Overcoming the Fear of Abandonment

In this interview, I discuss what the primal abandonment wound is, where the shame is stemming from, and overcoming the fear of abandonment.

I also share why my abandonment recovery program is different from all the other programs out there.

For the transcript, see below.

Elizabeth Lock:

Hi everybody. I’m Elizabeth and welcome back to my show called Hopeless to Happy. Today I’m excited about my guest here—Susan Anderson. She is a psychotherapist, who has over 30 years experience helping people with abandonment recovery and if you’re not real clear on what that is, you will know here really quickly.

So first of all I would love to say welcome Susan and thank you for joining me on my…

Susan Anderson:

Thank you for having me and you’re welcome.

Elizabeth Lock:

And so to get jump right in here. So you work with victims of abandonment trauma, grief and loss. so I’m a little familiar with that but maybe the audience doesn’t have you know a full awareness or understanding of of what that actually means. Can you describe a little bit more of that?

Susan Anderson:

Okay. Well I work with the primal abandonment wound. It’s the thing that’s in all other kinds of loss that make it so painful. It’s the thing that goes on when there’s a divorce or a breakup or when someone dies. It’s the primal wound. The primal abandonment fear and shame that get triggered by these different experiences.

It’s what makes going through all the other losses so painful because we’re dealing not with the heartbreak itself per se or the grief over death per se. We certainly do deal with the specifics but we’re looking at what is going on under the surface—the underlying primal wound of abandonment.

Elizabeth Lock:

Okay. So you’re saying the primal part of that is the underlying. Is that how you’re describing that?

Susan Anderson:

Yes. It’s the primal fear. You know we all were born so we all have a fear of suddenly being thrust out of this warm beautiful woman into this room and separated from, you know, the mother that gave birth to us. 

Momentarily we all have that disruption and we all have built in a kind of reaction in our nervous system to separation so we all have a tendency to have this anxiety or fear around disconnection and it sort of conditions us in a normal way to have a natural normal fear of abandonment.

It’s primal. It’s not always negative. It motivates us for fear of being ostracized. It motivates us to be good to people and have good relationships and to bond with people and to hold on to our attachments where possible.

So it’s a very important driving human force that holds the human race and many mammals as well together. So we’re really looking at that primal fear and how that can become, at times, problematic when it gets triggered.

Elizabeth Lock:

Okay. Sounds familiar. I will say.

Susan Anderson:

It’s universal.

Elizabeth Lock:

Yeah yeah. I can see how that would be um.

Susan Anderson:

You know the shame that goes with it, it’s reciprocal with the shame of “Am I enough?” because if we fear being abandoned, it goes hand in hand with “Am I enough to hold on to somebody am I worthy?” “Am I too defective?” “Am I…is there something wrong with me that will cause me to be abandoned?” So it’s only natural that as human beings we have a fear of abandonment and a kind of primal shame of worrying if we’re enough. Again that’s universal. It’s perfectly normal and natural and some people have more struggle with it than others depending on our history or our temperament.

Elizabeth Lock:

Where do you think the shame comes into play though? Because we’re talking, you know, abandonment trauma, grief, and loss so if we are feeling shameful um where is that stemming from?

Susan Anderson:

The shame is coming from very early on when we initially started to discover as infants that we could bring our parents to the crib side by screaming or we could somehow participate in the process of having the connection by smiling and playing peekaboo and cooing and screaming, you know, and having our parents come to the side.

So sometimes we would feel I’m powerful, omnipotent because we could you know encourage adult grown-ups to take care of us by being lovable or by crying and other times we would try those things and that parent couldn’t come running, you know. It didn’t happen so automatically and at those times the feeling is more “Oh I can’t. I’m not strong enough.”

Not that we had words. Just a feeling—a very primal feeling—without words. We don’t speak yet; we’re infants. 

So the shame—the natural, normal kind of shame that’s part of every human being is just built into the fact that we don’t always, you know, command everyone to rush to our side.

Therefore, maybe we’re weak or we’re not enough. And then we the next time we cry they come back, and we have good feelings. So it’s there are there’s a mixture of all the different emotions that have been conditioned from going through infancy and they’re very natural and normal.

Elizabeth Lock: 

So this is kind of what you’re saying like a human experience of like tests and trials. Sound like you know when we’re trying to figure out our space in the world you know we as small children, we may even know if we may not understand, why things aren’t going the way we think they should, but it leaves us with emotional wound per se.

Susan Anderson:

As we get older we go to school and we see other children. Now today because of what we’re going through that might be more difficult because kids are more isolated but historically when you get to see other children and you get to try to connect with a child, some people have an easier time connecting than others. And so we tend to compare ourselves to other people or judge ourselves based on how well other people respond to us.

And we can tell that let’s say Johnny is very popular and the teacher is nice to him and all the kids want to play with them and nobody picked us for the kickball team, and so there’s this whole self-evaluation that takes place as we go out into the world. And you know interact with teachers and especially with our peers, we can compare ourselves to how our peers are getting along and of course some of the comparisons are positive and some of it isn’t so positive.

Elizabeth Lock:

It’s very interesting how you talk about the kickball team because I actually had a similar experience in elementary school, where we had kickball. I didn’t know kids still play that…but I wasn’t like the best player but I ended up getting better. But in the beginning, you know, I was like one of the last two or three and it does leave like a sting there’s like this feeling.

Susan Anderson

It does. Imagine the child who’s not good at reading and the other children are reading so well. And they’re in these reading groups in the classroom, which are called blue jay or stars or something like that. And they’re in one of the lower reading groups but teachers don’t say that’s the low reading, but we can feel that we’re not in the best reading group. And so we’re comparing ourselves to other children and it’s really hard when we compare ourselves and we see other kids better at something than we are. We wonder, “Why aren’t I a good kickball player?” “Why is it so hard for me to read?” “Am I inadequate?” “Am I not worthy?” You know we don’t put words to these things most of this is just feeling level stuff. But we’re absorbing a sense of ourselves from these experiences.

Elizabeth Lock

Do you think that the abandonment also stems from the child-parent relationship?

Susan Anderson

Yes. You know, you could have perfect parents who love you dearly and always show it and are so positive, and you could still have a lot of abandonment fear. So we can’t really, you know, make these hard and fast rules that we can blame it on the parents. It could still happen even if you had perfect parents that, you know, one day they didn’t pick you up on time from the daycare center. And you panicked and thought you’d been abandoned.

But a lot of kids grow up with a lot of problems in the family such as one of the parents or both of them could be alcoholic, so the parent is physically there but not emotionally there. And so they’re not able to feel good about themselves and strong and stable because they have to work so hard to get the parent to give them what they need.

Or maybe one of the kids in the family was born with a severe problem like, you know, a physical problem or a cognitive problem and the parents just have to give that child more support, more help. And they get it and they stand on the outside, you know, letting their parents give most of the attention to the other child. But you know they still aren’t getting what they need.

Or kids grow up and one of the parents may be going through an abandonment. Maybe they were left and now they’re feeling so confused because their parent is going through the emotional turmoil of abandonment. Or they feel bad about the other parent who’s now all alone and feels sad because they’re no longer living with that parent. So all of these different scenarios can just create and can trigger all of that abandonment fear.

Elizabeth Lock

So in this space of abandonment, if someone is in that place, how does this lead to self-sabotage?

Susan Anderson

Well, adulthood is all about taking responsibility. But because these experiences–these abandonment scenarios–in childhood can accumulate, they cause us to abandon ourselves.

I mean to give you an example of abandoning yourself, let’s say you decided you were going to be an astronaut. And now you’re 25 and not only are you not an astronaut but you didn’t even graduate from college because of some problem or you didn’t get to go to college.

So you’re disappointed in life and in yourself and you’re kind of blaming yourself for not being as good as somebody else, you know, who’s, you know, in some fabulous business and they’re doing well. So there’s self-disappointment, self-frustration, sometimes even self-hatred. “Oh look! I didn’t…I should have done this and I didn’t. I was lazy. Oh, I wish I had done it.” So there are all these negative feelings toward the self, which is the opposite of self-love, at being disappointed in yourself and frustrated with yourself. So when you’re disappointed in yourself for not achieving your goals, that’s just one example. You kind of leave the self behind. You get in that anger toward yourself. You commit self-abandonment. You leave that self behind, and you live on the outside of the self.

You’re now out there using substances, shopping, alcohol, whatever you can find to kind of feed the emotional hunger. So when you no longer have a great love within yourself for yourself, you tend to self-sabotage because you’ve left yourself behind. You’ve abandoned yourself, and now you’re on immediate gratification–whatever feels best at the moment.

And the biggest symptom of self-sabotage in adult life and all of us have this to some extent is avoidance, you know, inertia. We should be doing XYZ but we’re not. And if we did it we’d be successful and all these wonderful things. But we keep putting it on, so the idea of self-abandonment which comes from having unresolved abandonment causes us to sabotage ourselves by avoiding, procrastinating, acting out, you know, over-drinking, overspending, over watching television, you know, by all kinds of behaviors that are self-defeating. And that’s the self-sabotage.

Elizabeth Lock:

I guess that could even flow into addictions, right?

Susan Anderson:

Yes.

Elizabeth Lock:

Yeah. So how is it that you begin to help people kind of unravel this and start the healing process?

Susan Anderson:

Well, I had been sort of focusing on abandonment as I was a therapist working in a psychiatric hospital and with a private practice, and I saw things through the lens of abandonment feelings and separation anxiety. But then I went through my own adult abandonment, which brought me to my knees and helped me to realize that the tools that I was using on my clients and, you know, everyone was very grateful for these tools, but they weren’t enough. You know, they only helped me a little bit and I needed a lot of help to get through this. I was so devastated.

So I began doing a whole lot of research for three years, researching like a maniac, becoming very nerdy trying to find this information, and I did find some extremely valuable tools that I began to apply. And not only did I apply them to myself, but I had all of these people who were going through very similar experiences, and I began to see what worked and what didn’t work. And so out of this process and over a period of many years, very research-driven, I developed a program of abandonment recovery, and of course, I’ve been sharing it ever since.

Elizabeth Lock:

Awesome! So what is the name of that program?

Susan Anderson:

Well, I give it the nickname Akeru. It’s the japanese word that means to begin and to end. And it refers to the fact that when something feels tragic, and it ends, and it’s terribly painful, it’s also the beginning of an opportunity to develop a whole new relationship with yourself, which is long overdue and can only help you move in a brand new very positive profound direction.

It takes work. Akeru doesn’t imply, “Oh well, you know, you just flip it.” You do flip it, but flipping it takes a tremendous effort and being very consistent.

Elizabeth Lock:

So it sounds like it’s something that could potentially be scary for somebody who may not be ready to face all those emotions.

Susan Anderson:

Yeah. So it’s a layered approach. so it is true that a lot of people who are going through abandonment are so fragile at that moment, that what they need is immediate TLC. They need immediate help. So the first level of you know Akeru is just providing you know a little relief from the pain when you’re in that kind of pain. It’s really time management because you’re having to get through each day you know the best you can. So you’re learning how to manage your time in a constructive healthy way. So the program really helps you gradually get yourself through the process of healing.

Elizabeth Lock:

Great. So you provide this environment that just helps the person little by little and not just overwhelm them with everything?

Suan Anderson:

Yeah. I provide, well I’ve written copious instructions about it in my books. But also I give workshops because when I get people to practice these exercises in a group, they just help each other so much. They motivate each other. The exercises really make sense when they see other people reacting to them. So I do everything I can to talk about them, teach them, write about them, and also run programs where they do it. I have online abandonment recovery workshops and believe it or not even you know as little square faces in a Zoom screen, it’s amazing how helpful it is to people to learn these exercises in a group.

Elizabeth Lock:

Well, I would say that that was probably very beneficial to have that communal type of support. You know I think that’s a lot of our kind of issues even today is that you know we have all the social media stuff but we’re so disconnected. We don’t have a true community. So it sounds like you’re providing that extra communal support for them to you know go through the process together. 

Susan Anderson:

People don’t tend to talk about this stuff. When it’s just…if you and I were to sit down just meeting each other and we had a cup of tea somewhere together, chances are i’m not going to tell you about my abandonment fears and you won’t tell me. But if you’re attending you know a special workshop all of a sudden people are just saying the most incredible things at their own comfort level. There’s no pressure, but somehow the fact that it’s a community of people all working on the same issue, the comfort level is tremendous. And it’s a relief to be able to just talk about this stuff and people are shocked to hear it come out of their own mouth. They didn’t even know they were feeling these things but in fact, they were.

Elizabeth Lock:

Beautiful. So is this what you’re describing? Is this what sets apart your program from other programs?

Susan Anderson:

I set it apart from what from other programs did, you say? 

Elizabeth Lock:

Yes.

Susan Anderson:

Well, I would say that the distinguishing factor between the Akeru program of abandonment recovery–the exercises–is the fact that it focuses on doing. Because most people, somehow the mind believes, that it can think its way out of abandonment. So I’m sure that you have a friend or two like this but they go through a breakup or they’re in a pattern where they keep getting abandoned over and over again or they’re only attracted to unavailable people and they keep winding up alone. You know a typical adult pattern and they could talk your ear off for hours and days about whether so-and-so called or didn’t call, what they said, and all the stuff. It’s like obsessive thinking because the mind wants to find an object. The mind wants to connect and when stuff is getting in the way it goes through this obsessive process.

So the mind tricks us into thinking that we can analyze our way out of this problem, or think our way out. And we could go to a therapist and have catharsis and cry our way out but unfortunately, it doesn’t work. The way to get out of abandonment is through doing. We do our way out. So the program, it consists of a whole bunch of exercises. It’s physical therapy for the brain. You actually do exercises. You do them. You don’t read about them or think of it. You do the exercises, and then little by little, they help to strengthen the muscle of the healing part of the brain. And little by little you start to see an improvement that, I think, the emphasis on doing baby steps. We don’t expect people to take leaps. That’s just an unrealistic expectation. But little tiny teeny baby steps. But the emphasis on doing and the fact that it’s gradual physical therapy for the brain, incremental, that is what makes it the program effective and I think special. 

Elizabeth Lock:

Yeah. It even sounds like you know taking those tiny baby steps can really be a huge thing for somebody right? Like even though it seems small, right?

Susan Anderson:

Huge. you know you could take a baby step that is so tiny that you can’t even imagine how it will help, but it’s all you can manage today. you’re in a lazy mood. you’re depressed. you just don’t feel. but so you’re going to do a baby step. So what you’ll do is you’ll go to your mailbox, and when you pull your mail out of your mailbox, you’ll make sure to get into the moment. Just for a split second, you’ll notice if you hear traffic or birds chirping, or you’ll just take a moment to tune in, and then you’re done you did your baby step.

How could that possibly add up to healing? You don’t have to worry about that because if you do a step like that every day, they do accumulate. And then one day you might your baby step might be you know “I’m too shy maybe I should join Toastmasters. Oh, I can’t do that. That’s a ridiculous side. I’m not going to do that and then one.” But you thought it, you came up, you wrote it down, that’s a baby step.

And then another day, you actually call and find out now Toastmasters might not be meeting in person right now, but they certainly will in the future, you might find out they might meet on Zoom when they’re meeting. And you’re not going to go. You just write it in your calendar, but you took a baby step. You wrote it in your calendar. And then maybe another time you actually, “I’m gonna check it out and sit in the back row.” And you go and there’s someone there you know or you meet somebody that you kind of thought was nice to talk to. The next thing you know you’re engaged in a new activity that is making an enormous change in your life. It’s just a small group, a bunch of people kind of a format, but it happens to make the difference. Or you join an al-anon program or you know there I could name so many little baby step things that wind up becoming a leap because it’s only a baby step but somehow you left forward from it.

Elizabeth Lock:

Awesome. I think those are…the most important things is you know we put a lot of expectations on ourselves and it seems to be like kind of a cyclical well I could say maybe even a spiral you know when we know we want to take a step, but then we keep going back to that “I’m not good enough” right? And so like it keeps when we keep in the place of doing nothing.

Susan Anderson:

And then the shame that’s unconscious. We all have shame it’s very unconscious. It’s hidden. It’s buried in the basement, so we don’t even know we have it. But the shame makes it hard to ask for help. So let’s say we’re trying to lose weight and we’ve always done it ourselves, we don’t need anyone to help us. But we’re struggling because we’re bored because of coronavirus or whatever, and we’re eating. And this time we ask for help. We go out, and we get help. We join you know a program, or we call a professional or tell a friend or whatever. So a lot of times, the solution involves recognizing that we don’t have the answer within ourselves. But in order to do that, we have to at least leap over that shame that says we should be able to solve this. Other people do it on their own. Why do I have to you know ask for help? But a lot of times asking for help is blocked because of shame. But then we overcome that and finally do get asked for help, yeah you know hiring a coach, a personal trainer, calling a friend whatever.

Elizabeth Lock:

Yeah, and I think even my own personal experience. You know I’ve you know experienced the shame, and the embarrassment, or whatever too. But I’ve come to realize that you know asking for help is okay. It’s okay to not know how to take the next step, and it’s okay to ask somebody to help you, guide you in the direction that you need to go because that’s I think what we again like we’re missing, like that community kind of aspect you know, where we now have to seek out the help that we need from professionals or those who have gone through it. You know and knowing that it’s okay to not know everything. Yeah.

Susan Anderson:

Breaking that shame barrier and reaching out to a friend or a professional or a group or whatever, it is just that: just breaking that shame barrier. And sharing the dilemma and asking for help gives you a tiny little bump up in your self-esteem.

You may not feel it right away. You might feel it later on down the line, but you have this little bump up and it’s something that you get a lot more of in you know in an abandonment workshop, where there’s constant sharing and everyone’s helping everyone. There’s this is going on the whole time you experience that bump up. But even at home just the idea that you’re working on something and you’re not your inertia is getting in the way you know you swear you’re going to, but you don’t take the action, that you think just calling a friend and saying “I’ve got to tell you something. I’m making you a witness to something. Maybe telling you will help me.” And you’re breaking your same barrier and you get that little bump up.

Elizabeth Lock:

Nice. Yes. That’s an important reminder that we can even reach out to our friends. it seems like even for me, I struggle at times to reach out to people. I think just because again our society is kind of separated you know by so many factors. But you know even just remembering a past experience with a friend that you know i know they were there for me at one time, maybe I can call them again and ask.

Susan Anderson:

I agree with what you’re saying about how there’s been…become it’s so natural in adult life to experience so much separation from so many significant people. And so part of you know the baby step that we might take might be little by little gradually you know making a new reconnection with somebody. A new connection with an old person.

Elizabeth Lock:

How does somebody go about beginning to get help from you in this realm of abandonment?

Susan Anderson:

Well, you know abandonment recovery is so universal. People all over the world from all works of life are…and if you’re going through an acute abandonment such as just been left by someone you love you need help. I mean help. It is so painful to go through. But even if you have a chronic issue like you’re caught up in a pattern where it just makes it hard for you to get in in a relationship, or you avoid relationships altogether to avoid getting hurt, or you know even if you’re caught up in a chronic issue that’s just always sort of there, you need help. And so I’ve tried to provide help in every way that I can: doing interviews for one thing because your viewers may listen to this and say “ah I can identify with that and now I could now I know there’s help.”

Or I’ve written four books and I’ve written them in different ways and styles to appeal to all different needs of different people. I have websites that reach out all over the world and people all over the world have written to me. And sometimes in languages that I have to translate using Google translate. Very interesting to meet people from all over the world.

And then I incorporate the outreach that I get from people on my websites, in my email, and so forth. and I incorporate that into a new understanding so that each new book and each new article reflects more that I’ve learned. So I started this process many years ago and since then I have, at least 25-26 years ago, collecting data. I have now unmasked an awareness of abandonment and how it affects people. How abandonment and shame, how it fosters self-sabotage the different impacts that it has on so many lives, and why, and then what to do about it. So the help is in all these different ways and also more recently in providing online abandonment recovery workshops.

Elizabeth Lock :

Great. So that leads me to the offer that you do have for the viewers. Can you describe what it is that you’re providing for them?

Susan Anderson:

Well, the free offer is a five percent discount on one of these online abandonment recovery workshops. It’s a five-session workshop. and it meets once a week for you know, two and a half hours. And you meet people from all over the world and everybody’s on the same page. People have different issues but they’re all pretty much identifying with the same basic emotions. We’re really very alike you know on a very primal level but the offer is a five percent discount.

Elizabeth Lock:

Awesome. And what is your website? Where they can find this information?

Susan Anderson:

Okay. The website is abandonment.net that’s one website two websites. Abandonment.net is one and the other website is outerchild.com. That is the website for self-sabotage. The reason I have two websites is what if somebody looking to overcome self-sabotage didn’t realize that it was coming from unresolved abandonment? They wouldn’t know to search for abandonment so there are two websites outerchild…I’m sorry outerchild.net and abandonment.net both .net. And those two websites will go to the same place.

Elizabeth Lock:

Awesome. Great. And we will have the links for those websites as well on you’ll find those below on the speaker page and in the email so and we’ll have the coupon code as well there for you to access if you would like to participate in susan’s workshop.

And I thank you again for joining me today, Susan, it’s been a pleasure having you and this topic of abandonment. It sounds like you have help for those who are seeking help from this particular topic. So I hope that those who are listening today will take advantage of what Susan has to offer. so thank you again.

Susan Anderson:

Okay. Thank you, Elizabeth. I appreciate it.