Quotes About Abandonment

When a child is deprived and neglected, he has a much harder time delaying gratification. Our wounded inner child believes that there is a severe scarcity of love, food, strokes, and enjoyment. Therefore, whenever the opportunity arises to have these things, our inner kid goes overboard.

Besides lack of mirroring, abandonment includes: neglect of developmental dependency needs, abuse of any kind and enmeshment into the covert or overt needs of the parents or the family system. Abandonment induces shame in the child who is utterly dependent on the parents.

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent. The illusion is what Robert Firestone calls the Fantasy Bond

His daughters especially were a source of nurturing. Never once did I see any of his children express anger, hurt or resentment toward Max. They had never connected with their own feelings. Max would become enraged when I spoke of his reenactment of his abandonment on his own children. His children minimized the impact of their lonely childhood. This is the delusional nature of deprived narcissism

My belief is that recovery from childhood abandonment, neglect, and abuse is a process, not an event. Reading this book and doing the exercises will not make all your problems disappear overnight. But I guarantee that you'll discover a delightful little person within yourself. You will be able to listen to that child's anger and sadness and to celebrate life with your inner child in a more joyous, creative, and playful way.

The more dysfunctional the system, the more closed and rigid are the roles it assigns. In families that are chemically, sexually or violently dysfunctional, the needs of the system are overt. The system dispenses its roles for the members to play in order to keep balance. All the rigid roles set up by family dysfunction are forms of abandonment.

When Herkamer tells her he hates her, she cries, telling him that maybe someday she won't be home when he wants her. Poor Herkamer is devastated. His abandonment, terror and separation anxiety are triggered. He rushes to his mom, feeling terrible guilt. His awareness of his anger is completely lost. His anger has been converted into guilt.

This transformation involves three dynamics: 1. The identification with shame-based models and the carrying of their unexpressed shame. 2. The trauma of abandonment and the shame binding all one's feelings, needs and drives. 3. The interconnection and magnification of visual memories or scenes, and the retaining of shaming auditory and kinesthetic imprints.

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent. The illusion is what Robert Firestone calls the "fantasy bond.

The fact is, we really never went through the pain. We developed a fantasy bond and used our primary ego defenses to avoid the anger, hurt and pain of our abandonment. Then we avoided our avoidance with our rigid roles and characterological defenses. We missed expressing the feelings at the crucial time.

The more emotionally deprived a person has been, the stronger his fantasy bond. And paradoxical as it sounds, the more a person has been abandoned, the more he tends to cling to and idealize his family and his parents. Idealizing parents also extends to the way they raised you.

If we humans are essentially spiritual, then when we are abandoned, abused or enmeshed, we are spiritually violated. Indeed, when our caretakers acted shamelessly, they were playing God. Healthy shame tells us we are finite, limited and prone to mistakes. When our caretakers acted shamelessly, we were forced to carry their shame. Our self-esteem was wounded by that shame. Co-dependence is the outcome of this abuse.

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family's precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

Because the roles maintain the balance of the system, they exist for the system. The children give up their own reality to take care of the family system—to keep it whole and balanced. Each form of abandonment breaks the interpersonal bridge and the mutual-intimacy bond. A child is precious and incomparable. Unless treated with value and love, this sense of preciousness and incomparability diminishes. In toxic, internalized shame, it disappears completely.

Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one's authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one's primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally (all shame-based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their children's emotions.

Then that scripture gave me hope, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.  Heb. xiii. 5.  'O Lord,' said I, but I have left Thee.  Then it answered again, But I will not leave thee.  For this I thanked God also.

The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time.

Two people may fall for each other but sometimes one gets up and walks away while the other is still falling to the ground.

The saddest thing about breakups is that the children get dumped, too.

Why did you leave me? When did you leave me? Where was I when this happened?

You gave up on me so easily. And it hurts to realize how replaceable I was. But the thing is, I never gave up on you, remember that. I was there the whole time waiting for you, but now it's too late for you to come around. Sorry.

He gave me nothing, and he took it with him when he left.

You told me you love me, Why did you leave me all alone?

I stop talking to you to see if you cared...Well it look like you never did!