Emotional abandonment can lead to feelings of helplessness and insecurity, impacting mental health significantly. Effective treatments like cognitive processing therapy and acceptance commitment therapy can address these issues and improve well-being.
By Brad Nakase, Attorney
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Subjective emotional states such as being unwanted, disbanded, insecure, or left behind are called emotional abandonment. Individuals who have experienced emotional desertion might feel helpless. Either abruptly or gradually, individuals may experience a sense of being parted from an essential source of support or retreat. Loss or being apart from someone you love can be signs of emotional abandonment.
One major biological aspect of mental abandonment is the feeling of rejection, which stimulates the brain’s pain sensation centers and may create an emotional impression in the brain’s warning system. Since long ago, literature and poetry have frequently featured emotional abandonment.
A variety of circumstances can give rise to emotional abandonment feelings. In line with Makino et al.
Rejections have a variety of emotional, interpersonal, and psychological repercussions, regardless of whether it is a love rejection, the breakup of a friendship, being shunned by others, being cut off from family, or just being overlooked or left out in casual interactions. Behavior in humans is heavily impacted by a need to prevent rejection, and people respond emotionally when they believe that someone has rejected them.
A person’s actions might be permanently impacted by how they perceive rejection or getting rejected. It may be difficult to build and sustain genuine connections with people because of one’s perception.
People facing abandonment (emotional) are more likely to exhibit maladaptive ideas (also known as “unreasonable beliefs”) as well as actions that involve avoiding relationships and/or reliance, as well as symptoms of depression. This could make interacting with people and in social situations quite challenging in day-to-day living. While some psychological disorders (such as antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, and anxiety disorders) can occasionally be accompanied by such destructive ideas and behaviors, not everyone who goes through abandonment will fit the diagnostic criteria for a disorder like this.
Despite having these emotional problems, these people might be able to operate within normal bounds. A mental wellness practitioner should only take into account such feelings when combined with all relevant data and diagnostic criteria before making judgments regarding the mental health status of an individual.
Several therapy strategies are effective in addressing maladaptive behaviors and thoughts that are frequently displayed by individuals who feel abandonment (emotional), provided that treatment is approved by a health care professional. For instance, PTSD, anxiety disorders, and depression can all be successfully treated using CPT (cognitive processing therapy). Depression responds well to therapy focused on emotions, or EFT. Treatment for adverse feelings and impulsive behaviors, which are frequently observed in people with borderline disorder of personality, can be achieved with DBT (dialectical behavior therapy).
ACT (Acceptance & commitment therapy) is another type of treatment that is appropriate for these individuals. The main goal of ACT is to help people avoid unpleasant feelings and memories. The goal of ACT approaches is to develop mental habits that center around tolerating unpleasant or uncomfortable ideas and feelings while staying in the moment at hand.
The core of ACT therapy is changing one’s negative beliefs about one’s thoughts to positive ones and making a commitment to matching one’s actions to one’s objectives and core values. All forms of treatment and therapy methods should be tailored to each patient’s unique presentation and examined by an expert in mental health prior to starting treatment, much like the procedure for diagnosis.
People’s distress and dysfunction are mostly caused by separation anxiety, which is an outcome of abandonment (emotional). It is known as separation anxiety or separation stress because it is a panic response that is triggered when we feel threatened or disconnected from our primary attachment. Widespread animal reactions to separation have been demonstrated, including separation stress, which has been the focus of much investigation in the domains of psychology and neurobiology.
When doing experiments on young rats, scientists take the pups away from their moms for a while. The different parameters of their separation response are then determined by measuring their stress hormones and distress vocalizations. As the rats get older, their stress hormones and response behaviors are reviewed, and it is found that they closely resemble the depressive, anxious, avoidance, and dejected posture behaviors exhibited by people who are believed to have experienced prior separation experiences.
People are sluggish to realize the possible consequences of losing a fundamental relationship because of the neocortical aspect of human function (they might fear falling into a chasm or feel unclear about what’s to come, for example). Other things that exacerbate these anxieties include “Separation stress is compounded by all of the above-listed issues.
To give up is “to withhold one’s assistance or backing from, particularly when in opposition to duty, loyalty, or obligation; desert: leave an acquaintance in trouble.” One common reaction is a sense of undeserving love whenever the loss results from the object’s intentional disengagement. This shows that people often put the responsibility for rejections on their own shoulders. “Am I undeserving of love, doomed to get old and perish alone, devoid of human interaction or caring?”
Other fears associated with abandonment scenarios include doubting one’s suitability as a partner and worrying about being alone for all time. Abandonment grief is distinct from the majority of types of mourning due to the co-occurrence of self-devaluation and innate dread.”
A person’s psychobiological functioning may be affected emotionally by the prolonged stress that results from depression that may precede desertion. This emotional trauma may be sufficiently severe to cause lasting effects. This may influence decisions made in the future and how you react to rejection, grief, or even breakup. Suffering from flashbacks is one of the consequences of facing abandonment.
Our innate fear of separation is connected to these stimuli. Primal abandonment dread is the name given to this kind of anxiety. We are afraid of being abandoned and without someone to look after our needs. The worry of being apart from mom is typically the initial cause of stress in people. This feeling is kept in reserve in the brain’s profound mental storage system, the amygdala, a region that trains the fight-or-flight response to terror. Birth trauma could have been the first cause of primal fear, and there might be some prenatal precursors.
At or prior to birth, the mental memory mechanism is largely intact and records the emotions and sentiments of the baby’s experiences with separation. Later events rekindle these primal sensations, particularly those associated with sudden or unwanted splits from the origin of nourishment.
As an adult, being abandoned triggers basic dread and other instinctive reactions that lead to terror and complete panic. A symbiotic relapse can occur when primal cravings and urgencies resurface and make people feel, for a brief period of time, that they would perish without what they have lost. The extreme tension of powerlessness can also be experienced by people. They feel powerless and unfit for the job when they try in vain to force the person they love to come back.
People feel they have something Michael Balint refers to as “a restricted capacity to execute the task of conquering – the effort necessary to change a disinterested item into an engaged partner” as a result of their helplessness. Experiencing one’s “restricted capacity,” in Balint’s opinion, is traumatizing because it creates a psychological fault zone that leaves the sufferer open to stronger emotional reactions in important relationships.
The anxiety of losing a background object is another aspect that exacerbates the traumatic situation. An object that people have become dependent on without realizing it until it disappears is referred to as a background object. For example, the partnership functioned as a mutual safety net. Individuals’ homeostasis was preserved by a number of psychobiological systems.
They started acting as each other’s outside regulators when they were in a relationship. They mirrored one other’s actions, and speech patterns, as well as EEG and cardiac rhythms, and their pupils got dilated in unison, demonstrating their multimodal responsiveness. Together, they acted as a kind of reciprocal bio-feedback structure, pheromone-sensing and reacting to each other’s endogenous opiates and biorhythms that were steadily released as a result of their interaction.
The several systems it assisted in regulating become chaotic when the partnership ends. Knowing that the person they love decided to break the tie rather than them adds to the unpleasant process as the mental and physiological repercussions worsen. People may read their strong emotional reactions to the breakup as proof of their alleged frailty and “limited ability to carry out the task of conquest” as a result of this knowledge.
After going through the severe strain of abandonment, certain individuals go on to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Adoption-related post-traumatic disorder symptoms include the aftermath of elevated emotional reactivity (from moderate to extreme) and ingrained defensive mechanisms (a lot of them have devolved into maladaptive ones) when faced with perceived dangers or disturbances to one’s identity or relationships.
Irrespective of how horrific the event was, all of these symptoms are extremely prevalent. They consist of “flashbacks, traumatic nightmares, and recurrent unwanted memories.” Staying away from ideas, feelings, and/or locations, individuals, or things connected to the trauma. False views about self or the outside world, ongoing shame or guilt, emotional numbness, estrangement, forgetting important elements of past trauma, etc.” All of these symptoms are related to traumatic experiences that may impact the brains of adults with long-term implications.
The formation of a real clinical manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder may be precipitated by a variety of underlying environmental and psycho-biological elements that are involved in emotional trauma experienced in the past. A contributing component is the variation in specific brain structures. Jerome Kagan claims that certain individuals were born having a locus coeruleus that has a propensity to release more norepinephrine, a chemical found in the brain that is involved in triggering the body’s defensive mechanism.
As a result, individuals would be particularly susceptible to developing post-traumatic stress disorder since their threshold for arousal would be lowered and they could be more inclined to experience anxiety in response to life’s challenges that bring back memories of separation and terror from childhood.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by two primary symptoms: an extreme fear of potential abandonment and a strong sensitivity to rejections or criticism. The inability to control emotions, impulsivity, problems with self-worth, and abnormally high sensitivity in interpersonal relationships are all characteristics of borderline personality disorder (BPD).
A new connection may be formed to guard against abandonment in the current relationship, which can result in overlapping romantic relationships due to anxiety about abandonment. An individual may also experience de-personalization, paranoid thoughts during stressful situations, uncertainty about their identity, ethics, and values, and, in mild to serious cases, psychotic episodes or breaks with reality brought on by stress.
The particular anxiety about isolation known as autophobia is a crippling dread of being conceited or a terror of remaining alone. It is not necessary for patients to be isolated physically for them to feel unloved or disregarded.
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