s healthy development, but when they’re common occurrences, they reflect deficits in the parent, which affect the child’s sense of self and security that often lead to intimacy issues and codependency in adult relationships. Couples counseling can bring couples together to enjoy more closeness, heal from abandonment, and change their behavior." PsychCentral (

The Completion Process can be a helpful tool to integrate the original traumas and break free from the destructive behaviour patterns that are caused by Abandonment.

Information about the Completion Process:

Here you can find Rowan:

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If you feel like you eventually suffered from Abandonment Trauma, please contact me for a Free Discovery Session where we can talk about your childhood experiences and develop a strategy of how you can improve your Emotional Health.

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