“We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become.”
-C.G. Jung

The Metamorphosis of Healing from Abandonment:

Many of us are all too familiar with the extreme suffering, hopelessness, and self-loathing that manifests when we fall victim to abandonment fear patterns in our romantic relationships.

Most of us have abandonment fear wounding’s, big or small, but some of us are more sensitive than others, and it’s the severity of the wounding/s and or our sensitivity that can cause unhealthy abandonment fear patterns in our relationships. Abandonment trauma reaction might look like losing yourself in your relationship, frequent jealousy, clinging, or allowing yourself to be verbally, emotionally, or even physically abused, but not feeling like you can set a clear boundary and put yourself first.

My experience of gradually emerging from the shackle of abandonment trauma, as long as it took me, and as painful as it was at times, actually became a beautiful and meaningful metamorphosis of coming into my own soul. On the other hand, when I finally got into my soul, I found that I still wasn’t free from this suffering. That was when I realized that I had to do something different. I had to separate two voices within me: I had to separate my inner child’s cries from my inner nurturer’s wisdom. When I did this, my wise inner nurturer led me to do some research to help my own soul, and we discovered Susan Anderson, the Earth angel of abandonment trauma. Susan’s methodology is based on cutting edge neuroscience research, and also allows room for a deeper, soul level healing incorporating inner child work.

Thanks to my own immersion into soul work and then discovering Susan Anderson, I have developed a protocol for abandonment trauma that is similar to Susan’s, embracing inner child work (along with soul work if my client desires this) and neuroscience. It involves healing in the four quadrants: mind-body-spirit-soul. My approach is to using Susan Anderson’s workbook exercises along with emotionally focused therapy, inner child healing, guided visualizations, and if my client desires, soul work.

For the Soul Searchers and Soul Curious: Self Abandonment and Soul Abandonment

How many of us suffering from abandonment fear in our romantic relationships ever stopped to consider whether or not our own souls might be feeling abandoned? Perhaps abandonment fear, which is quite prevalent in this culture, is largely based on our own unconscious projection stemming from the fact that our own beloved souls have been trying to tell us that they feel abandoned. How do we deal with those times in our life when we suddenly realize that something has been missing that is keeping us at arms length from true meaningfulness and happiness? What if that something is a societally driven disconnect from our own souls? What I am suggesting, just as Thomas Moore has been trying to tell us for decades, is that we challenge ourselves to stop succumbing to this empty cereal box existence that our materialistic society wants us to subscribe to. Instead, lets take leap for soul-kind and redirect our attention away from the fear-based, mainstream culture driven voice of our underdeveloped egos and attune ourselves to the wisdom and vision of our timeless souls? If you would like to blend soul work with abandonment therapy, I would be honored to guide you in that process.

Christine Dufond, LMFT