Abandonment Fear, Repression, Childhood Trauma, and Healing

[Marc Moini]

I hope this will be useful to you, it’s an example of applying the principles I'm learning from Nathaniel Branden and Alice Miller and Marshall Rosenberg:

I bought a used phone last week and after fixing some parts I realized it was locked and I didn't know how to get past that. The next day while preparing lunch and thinking about this problem I felt like a flushing inside my whole body, intense fear, I almost fainted, I guess from blood getting sucked into the spleen in anticipation for a life-threatening blow. Facing the thought that I had made “a mistake" in not thinking ahead enough when making this purchase was overwhelming.

Using Alice Miller's idea that this exaggerated fear is likely a reaction to events in my childhood, I thought of how I grew up being very careful not to get caught doing anything I might get in trouble for, and the link became clear. If as a child I had spent money on a useless locked phone my dad would have been very angry with me because I wouldn’t have been a son he could have been proud of, which I guess unconsciously triggered in him the fear he felt from his childhood when he needed to be a perfect son otherwise his dad would be angry, etc. in a repetition going back from parent to child possibly many generations. As a child I wasn't aware of being afraid, probably because allowing myself to feel this intense fear would have hampered me in doing whatever I needed to do to not get caught. As a result I learned to repress this fear along with most of the events associated with it. Until I read Alice Miller's books and articles (alice-miller.com) and until I tried to imagine myself as a child whenever I experienced one of these strong and puzzling reactions, I was surprised to not be able to remember how afraid I felt in the few instances I did remember being threathened or hit. Now the repression is lifting and the fear is gradually coming back.

The next step was to do something about the fear. Realizing that the adult I am now wasn’t in immediate danger standing there in the kitchen brought some relief, but not enough. The fear had been replaced by feeling helpless and lonely, I still didn’t know how to get the phone to work and stop the thoughts of “I am no good”. I longed for comforting arms, someone to understand what I was feeling, who would support me through it. Again this brought me back to my first years, how I didn’t get this comfort and support, and how my reaction had been to put all of it out of my mind because these experiences of abandonment had been too painful (mostly my father getting angry at me and yelling and hitting, whereas I looked up to him for protection and guidance, and my mother who could barely protect us children from him and found it difficult to comfort me when I needed it). This next realization, that once more it was unmet needs from the past that were affecting the present and causing these feelings, brought some more relief and I was able to go through the rest of the day without being so hard on myself when thinking of what to do with this telephone.

Looking online for information on the effects of abandonment and how to recover from them, I found http://abandonment.net/articles where I read that fear of abandonment is really the primal fear and it is part of being human, and so the problem isn’t so much having this fear, as how we handle it (although people who live through extreme abandonment such as losing a parent during early childhood can be affected much more than most and it can be much more difficult for them to train to reassure themselves). Laying sleepless at 5am the next night thinking through all this, things then fell into place (most of these past 3 years I've spent doing self-work, this didn't come to me easily). Here was the idea I had been missing in order to better understand Nathaniel Branden’s statement “Nobody is coming to save you” and Marshall Rosenberg’s “It’s our responsibility to meet our own needs”. I had been thinking that I needed someone else to get reassurance from, as a child I had expected this from my mother and because she hadn’t been able to give me this past my first year I think, from around 7 I turned to looking for reassurance from girlfriends. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be able to comfort and reassure myself. I am now training to give myself the security I need and so far it seems to be working, I am feeling more energy and more calm, less worrying and less confusion.
So this is an example of how this process has been progressing for me, making sense of my past and understanding my needs and beginning to take steps to meet them. If you have any suggestions or comments I’m interested in hearing them.

I want to express my gratitude to Nathaniel Branden and Alice Miller and Carl Rogers and Marshall Rosenberg, whose work helped me understand the importance of feelings and emotions (otherwise I wouldn’t have recognized it was fear and helpessness and loneliness that I felt, as I couldn’t recognize or admit to these feelings in myself, before), and how to think in terms of meeting universal human needs instead of thinking in terms of morally right and morally wrong, and to learn what self-esteem is and how to develop it. I am also grateful to Wes Bertrand for introducing me to this body of knowledge and for helping me make sense of it. And I also have immense gratitude for the friend who showed interest in helping me explore my childhood and reconnect with my feelings, instead of only having an intellectual understanding of them, and thus to unlock my empathy. (That’s why I had and I think most people today have very little empathy, because of this unconscious repression defense and not because we are “sociopaths” who have no capacity for empathy). Other friends have helped me as well, such as LovePrevails and Lens here on FDR. And recently I’ve been lucky to be able to trade with a student therapist who trains on me as a test client while I get an hour of support each week for free, which I’m very happy for because I would have trouble paying for that much therapy right now. A big Thank You to all!

To give you an idea of how big a change this has been for me: before having children I spent a decade reading psychology and self-help books, and the best I could find were Virgina Satir’s books, which helped me some but didn’t help me understand the mechanisms at play. I did go to therapy as well, but the 2 therapists I saw apparently didn’t understand this either. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to come across all these important ideas and these high-empathy people in recent years, which in pre-internet times were even more difficult to chance upon, I would have kept on repressing all these feelings and memories, and upon seeing that the phone was blocked I would likely have found someone else to blame and got angry at them, such as my ex-wife, thinking it was her fault for having burdened me with trivialities that had thrown off my concentration and brought about this “mistake”. Or I would have gotten angry at my children. I used to go to any length to escape recognizing my part in any mishap, because I had this overwhelming fear that I was trying hard to not become aware of.

[Mike Larson]

Thanks for sharing Marc. I think this is a great example of living consciously. Easy to theorize about, but really difficult to do in practice.

 

I thought this comment was particularly enlightening.

I had been thinking that I needed someone else to get reassurance from, as a child I had expected this from my mother and because she hadn’t been able to give me this past my first year I think, from around 7 I turned to looking for reassurance from girlfriends. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be able to comfort and reassure myself. I am now training to give myself the security I need and so far it seems to be working, I am feeling more energy and more calm, less worrying and less confusion.

 

I'm curious about what you think are some effective ways to increase your ability to provide for your own needs of comfort, reassurance, and security?

[RuralRon]

I agree with Mike and his reply. I too focused on that area of your post Marc, especially the sentence that preceeded what Mike quoted, in particular Rosenberg's statement:

 

Here was the idea I had been missing in order to better understand Nathaniel Branden’s statement “Nobody is coming to save you” and Marshall Rosenberg’s “It’s our responsibility to meet our own needs”.

 

I also have great admiration and appreciation of your honesty and willingness to share this with us here. It's a vulnerable thing to do and I suspect as I think about it over the next few days I'll have some questions for you about it.

 

I also liked how this illustrates the process of learning to become more sensitive to the things we repress that you expressed here so eloquently, and how that isn't an easy process for many. You just nailed it Marc!

 

I tend to intellectualize and repress my feelings as a means of avoiding my responsibility and the frustration of not knowing how to resolve problems or the shame I feel because I don't. I think that's key for me, and I think you for helping me to see some of the mechanisms at play in there.

[Marc Moini]

Thanks for sharing Marc.

...

I'm curious about what you think are some effective ways to increase your ability to provide for your own needs of comfort, reassurance, and security?

 

You're welcome, Mike. So far it seems to me that once I've realized that it is possible for me to meet these needs myself, which was quite a novel idea for me, the rest is a matter of 1) remembering to turn to myself instead of looking for someone else, when I need security and to be comforted and reassured, and 2) practicing self-empathy.

 

And to practice self-empathy, the most effective way I've found is to keep studying and practicing NonViolent Communication (also called Connected Communication or Compassionate Communication). This has proved very difficult to understand for me, maybe because it is such a different way of thinking from the one I was brought up with. It took me over a year just to begin to understand what they mean by "needs", and my impression is that I'm still not fluent in thinking in terms of feelings and needs, 3 years in. It's like learning to think in a new language, it takes a lot of practice.

 

One trick that has made a big difference for me is to talk to myself saying "you". As in "Are you depressed because you're telling yourself that you're no good?" Somehow this seems to engage processes in my mind that make it easier to feel what's going on inside, but this may be something personal to me as I've always found it easier to figure things out when talking to someone.

 

I'm interested in hearing any ideas about any of this!

 

-------(I wanted to post a separate reply to Ron but it keeps getting added to my reply to Mike)----

 

Thanks for your kind words, Ron, and I'm glad you found what I wrote about my understanding of these mechanisms useful. It seems some of these ideas resonated with you and you are pondering them and considering the implications for how you perceive your internal world, and  you are getting some clarity in the process, and hoping to reach more soon.

[Marc Moini]

In my previous comment maybe I forgot a step. When I feel a strong emotion like fear or sadness that makes me long to be comforted and reassured, I can get the security I need by:

 

1) Remembering to turn to myself instead of looking for someone else

 

2) Imagining myself being faced with the present situation when I was a child. This can make the deep source of the emotion more apparent, in my experience (versus what triggers it in the present).

 

3) Self-empathizing, for example asking myself "are you afraid because you think you are going to get badly hurt if you don't succeed at appeasing this person?"