The Unique Grief of Abandonment
Did your lover leave you?
Abandonment is a knife wound to the heart. It is highly vulnerable to infection and can leave scarring.
Anyone suffering the loss of a love is in a true emotional crisis. Abandonment has its own special kind of grief, as painful as grief over death, and just as enduring. It grips your life with powerful feelings. Left unresolved, this unique grief can burrow deep within where it undermines self esteem and interferes in future relationships. It is only because people don’t know how to handle the feelings that abandonment can have such a lasting effect – and can lead to self defeating patterns that interfere in future relationships and in life.
Abandonment Recovery guides you through the stages of this powerful psycho-biological process and shows you techniques for managing its pain. Empowered with the right tools, you can prevent self-injury, prevent damaging your self esteem. In the end you’ll turn this painful experience into an opportunity for positive change.
Initially, being left, rejected, bereft of love – creates a deeply personal wound. It threatens our sense of self worth and shatters our security. It consumes us in panic, longing, isolation, self-recrimination, and despair.
The severing of our love-relationship creates a heart-wound. Your body reacts as if your very life were being threatened, as if you had been actually stabbed in the heart. The threat of losing your primary attachment propels you into a state of neuro-biological emergency. Your heart pounds. Your stomach turns. You lose your appetite one minute and become ravenous the next. You oversleep or can’t sleep. You’re on edge, hyper-vigilant, and plagued with obsessive thoughts (about your lost love) and can’t concentrate on anything else. You feel mortally wounded, that your life is over, that you’ll never love again. These catastrophic thoughts, along with your urgent feelings of morbidity and doom, are evidence of surges of stress hormones coursing through your body and brain. You are in a state of constant of vulnerability.
As helpless and defeated as you may feel right now, this does not mean that your situation is hopeless, that you are weak or dependent, or that you will never love again. Feelings of hopelessness, panic, and desperation are normal to the first stage of the abandonment cycle. The five stages – Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting spell S.W.I.R.L. As you SWIRL through the overlapping stages, the intense feelings prove to be temporary, in fact NECESSARY to your personal growth and recovery.
But while you are in the throes of the initial break-up, you find yourself overwhelmed with feelings that have taken on a life of their own. Try as you might, you can’t just will them away. But you CAN take charge of your recovery. At the bottom of your pain is a touchstone of positive change that leads to greater life and love than before. All the way through abandonment’s cycle, the HELP center provides support, guidance, techniques and insight.
PS: I have created a series of videos that take you step-by-step through the 5 Akēru exercises and other life-changing insights of the Abandonment Recovery Program.
Whether you’re experiencing a recent break-up, a lingering wound from childhood, or struggling to form a lasting relationship, the program will enlighten you, restore your sense of self, and increase your capacity for love and connection.