Okay, Susan, how do you love a person with abandonment issues? Well I can take
that question two ways: How do you love someone and that person has abandonment
issues and is very insecure and has big gigantic overreactions and you're always
coping with a new drama because they get very emotionally hijacked over many
little triggers that occur in the relationships. So how do you love someone
who has abandonment issues and who turns your life upside down because they're
dealing with their sort of emotional instability due to abandonment issues.
That's part...that's one way of interpreting the question and that's a
big question. I hear a lot of people in those situations saying I need to get
help for my partner because he or she has abandonment issues and it's very
hard to cope. The other side of that question is how do I love someone if I
have abandonment issues, and I think I'll focus on that part just for for this
moment because what that's about is that you become most vulnerable when you like
someone or love someone or are attracted to someone. When that person brings out
the mating feeling in you. When you have a mating feeling toward another person,
that makes you the most vulnerable you will ever be.
If you feel attracted to that person you want to know that person is attracted to
you. It's immediately incumbent on the feeling to be reciprocated because
anything sort of getting that reassurance makes you feel it brings out
the shame, "I'm not enough." "I love them but they don't love me." "I think they're
wonderful but they don't think much of me." "They're special to me but I'm not
special to them because I'm not enough; there's something wrong with me.
there's something fundamentally missing in myself." Those feelings of shame--we all
have them--are lurking beneath the surface and the minute we go to love
someone, those feelings become the most vulnerable that we can ever feel them.
They really come to a head we're not conscious about the shame messages; those
are mostly unconscious. We're just conscious of being insecure
and and vulnerable. We're unconscious of not being able to trust the other person.
Now intellectually we may know that it's not the other person. I have people
telling me all the time, "I know it's not him it's me. It's in me. He's always
trying to reassure me. I can't feel secure. It's my own abandonment issues." So
even when the mistrust intellectually we know it's not because the other person
is is causing it, even then it is hard to deal with not really trusting that you
are attachment worthy, that you're worthy of being kept, that you're so valuable
the other person will do everything he or she can to stay in the relationship.
Now there's an answer to this dilemma and
the answer works for both sides of this question whether you're having trouble
loving someone and your own insecurity is making you mistrustful and insecure and
anxious about being abandoned any minute or whether that person is having that
reaction, the answer is the same and it is that each one of us is responsible
for our own sense of security. So we are in a partnership and the other person is
insecure, you can remind yourself that you're not responsible to make that
person secure. You can be helpful you can be a very kind person and make it as
easy as you can for the other person, but you'll never be
able to reassure the other person. It's in them. So it's very clear that each
one of us is responsible for making ourselves secure. That is what we do when
we're in when we're the ones insecure and feeling vulnerable. When we realize
that our job is to become a self-sufficient, emotionally self-reliant
person, and that our job is to find ways to give ourselves a sense of security, to
give ourselves a sense of centeredness in on the planet, to feel the strength of
our own two feet--our ability to stand alone, our ability to take care of
ourselves, our ability to love ourselves and cherish ourselves and honor
ourselves because only we know how hard it is to be to be us. So once we realize
that that is our responsibility and no one else's, we can begin to take the
power away from that other person. We can begin to put the power back in ourselves.
We don't do this perfectly. That other person still has power because we like
them or love them, and they still have power and they can still make or date
make or break our day, but all of that is going to happen. But the primary
responsibility is with ourselves and once we really work on that and put our
focus there we become emotionally self-sufficient and usually that adds to
our cachet. It adds to our attractiveness or our love ability to the other person
as well because we are taking care of ourselves and loving ourselves. We're
showing Self at that point. Do you think that a person should be totally healed
of the abandonment issues before he or she can be in a relationship or can that?...
No. This is something that I feel that people make the mistake of waiting until
they're no longer anxious and no longer insecure, no longer having
hissy fits, and no more no longer having emotional highjacks that they're all
they're not having those experiences...we could wait until the cows come home for
that and we would be avoiding relationships. The idea is that we are
never perfect in these things. It's okay to enter into a relationship and have it
be a rollercoaster and even a nightmare because it is very very vulnerable to
try to get close to someone. But we can learn so much from it. We can gain so
much strength from it. It's better to go in with positive intentions of taking
care of ourselves, learning how to complete our own loop of self-love so
we're not so dependent on the other person. All of those things are teachable
moments you know there are all opportunities to gain strength. Okay. So
where do they learn more about abandonment recovery? How do they... My
website abandonment.net has a hundred and twenty pages of free information
that will help people start a journey. outerchild.net is all about the
self-sabotage. The ways we sabotage our relationships and stand in our own way.
All the abandonment books journey from abandonment to healing and the rest of
the books, and workshops I'm running online workshops since during the
pandemic that actually has people helping people with me adding input to
make it a very powerful experience. Okay so you have different books but which
book do you recommend the most I mean which where should they start? Um really
they could start anywhere. It's very hard for me to say. Some people have become
lifelong you know friends because of reading Black Swan. It gets right into
the heart of the abandonment wound. All of the books deal with the primal
wound of abandonment and how to heal it. So I would say the most basic textbook
or that will give you like an overview is Journey from Abandonment to
Healing, but they all really cover a great deal of the material.