How To END Self-Abandonment (With Clear, Actionable Steps)

So let's talk about understanding the abandonment wound and what forms it.

The first thing that I want you to know is that this is way more common than you might think.

So many of the men that I work with have a fear of being abandoned, have, uh, have a core wound of abandonment, and because of that, they are consistently abandoning themselves.

Now, what forms an abandonment wound? Well, an abandonment wound really forms when, as a kid, you experienced some type of disconnection, some type of abandonment.

It could've been physical.

It could've been emotional.

It could've been both, right? But maybe it was a parent leaving.

Maybe there was a divorce.

Maybe one of your parents was constantly gone because of work.

Um, or maybe they were just emotionally unavailable.

They were there all the time, but there was nothing to hold onto emotionally, and so any time that you brought up your emotions, there was just this kind of disconnect.

Maybe they shamed you.

Maybe they shut you down.

Maybe you got punished, uh, for feeling or feeling too much.

Um, or maybe you just felt like how you felt didn't matter at all.

Like, people weren't really interested in how you felt, what you wanted, what you were interested in.

And as a result of this, there's a, a kind of wired-in layer of shame.

You can think of it as like a, a heavy blanket that has surrounded your sense of self.

It has surrounded your real... what Carl Jung would've called your deep self, who you really are at your core, what you really need, what you really want at your core.

And what emerged, what you keep coming in contact with, is the version of your identity that is really entrenched in the belief that you're broken in some way.

You're defective in some way.

Your wants, your needs, your desires, all of those things are somehow inherently defective and that at, at your core, that your feelings don't really matter, or at the very least, other people do not want to know about them.

And that shame [clears throat] that you experienced and that you continue to experience shows up later in life as a whole bunch of symptoms, and that's what I wanna get into next.