Don’t Search for Love to Avoid Abandonment.
Abandonment wounds are a very real experience for many of us. We may have had a parent leave the household spontaneously as children, struggled to maintain friendships growing up, or had a previous romantic partner leave the relationship with little notice.
The reason these wounds are often so deep-rooted and difficult to heal is very multifaceted, especially because of the way they clash with society’s idea of what it means to be “whole”. Taking an intense fear of abandonment and surrounding it with societal narratives that preach “searching for ‘The One’”, and that being in a relationship means you’re “desirable”, is a slippery slope that can lead one to search for love for the wrong reasons.
What is essential to understand when it comes to healing our abandonment wounds is that much of our suffering originates at the level of our nervous system. Our body is and has always tried to keep us safe by keeping memories of previous threats and sounding the alarm (i.e., our Amygdala) whenever it senses resemblances to those threats. The issue is, that once the alarm is sounding and we enter fight or flight mode, our rationality leaves us because our survival is dependent on one goal now: preventing abandonment.
You may have experienced this during seemingly insignificant events in your relationships: one of your friends is in a bad mood because they had a bad day, and because these kinds of emotional shifts signal danger to you, you begin repeatedly calling and texting them to check in. One of the people you began talking to on that dating app may have stopped responding as quickly, so your anxiety leads you to send more messages in hopes that they will reply.
We do this because when we experience abandonment, we internalize it as a sign that we are unlovable, that we are disposable, and we will do anything to prevent confirming these beliefs about ourselves.
You are not unlovable.
You are not defective.
You are not broken.
You are not a second choice.
You just want to be loved, as any human being would.
You just want to feel loved and prioritized by others as you love and hold space for them.
You have always just wanted to feel seen.
I need you to know that you don’t need someone else’s companionship in your life to prove this to you, no matter how far-fetched that may sound. I need you to thank your body for always trying to keep you safe, even if it feels like it has done so in the most unloving of ways.
Most of all, I need you to forgive yourself for the times in which this wound got the best of you and pushed people away, or led you to seek love in the most unloving of places just to fill a void.
You did what you could with what you knew then.
The next step is to simply learn to acknowledge when this wound is being triggered, and to sit with it. What you may find is that the voice that is begging for attention and security is not the current you, but your inner child. It is that wounded part of you that needs your time and your compassion to learn that they are okay, that they have always been okay, and that they are seen. Let that part of you know that you are keeping them safe now by building a home within yourself, for yourself, rather than in other people.
Doing this practice and strengthening your ability to recognize when this wound is being activated will help you form more conscious relationships in the future. These bonds will be rooted not in a fear of being alone and what that may cofirm about you, but in your desire to share your wholeness with someone else.
Remember, love should not be about one person being the guiding light in someone else’s life, but about the lights of two people coming together to burn brighter, together.
To learn more about abandonment wounds and how we can heal from them to build conscious relationships, listen to my latest podcast episode, “Healing from Attachment Wounds & Coming Home to Ourselves”.
