Post by lovebunny on Feb 4, 2023 15:28:48 GMT
I'm reading The Journey from Abandonment to Healing by Susan Anderson, and I recommend it. It seems I do well with therapies that involve using my strong imagination and ability to visualize. It offers specific ways to work on 5 stages of abandonment, which differ slightly from stages of grief.
As you may know from other threads, I'm not a month of out of a breakup with my boyfriend of almost 3 years, lived together nearly a year. I had to move out of his house into a tiny studio apartment, leaving my pets and some of my furniture that won't fit.
My feelings of abandonment are absolutely overwhelming, yet I can step back and look at the situation and honestly say I already had a foot out the door, and he knew it. I'd been threatening to leave if he didn't respect my boundaries, heck, I'd already downloaded housing applications. Our relationship styles are just incompatible (he wants to be polyamorous.) I needn't take it personally. He actually seemed pretty broken up over it when he helped me with the move. Or at least, he's full of self-pity and guilt.
The feelings of abandonment are because he turned his attention to another woman then ended things while I was still clinging on to hope and magical thinking and actively working on the relationship.
I started thinking about childhood episodes of feeling abandoned, came up with a few:
I was 6, first day of 1st grade, we'd just moved to a new town into a huge apartment complex. We moved a lot when I was a kid. I got off at the wrong bus stop, all the apartments looked alike. My parents had just expected me to recognize the address, I guess? I was terrified. I sat on a rock and just cried and cried. Luckily, my father came looking for me, I was probably only missing for 15 minutes.
I was 9, my parents had moved away, I was staying with an aunt and cousin so I could finish out the school year in my old school. My aunt caught me and age-appropriate cousin playing "doctor." Auntie handled it well, but I felt like I'd done something really bad and just wanted to go "home."
11, spending summer at Grandma's which was more for my grandma than for me. Got my first period, very uncomfortable processing that with grandparents.
I can think of many small ways I've felt abandoned by parents and partners throughout my history.
The books explains that everything I'm feeling, and as intensely as I'm feeling it, has an explanation in physical and psychiatric reality. I'm truly in withdrawl, my body is truly wound up to find my lost object, my sense of disorientation and inability to concentrate....very real.
As you may know from other threads, I'm not a month of out of a breakup with my boyfriend of almost 3 years, lived together nearly a year. I had to move out of his house into a tiny studio apartment, leaving my pets and some of my furniture that won't fit.
My feelings of abandonment are absolutely overwhelming, yet I can step back and look at the situation and honestly say I already had a foot out the door, and he knew it. I'd been threatening to leave if he didn't respect my boundaries, heck, I'd already downloaded housing applications. Our relationship styles are just incompatible (he wants to be polyamorous.) I needn't take it personally. He actually seemed pretty broken up over it when he helped me with the move. Or at least, he's full of self-pity and guilt.
The feelings of abandonment are because he turned his attention to another woman then ended things while I was still clinging on to hope and magical thinking and actively working on the relationship.
I started thinking about childhood episodes of feeling abandoned, came up with a few:
I was 6, first day of 1st grade, we'd just moved to a new town into a huge apartment complex. We moved a lot when I was a kid. I got off at the wrong bus stop, all the apartments looked alike. My parents had just expected me to recognize the address, I guess? I was terrified. I sat on a rock and just cried and cried. Luckily, my father came looking for me, I was probably only missing for 15 minutes.
I was 9, my parents had moved away, I was staying with an aunt and cousin so I could finish out the school year in my old school. My aunt caught me and age-appropriate cousin playing "doctor." Auntie handled it well, but I felt like I'd done something really bad and just wanted to go "home."
11, spending summer at Grandma's which was more for my grandma than for me. Got my first period, very uncomfortable processing that with grandparents.
I can think of many small ways I've felt abandoned by parents and partners throughout my history.
The books explains that everything I'm feeling, and as intensely as I'm feeling it, has an explanation in physical and psychiatric reality. I'm truly in withdrawl, my body is truly wound up to find my lost object, my sense of disorientation and inability to concentrate....very real.
