If you’re wondering how to heal abandonment issues spiritually, you’re in the right place.

We all have an abandonment core wound. The first step is understanding the coping mechanisms that abandonment uses.

I’ve worked with the abandonment wound for over ten years and I have a lot to share on healing this wound.

We’re going to talk about the abandonment core wound, and the different ways to resolve it.

This post will help you understand how to heal abandonment issues, spiritually.

What is the fear of abandonment?

The fear of abandonment is a worry that someone or something will leave you. This can come up in many different ways.

For some, it’s a fear that you’ll lose your family members or people who are important to you. For others, it may be a fear of leaving a known career path or relationship behind.

Abandonment is a deep love wound that makes you feel like you aren’t enough. It’s based on a feeling of division, which we’ll talk more about below. 

Feelings of abandonment cause you to make choices that sacrifice your own well-being.

Deep wounds around abandonment also include a fear of rejection, intimacy, vulnerability. This includes taking responsibility and feeling burdened. 

Abandonment affects the nervous system, sending you into fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

​Here’s how abandonment may show up in one of these nervous system responses:

Fight: When you feel backed into a corner or controlled, you’ll feel the need to defend yourself. 

Flight: A fear of rejection will cause you to leave others before you get left. Or you’ll worry about them leaving you. 

Rejection also works in reverse. You may stay too long in toxic situations because you’re afraid of someone leaving you.

Freeze: You feel paralyzed by fear or self-doubt so you do nothing. Change feels too overwhelming.

Fawn: This is when you start people pleasing and doing what others want. It’s feels easier for you to cave and make other people happy than it does for you to advocate for your needs.

Abandonment has roots as a birth wound. 

The feeling of separation from God or creator when you incarnated leads you to feel separate. 

When you feel separate, you feel different, and often alone.

To resolve symptoms related to abandonment, you’ll need to work on any area where you feel incomplete.

What are abandonment issues?

There are many ways abandonment can show up. If you pay attention to how it shows up on the outside, you can determine what needs your attention on the inside.

Emotional abandonment is when you abandon yourself. This is when your emotions need your attention, and you don’t tend to them. 

You’ll notice this form of abandonment on the outside first. An example is when you have a romantic partner that isn’t attentive to your emotional needs. 

It’s time to look within at where your emotions need your attention and what they’re trying to tell you.

Literal abandonment is when you are physically abandoned. This likely stemmed in childhood with a parent or someone you loved who left. 

If you experienced a situation like this in childhood, you may draw similar relationships to you now.

We all have physical needs. We want to feel safe with the people we allow into our lives. As with all healing, this begins with you. 

Look at areas where you are abandoning yourself. 

Where do you walk away when you need yourself the most? 

Which physical needs are you ignoring or suppressing and how can you meet those needs?

Meeting your own needs first is how you begin to heal this wound. Once you’ve done this, you’ll notice that your outer reality begins to alter to your inner self-care.

What is the Inner Child?

The inner child is the most vulnerable part of you. The inner child holds much of your pain and deep-seated fear. 

Think about when you were a child and something that you didn’t understand was happening. You internalized it, made it about you and now have fear around it.

If no one took the time to help you process big emotions in your little body, you’re dealing with trauma. 

You may have made it mean that you did something wrong, or that you’re not lovable. 

You may have a lot of stories attached to your experiences. Stories intertwine with your beliefs. Beliefs are not always facts. They may or may not be true.

Your inner child may not believe they are worthy of love.

Your inner child may not understand why they experienced physical abandonment. The childhood experience can be very traumatic for many people.

Healing with the inner child means that you, as the adult, take responsibility for healing. 

It’s up to you to process your past experiences. Once your inner child feels safe, you can begin to relax. 

Symptoms of the Abandonment Wound

The abandonment wound determines how you show up in your relationships. This includes the one with yourself. 

Abandonment is tricky because it shows up in many ways. All lead back to either self-abandonment or abandoning others.

Abandoning others is still a form of self-abandonment. This is because you can’t be there for others when you aren’t there for yourself.

Abandonment energy is insecure. It can show up as insecure attachment, where you hang onto things and people out of fear of losing them.

It can also arise in intimate relationships. You may stay in a toxic relationship long after you should’ve walked away. Or your pattern may be to leave people before they leave you. 

This is a fear of rejection. I call this, “The Runaway” archetype.

If you’ve experienced abandonment trauma, it may be from a parent or someone important leaving. 

As a child, you may not understand why this happened so you create a story about it. Usually, we blame ourselves when we don’t understand why something happened.

This cycle will play out throughout your life. You’ll try to get your basic needs met in various ways and through relationships. 

You may attract people that abandon you, triggering that wound. If that is the case, doing the inner work and healing is important.

Your entire reality will change once you alter what you’re creating. This includes your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, perception, and expectations.

Working on one area won’t shift this. Working on each of them as they come up will bring you back into alignment with your authenticity.

Abandonment comes back to being afraid of loss. When negative feelings arise, you may try to change who you are to keep someone or something in your life.

This is where people-pleasing and over-giving take hold. 

You begin to lose your identity and won’t know who you are because you’ve shape-shifted.

Defense mechanisms can come up, especially if you’ve been in abusive relationships. Defense mechanisms can also include substance abuse, especially with trauma. 

It’s important to process traumatic events with mental health professionals. 

If you lean more towards spirituality, find a healer or coach you resonate with.

Defense mechanisms aren’t the easiest to recognize. I’d start by looking at your repeating patterns.

These are the questions you can ask yourself:

​1. Which pattern is repeating in this relationship that I’ve experienced in the past?

​2. When do I remember this pattern first beginning?

3. What story did I make about this when it first happened (think about what you decided in the moment)?

4. Is that choice still working for me?

5. What choice would I like to make now?

It doesn’t need to be hard work to heal, but consistency matters.

Emotional pain isn’t going anywhere when you ignore or suppress it. It gets deeper and more difficult to unravel the longer it sits.

Can the abandonment wound be healed?

The abandonment wound is a collective wound, so you can’t heal it for yourself. It affects every person on the planet.

Your healing contributes to healing the collective healing of the wound.

With that said, you can heal unresolved pain in your own life. Your healing process can include your symptoms of abandonment.

You can feel 100% better and not have abandonment affect your life on a day-to-day basis. And, you can learn to provide emotional support to yourself during triggered times.

Your healing journey will need to include a few things:

• A safe space for you to process how you feel with people you can trust. 
• A healthy home where you feel grounded and at peace. Home is one of the few areas we can control our sense of safety. Create a sanctuary for yourself where you feel safe spending time and opening up.
• A professional who can walk with you on your healing journey to hear and guide you.
• Spiritual practices that help you feel more grounded and at peace.
• A healthy way for you to process your emotions day to day. My favorite way is through my contemplation practice where I write in my journal.
• A healthy community and support groups who love and accept you for who you are.
• A connection with your higher self. This connection will help you understand your human experience from a spiritual perspective.

Moving beyond abandonment means that you do not self-abandon. Your priority is your health, happiness, and well-being. 

While some may view this as selfish, the truth is that you can’t take care of others unless you care for yourself.

We are not meant to care for others from an empty cup. We care for others from the overflow of our cup.

Women care for others at the expense of our own feelings and needs. We live in a society that values work and logic over emotion and intuition. 

We need to adapt but not sacrifice. There is a place for both logic and intuition in this world.

As women, it’s up to us to focus on and elevate the intuitive, emotional, and feeling sides. To tap into it, give it a voice, and listen to it as we would listen to our thoughts.

They work together to help us navigate life. 

Intense feelings are not always a sign that something needs healing. Sometimes it’s a sign of something to avoid.

​No one ever benefits from emotional neglect. To be a light for others, you must first be a light for yourself. 

The bigger picture is that you are important, and your emotional experience matters.

Once you begin showing unconditional love to yourself, you’ll have it available for others.

The abandonment wound doesn’t need to impact you on a daily basis. It won’t mean the wound is gone, but you won’t operate from it anymore.

To get started, process any fears of abandonment. Abandonment and rejection go hand in hand. The best way to begin is to look at areas where you feel rejected.

When we feel rejected we tend to focus on the other person. Rather than focusing on the other person rejecting you, look at where you are rejecting yourself. 

When you get to the root cause of where you are rejecting yourself, you have a strong foundation for healing. 

With the help of a good healer, coach or mental health professional, you can begin feeling better in no time! 

I teach women how to strengthen and use their intuition to navigate life and business. To learn how to use your intuition as a powerful tool, download my gift.

In the free Energetic Empowerment Guide, you’ll learn how to harness your intuition. Plus, I’ll show you how to expand your energy to receive more in life, and business.

Don’t forget to leave me a comment down below with your thoughts. I love hearing from you!

This post was to help you understand how to heal abandonment issues, spiritually.