Note: I’m hard at work researching social neuroscience and antifragility and organizing a presentation to directly address the issues that result from abandonment and neglect. I expect it to be ready sometime in 2017. If you’d like to be notified when it’s complete, drop me an email at: antifragileheart@gmail.com
Once, in a significant relationship of long duration, I very reluctantly initiated a breakup. I initiated it for many reasons. One “senseless” reason was to avoid having to re-experience the feelings of loss, abandonment and neglect so familiar from childhood. What I ended up feeling, of course, were crippling, pulsating pangs of loss, abandonment and neglect.
To the logical brain, initiating a breakup to avoid feelings of loss, abandonment and neglect makes no sense. To the feeling brain and a heart desperately trying to heal, it makes perfect sense. The Pain Body (an Eckhart Tolle term that I particularly resonate with) in concert with trauma long buried in unconscious Implicit Memory looks out and pinpoints the precise people to help us reenact the trauma – in the hopes of healing it at last. But with abandonment and neglect, by their very nature, that rarely happens. Partly because every way you try to reenact it you lose, and partly because when you’re in the middle of a reenactment, a greater awareness of the larger picture is seldom available: it doesn’t feel like healing trying to happen in the least. More often than not ALL people involved end up in triggered states of emerging traumatic memory re-creation. And being in an actively triggered emotional state seriously compromises coherent brain function and possibilities for healing in everyone. It feels much more like a return to the wild, than trying to collaboratively and sanely navigate treacherous terrain.
Children who experience abandonment and neglect repeatedly feel at risk when attachments of any kind are broken. Whether physical, emotional or neuro-cardiological, we also have large gaps in our developmental unfolding. Those gaps are called lacunae in the psychiatric literature. Spiritual teacher, A. H. Almaas simply calls them “holes.” These are missing structures that form normally from experiences of people/parents being there for us come hell or high water. As a result, we often end up with few inner neural reserves to call upon to help us navigate safely and securely together through the hard stuff with significant others. Our physical Pain Body simply becomes overwhelmed with emotion, greatly impairing coherent thinking or action. Often, the only way out, it seems, is to flee. Or to isolate. Neither is an optimal strategy.
Choiceless Unawareness
Some people, like Eckhart Tolle, assert that we all have choice in how we experience such re-surfacing memories. From my perspective they have little understanding of how transient disorganization happens when the stress of traumatic memories becomes activated in the brain. They also fail to understand how much activity of the brain is completely unconscious and easily manipulated (all we need do is look at Stanley Milgram’s at Yale or Phil Zimbardo’s obedience experiments at Stanford for confirmation). Furthermore, few of those who assert such notions concerning choice, while they may be victims of other forms of abuse, they have rarely suffered abandonment and neglect themselves. Choice may be available to some of us later, in the wake of traumatic memory activation, after the poo has been cleaned out of the loo. But Tolle and his advocates would be better served, I think, to hold the matter of choice and free will as an open question rather than to offer it as rigid dogma. I suspect neuroscientists David Eagleman and Bruce Hood live in my camp on this matter of choice, since each recognizes that every brain is enormously complex and operates the best it can in any moment in every situation, depending upon all kinds of situational variables.
Children at Risk
Those of us who hail from a history of abandonment and neglect are also at greater risk for abandoning and neglecting relationships and our own children than those who don’t. I came very close to unconsciously organizing the family (brain-body) stressors in my own life such that I nearly abandoned my daughter Amanda at age 4, the same age that my father abandoned my own sisters and me … the compulsion to repeat the trauma. The compassionate heart of one of the very few good therapists I’ve worked with over the years, helped me hang in … until Amanda was 13. Then, my understanding of the real limits of the psychotherapy profession at the time, and too many traumatic memories mounting an emergent assault on too many fronts, proved to be beyond my ability to manage. They shut down coherent functioning in my brain and severely limited my choices. Separation and divorce ensued. But I did manage to hang in a little better than my own father did: I continued to provide financial support and spent as much time as Amanda and I could manage together. An Authoritative Community might possibly have helped me hang in better. Possibly.
So, what will help to heal abandonment and neglect? I can only speak from my own experience, but what I most greatly yearned for during those periods of regression and painful traumatic reenactment was for someone who deeply understood that healing attempts often show up chaotically. They would be someone who could stay fully present in the midst of my regressed stony silences, plaintive wails or angry outbursts, and to each of them simply calmly say over and over again, “That’s fine. I understand. But I’m not leaving. That’s fine. I understand. But I’m not leaving.” That’s what it would mean, at least for me personally, to meet The Big Brain Question with The Big Heart Answer.
P.S. If you want to see some specific and startling impacts that abandonment and neglect have on the brain, click HERE.
Amen. I was trying to explain to someone the other day about how one can’t have a choice “to just choose positivity!” when one is so badly triggered, and you’ve done a beautiful job here. I posted the link to this one on facebook.
Thanks for all that you do, Mark
X
Marla
That last paragraph is what I feel my friends do for me, and what I hope I do for them. So I’m going to share it with them and hope we can all do it for our kids. Thank you.
Beautifully written- perhaps my favorite of all your wonderful posts, ever! Thank you so much!
Mark, thank you for provoking some thought and feelings from your post this week. Am i being naive to believe that those of us who experienced early neglect and abandonment, do have the choice to recognize that this experience influences our functioning and relationships, and that we are not doomed to repeat it?
Thanks for highlighting the current dogma regarding choice in behaviors and attitudes, Mark. This is so important, as telling people to just “choose to feel good” or whatever, can be sort of damning if for whatever reason such a “choice” remains unavailable to the person. From the work I’ve done with others (I am a psychotherapist in Seattle), and most importantly with my own trauma, I’ve come to see that the best we can do it work to create a life in which we come to feel we do have choices. When we aren’t feeling particularly triggered we can get to the building, we can do good works for ourselves and others, we can do what we can in the moment, while the moment allows it, and then hopefully when we get our buttons pushed will will have some walls upon which to lean to catch our breath.
The communities of which you speak, the “authoritative” ones, are all about his, creating the structure necessary for choice. Being in chronic survival mode, as many who have deep wounds are, really means we haven’t a lot of choice. Thanks so much for writing about this important topic, Mark.
Best,
Patrice
Mark, Once again you have share a valuable post. I am certain it will be very beneficial to many directly experiencing all you have described. It also will be great to provide insight for those that are helping others to heal the feelings of abandonment and neglect.
I just shared your, Big Brain Question again yesterday when presenting to a wonderful group who was very eager to learn about the brain!
Thanks as always for all you share.
Deborah
Wonderful post, I deeply resonated with it.
On your last point:
“I can only speak from my own experience, but what I most greatly yearned for during those periods of regression and painful traumatic reenactment was for someone who could stay fully present in the midst of my stony silences, plaintive wails or angry outbursts, and to each of them simply calmly say over and over again, “That’s fine. I understand. But I’m not leaving.”
If you have not already read This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness by Laura Munson check it out. It is the story of a woman who’s husband had a meltdown of sorts and she stayed fully present throughout and basically did what you describe.
Nathan S.
Hi Mark, I lead with gratitude and compassion for your journey. I am struck by how, in the spontaneously organizing worlds of brain and blogosphere we become increasingly empowered to hold multiple perspectives.
In other words, in the context of safe, connected and loving relationships/communities we may be able to stay present for each other without becoming dogmatic or controlling (the Shadow constellating as “charismatic leaders”). We strive to hold, and integrate, the seeming opposites of our Shadow/Lizard brains and our transcendent Buddha brains, anchored by the balanced twins of logic on the left and love on the right.
Thus understanding our repetition compulsions while allowing for the strange twists of synchronicity that our minds make narrative and causal, when they may be quantum and not at all what the universe “meant to say,” may free us from the prisons of our angst and alienation. (I think of how my mom’s dad died when she was fourteen, and my best friend died when I was fourteen, and how her post-partum depression shaped my neurology to always dread and expect disaster, and even secretly believe that I caused bad things to happen as a defense against the deeper dread of helpless abandonment).
I suspect we all fear being abandoned and alone—it’s whether we can let that go and live with it, and/or trust that it does not mean it will happen (again), and/or appreciate that angst of alienation partly drives us to attach, and/or trust that this basic dread plagues so many more of us than we might suspect, albeit at different levels of intensity with different levels of suffering and varying behavioral responses… that might allow us to heal together, individually and collectively.
Yes, this is very very hard (when we feel, or particularly when we ARE, alone and abandoned)—but so worth doing to whatever extent we can manage. To me the big reveal is that it’s all relational. We tend to want to go off into the forest and emerge later, complete and secure; however we must love and face our fear of abandonment in order to transform it from neurotic wishes for certainty to more robust abilities to manage uncertainty—and love no matter what.
Sorry for saying this in more words than necessary, but my heart resonates to yours, and to the increasing hope that our collective heart cannot be in the wrong place—we just have to trust that love truly is the beginning, middle and end of our ultimate situation.
Namaste
Mark, I am so touched you personalized this post and talked about your own vulnerable experiences. Bravo! You spoke directly to my heart and I could expand a little further in my own awareness of ways I repeat with my sons and even my clients. It was a true right brain transmission of concepts that can get mired in left brained wording. Thank You!
Yes, a candidate for my favorite blog, whose message shall live in my sessions with traumatized K-5 children whom I will begin to see at school this week.
Namaste – Graham
I loved this article ..I have felt the pain of abandonment.
Wow… all so very true. I’m in the midst of it all at this very moment in my life. Perfect timing to read this. Thanks for sharing.