How is Abandonment Grief Different from Other Types of Grief?
The feature that distinguishes abandonment grief from all others is the damage to self-esteem. We turn our rage about being rejected against ourselves. This accounts for the severe depression and self-injury involved in abandonment.
Abandonment overlaps with bereavement in that they both involve loss. For the abandonment survivor, the loss is just as disruptive and painful as it is for any other type of grief. Closure is incomplete because the person has not died, but has chosen not to be with you. Rejection, withdrawal-of-love, criticism, and desertion create a devastating personal injury. ‘Being left’ cuts us all the way to the core. We lose not only our loved one, we lose our sense of self.
As abandonment grief progresses, it burrows deep within where it can silently leech away at our self-esteem. But abandonment has not been legitimized as its own special type of grief. Everybody seems to know about the initial pain caused by abandonment. It is the latter stages of its grief that have gone unrecognized. Yet it endures, generating sadness, self-doubt, insecurity, and fear –sometimes indefinitely. Unresolved abandonment can interfere in future relationships.
Understanding this grief and the wounding process you have been through helps you assess damages from previous losses. The Akeru exercises help you put this awareness into practice.
Learning about the stages of grief specific to abandonment provides helps focus energy where you may be stuck. S.W.I.R.L. lays out the stages of the abandonment cycle – Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting. Those stuck in SHATTERING from earlier separation traumas tend to be chronically insecure, unstable, self-destructive, prone to addiction and borderline functioning in their object relationships, as well as other psychiatric conditions.
Those stuck in the WITHDRAWAL stage of earlier separations tend to suffer chronic feelings of emptiness and longing, exhibiting dependency and co-dependency disorders. Many seek mood altering experiences and substances. Palliatives range from food to people to drugs to self-help books – – anything to medicate the emotional urgencies impinging from within. The need for quick-fixes sabotages our clients’ ability to delay gratification and achieve long range goals.
Those stuck in INTERNALIZING have low self-worth, tend to turn anger toward themselves, are prone to self-doubt, self-depreciation, excessive shame, depression, dependency. They have feelings of worthlessness, difficulty making decisions, and a heightened need for immediate gratification. They have a constant need to assuage an emotional chasm of guilt and shame. They tend to idealize others (including the abandoner) at their own expense. They tend to create a caste system, positing themselves in the lower caste. This internal short-circuit causes them to underachieve, creating a vicious cycle of self-depreciation and unfulfilled life.
Those stuck in RAGE are plagued with emotional reactivity. They exhibit Outer child behaviors that sabotage primary relationships. Outer child, a new concept introduced in JOURNEY, represents the part of personality that acts out the fear and anger of the INNER CHILD. Outer child goes on the warpath for all of the cumulative losses and rejections going all the way back to childhood. Outer acts out against innocent bystanders — their significant other and sometimes, even against their own inner child. Outer child tends to take emotional hostages rather than form healthy relationships. Outer child is the self-centered nine-year old within all of us.
Those stuck in LIFTING have lifted above their feelings from previous losses. They’ve disengaged from their most vulnerable feelings, creating a barrier between their internal and external selves. They’ve formed emotional calluses over their wounds and suffer problems of dys-intimacy, displaced emotional center, and feelings of detached isolation. They’re hard to reach emotionally. Abandonment trauma’s emotional numbing causes many to develop a pattern of abandoholism -- being “attracted to the unavailable.” ‘Lifters’ sometimes cause their partners to feel isolated, unloved, or emotionally frustrated.
When we go through a current abandonment, we have most difficulty with the stage in which we were stuck from previous losses. Learning about where our emotional ‘hot spots’ are empowers us to focus our recovery effort where it is most needed. There is an Akeru that corresponds to each stage that helps us work through their unfinished business.