Top 10 Symptoms of Abandonment Issues in Adults
The causes of abandonment issues in adults vary depending on personal experience.
Your early experiences determine whether you’re dealing with abandonment issues.
If abandonemnt is present, negative thoughts are too.
I know someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder from issues related to abandonment.
Her family always excluded her, and hid things from her, then gaslight her saying that she was the problem.
It caused her to second guess her own experiences, and what she was seeing with her own eyes.
We’re going to discuss the common symptoms of abandonment issues in adults.
I hope you walk away with some clarity on how it may be showing up in your life.
This post is all about abandonment issues in adults.
What are Abandonment Issues in Adults?
Abandonment fears stem from physical, mental, spiritual or emotional abandonment.
There may or may not have been childhood trauma involved. Though, feeling traumatized in childhood could have many root causes.
I speak to abandonment from a Spiritual perspective. As I see it, abandonment begins long before we ever incarnate.
Or, even during the process of incarnation.
We choose our family members before we ever incarnate. The ones we choose, we usually have some karma or history with.
There may be karmic contracts, or karma that has not yet resolved.
If that’s the case, we incarnate together to work it out in this lifetime.
Karma is also determined by past experiences in past lives.
There may have been physical abandonment, or emotional. But physical will still impact the emotions.
There are no small things when it comes to abandonment. It comes down to what feels right or wrong to you.
Some of the most common causes are having no emotional support during a difficult time. Or someone leaving you when you needed them most.
Here are the top 10 signs of abandonment issues in adults:
Feelings of Abandonment
The first is a fear of abandonment. A fear like this permeates every area of your life.
It may begin in your relationships, but it will soon extend elsewhere.
The root cause of emotional abandonment is abandoning yourself.
If you want emotional support, you must learn to be supportive of your own emotions.
It’s important to get support when overwhelming fears keep you from connecting with yourself or others.
A fear of abandonment is isolating. You won’t want to go out, or meet with new people.
You’ll fear rejection and prefer activities that feel safe to you. You may invest all your time in work.
Or worse, you may stay in familiar relationships even if they are toxic to you.
Being Overburdened
Feeling burdened can be a difficult one to pin down.
Did your early childhood experiences involve doing adult things?
If so, then you might struggle with either doing too much or doing to little as an adult.
Inconsistent caregiving is the root cause of burden energy in childhood.
The child’s emotional needs need to get met in a consistent predictable way.
I know parents who worked two to three jobs, and asked their older children to care for the younger ones.
And others who were never home, and the children stayed with grandparents.
Having worked with the adult children who went through this, I can tell you that each of them reacted differently.
Some of them appreciate and recognize that their praents were working hard. And they were doing what they had to do.
Others felt abandoned and rejected, like they weren’t a priority.
It all comes back to the child’s individual needs getting met in the way they most needed.
Since I work from a spiritual lens, I also have to take their soul lessons into account.
Each of them had something unique to learn from their parents.
Rejection
We can’t talk about abandonment without mentioning rejection. The two walk hand in hand.
Not all traumatic experiences end in rejection.
You can’t help but feel rejected when you experience abandonment.
The mind wants to know why, and sometimes we don’t know the answer to that.
Still, it searches for a reason. Even if you had a reason, it would never please you.
How many times did you actually receive closure, and realized that you didn’t feel better?
That’s because we can only provide closure to ourselves. Until you can feel, and release the pain you feel, you won’t feel better.
Rejection stems from rejecting yourself.
The mind likes to blame, and project. It wants to find a reason outside of itself for the pain we are feeling.
One fantastic way to work through this intense fear is to look at why you feel rejected.
Look from the inside out and ask yourself, “what does I have to do with this?” Don’t blame yourself. You will be missing the point.
Ask with curiosity why you feel compelled to blame someone else for your pain.
They probably did you wrong in some way. And?
Are you going to punish them? Or can you use your energy in a way that sets you free?
Intimacy Issues
Abandonment creates a lot of intimacy problems in personal and professional areas.
The combination of abandonment and rejection creates more painful intimacy issues.
Since rejection creates a withdrawl effect, your emotions turn inward to protect yourself.
This causes people around you to feel abandoned by you. In reality, you likely turned inward because you rejected yourself.
You were expecting to be rejected which is how you reject yourself. Then you made a decision to reject the other person by turning away.
It’s a complicated cycle.
That’s why it’s not helpful to tackle abandonment head on. We work through the more surface level symptoms first.
Abandonment anxiety is the cause and rejection is the effect.
You may struggle with an intimate relationship if you have any emotional neglect in your past.
This is not to say that you can’t get into a healthy relationship. It’s about being aware of the pattern to reject, and to know your coping mechanisms.
Some people hold on and are more needy. Other people reject their partner before they can be rejected by them.
Future relationships can be healthy if you are aware of your patterns.
Taking responsibility for how you feel, and how you’re showing up is the key to ending the cycle.
Vulnerability Issues
How are vulnerability and intimacy different?
Well, abandonment trauma affects both of them and so does emotional abuse.
But, emotional abuse doesn’t need to be present to be dealing with abandonment.
The ability to be vulnerable has to do with how open your heart is.
When we’ve been through pain, the heart naturally wants to close. It’s the conscious decision to keep your heart open that makes vulnerability possible.
Innocence is the foundation of vulnerability. So, it makes sense that if you’ve been through something painful, some innocence is lost.
But, it doesn’t need to be so. You can choose to keep your heart open and walk with your pain and grief until you feel neutral.
I have clients who had the most incredible, loving parents and a safe, caring childhood.
Yet, they still struggle with abandonment and vulnerability. It’s not about the parents, upbringing or society.
Your soul came here to learn about and deal with certain situations. There are soul lessons attached to your learning.
The people involved are soulmates that are here to trigger that learning. Sometimes it feels good and other times it’s awful.
Vulnerability is possible when you accept all of it, still love yourself and keep your heart open.
Low Self-Esteem
Fears of abandonment stem from feeling like you are less than. It’s easy to feel this way if you have a lot of people-pleasing behaviors.
When you put someone’s needs before your own, you’re telling yourself that you are not important.
Someone that isn’t important is easy to abandon. Am I right?
So, it all begins with prioritizing yourself. If you loved yourself, I mean really loved yourself, how you would you behave?
Start at the negative thought patterns that may arise as you think about that.
How would you show up?
What would you eat?
Would your thoughts be more positive?
Which groups of people would you be associating with?
It all begins with high self-esteem, and that begins with loving yourself.
I see Love as a boring energy. It’s predictable, and it’s safe.
If you can create this for yourself, you’ve given yourself an incredible gift.
It’s the gift of knowing what to expect because only you determine how you feel.
Control Issues
Abuse of power is the cause of control issues. And as you’ve likely guessed, control issues stem from abandonment.
Abandonment makes you feel out of control. When your emotions are spiraling, everything else feels out of control.
Getting your emotional state balanced is the first step.
Next, we look at how you deal with your power.
How do you handle rejection?
Do you react or respond?
What do you do when you’re triggered?
Romantic relationships are fantastic for bringing all of this to the surface. They are the most important relationships for discovering more about yourself.
So are work dynamics, relationship with your parents, children and friends.
Control issues arise when you may not get what you want. When the ego needs to appear on top instead of equal to the situation.
Many people control through a combination of overgiving and poor communication.
They will give you something with strings attached, without sharing what the strings are.
Sound familiar?
It’s the foundation for entitlement, abuse of power and narcissisim.
There is a way out of this and it’s boundaries.
Poor Boundaries
Healthy boundaries are for you first, and other people second.
Unhealthy relationships are never one-sided. And close relationships will tell you everything you need to know about who you are.
It’s all about how you show up.
Almost everyone I know breaks their own boundaries. They will say no to an event, then show up anyway.
Guilt is a very tricky energy. Navigating it requires extreme awareness of your intention and motivation.
It really comes back to what feels good and right to you. No one else can tell you that.
When you’re first setting boundaries, there’s a tendency to go extreme. Especially if you’ve had poor boundaries in the past.
After some time, you can start to work your way back to the middle. This comes from confidence in your communication.
Before you even attempt boundaries, work on your communication. You can resolve a lot through this avenue alone.
This is my favorite book for improving your communication and strengthening relationships.
Emotional Emptiness
This is an underdiscussed aspect of abandonment that I want to highlight.
If you’ve experienced repeated traumatic events, you may feel empty inside.
Emptiness comes from a prolonged period of challenges where you finally just give up. The voice within or the vice wins.
You accept that this is how it is going to be.
Some people divert this energy into work and use it to build. There’s nothing wrong with that until we see imbalance.
Is the business doing great, but relationships are falling to pieces? That’s a red flag to watch out for.
Is your health in decline? Another red flag.
Emptiness also comes with loneliness, and an inability to let new people in.
The emotional connection that once made you feel alive has dried up.
You’ll say that you no longer feel inspired. You will struggle to feel anything.
This is where we see food, sex, gambling, alcohol, drugs and other forms of addiction take root.
These things all help you feel something.
But there is another way, which we will discuss next.
Limited Capacity
Emptiness is resolved with an expanded ability to love. It’s the full circle moment where we return to your heart.
Everything you want to grow and expand comes back to your own capacity. It is all based on your ability to hold it.
What does a supportive environment look like for you? Your mind may have gone to things like home, family, money and so on.
But, the answer is deeper than that. Those things are necessary but they aren’t the root.
You need love, from your self and as deep as you can feel it. This is the deepest self-acceptance and that comes from forgiveness.
We always try to forgive others before we look in the mirror. Then we wonder why it feels impossible to forgive them!
They aren’t the root. YOU are!
There is no way to get more energy without looking at your pain. Pain takes up a lot of space in your mind, body and emotions.
When we deal with it, the space clears for new opportunities.
That includes healthier relationships.
The good news is that it’s possible to expand your energy to receive everything you want.
This is where healing comes in.
I work with women on how to listen to, trust and act from their intuition in all areas of life and business.
You can contact me here if you’d like to work with me to heal yourself and regain trust in your intuition.
I’d like to hear from you! What’s one takeaway from this post that you’re going to put in place today?
