Embracing Vulnerability: The Power of Mindfulness in Healing from Abandonment Trauma

Abandonment, whether experienced as a baby, a child, a teen, or an adult, can leave deep emotional scars that echo throughout our lives. The crushing weight of feeling unseen and uncared for, especially by the one leaving, can instill a fear of abandonment that lingers, shaping our interactions and responses to relationships in adulthood.

For many, the abandonment might have occurred before conscious memory formed, yet its impact reverberates through moments of panic and anxiety, often leaving individuals confused and embarrassed by their own reactions. The automatic eruption of rage at the mere prediction of being left again is often misunderstood, sometimes even perceived as a threat, perpetuating a cycle where the fear of abandonment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s essential to understand that these reactions stem from a place of deep-seated trauma, where the coping mechanisms developed in response to abandonment were the only tools available at the time. The humiliation and alienation felt in a society often lacking in empathy only compound the distress.

Enter mindfulness—a powerful tool for embracing our vulnerable, traumatized states while cultivating more adult-like or pro-social responses to triggers. Mindfulness invites us to slow down and non-judgmentally observe our thoughts, feelings, and impulses without immediately acting upon them. While it may seem daunting at first, with practice, it becomes empowering, soothing, and encouraging, offering a path to greater freedom and connection.

Incorporating mindfulness into our lives requires patience and dedication, but the benefits are profound. Here are some strategies to begin the journey:

1. Making Sense of Feelings: Start by acknowledging and accepting your feelings without judgment. Allow yourself to experience them fully, recognizing that they are valid responses to past experiences.

2. Orienting Exercises: Incorporate practices like Somatic Experiencing to prevent overwhelm and ground yourself in the present moment. These exercises help regulate the nervous system, providing a sense of safety and stability.

3. Journaling or Art: Engage in creative expression as a means of processing your experiences and emotions. Writing or creating art can provide a tangible outlet for exploring complex feelings and gaining insights into your inner world.

While mindfulness is a lifelong journey, each step taken brings us closer to healing from the wounds of abandonment. By cultivating awareness and compassion for ourselves, we can gradually transform our reactions, fostering deeper connections with others and reclaiming our sense of agency in the face of adversity.

In a society that often overlooks the complexities of trauma, practicing mindfulness offers a beacon of hope—a pathway to liberation from the shackles of our past and a return to wholeness. As we journey inward, embracing our vulnerabilities with courage and grace, we discover the resilience and strength that have always resided within us, waiting to be awakened.

What is trauma?

“Trauma is incomplete self-protective responses waiting to be completed.”

Dr. Peter Levine

Dr. Peter Levine created Somatic Experiencing (c) but what does he mean by “Trauma is incomplete self-protective responses waiting to be completed”? Think of it this way:

• A threatening moment (could be emotional overwhelm or an outside threat to our safety) causes an automatic reaction towards trying to keep you alive. We usually think of these as fight, flight or freeze.

• These are are meant to “complete”. Meaning they are meant to cause us to feel certain emotions & take certain actions until we register that the overwhelm or threat is gone or done.

• When we don’t allow our system to complete* those fight/flight/freeze reactions get stuck in our systems and cause problems (like depression/anxiety/and more)

• Somatic Experiencing therapy can help the body safely complete these cycles and let go of the enormous amount of energy that is being used by the stuck fight/flight/freeze attempts and bring order back to your nervous system.

*Reasons we don’t allow our systems to complete fight/flight/freeze are numerous. For example, we might be in a car accident or something else extreme and there’s not enough time to move our bodies to protect ourselves like we want to (I fell off a tall ramp skateboarding at 39 broke my elbow and had this experience) , emotionally we might feel a murderous rage in reaction to a co-worker or a boss but we can’t act on that so we squash it and dissociate from our rage because we don’t know how to handle it without feeling out of control. Another emotional example is we receive heartbreaking news but are in public or with our young kids and don’t feel we can truly cry and grieve in that situation so we squash it and dissociate from the grief and the pain. A final example is as children we may not have felt safe to express our fear to our parents or teachers or peers and we learned to squash it and dissociate from it.

Are you tired??

Books meant a lot to me as a child (they still do). Roald Dahl, Louis Sachar, Beverly Clearly…the worlds they painted took me away. Perhaps the author most impacting at that age on me was Shel Silverstein. His book Lafcadio: the lion who shot back captured me with its absurdity and wit and remains a favorite. Today I still have two Silverstein books from my childhood in my library. One is Lafcadio and the other is my first copy of A Light in the Attic. Reading through it today I was reminded of a poem that speaks a truth that’s always good to hear.

Let's stop calling people mental health diagnosis'

Let’s stop making mental health diagnosis' people’s identity. It’s inaccurate, degrading and only repeating a negative pattern.

A phrase that often gets used is “He or She or They are just a ___________” Narcissist, Borderline, etc. This is a problem for two reasons:

1) COGNITIVE/EMOTIONAL TRAITS AND ORGANIZATION DO NOT EQUAL IDENTITY. THEY EQUAL A COMPLEX MIX OF GENETICS/EPIGENETICS/ENVIRONMENT. TRAITS REVEAL HOW A PERSON HAS COPED AND SURVIVED AND UNCONSCIOUSLY LEARNED TO PROTECT THEMSELVES (HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE). THOSE WAYS GOT USED OVER AND OVER AND BECAME HABIT AND EVENTUALLY PERSONALITY (A WAY OF SAYING AN UNCONSCIOUS AUTOMATIC PATTERN OF REACTING TO STIMULUS).

2) IN MY EXPERIENCE PEOPLE USE THAT LANGUAGE WHEN THEY’VE BEEN HURT BY SOMEONE WHO HAS THOSE KINDS OF TRAITS. IN CONDENSING THEM TO A DIAGNOSIS (THAT THEY MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE) THEY ARE RELATING TO THE PERSON IN THE SAME DEHUMANIZING WAY THEY WERE RELATED TO FROM THEM. THIS IS NOT A HIGHER WAY ITS JUST FLIPPING THE SCRIPT, REVERSING ROLES AND CONTINUING THE SAME CONFIGURATION OF A DOMINATE OR BE DOMINATED MENTALITY. IT DOESN’T WORK TOWARDS A BETTER WORLD.

So please, if someone is a hurtful person let’s find ways to NOT continue the pattern of hurting on by calling them a diagnosis.

Are you isolating others and yourself and not knowing it?

When we are uncomfortable/insecure with certain emotions we unconsciously keep ourselves from knowing that we are feeling them. However, they still get communicated. Probably the most common way is what we usually call passive aggressiveness. Another way that’s becoming more common is sometimes called “toxic positivity”. People feel good when they are engaged authentically (albeit respectfully). Lots of reasons cause emotional conflict (e.g. religion, workplace politics, gender pressures, etc.) but they all come down to fear. We feel anxious to know about how we feel because we predict we will feel bad (maybe overwhelmed or guilty or ashamed) and others will have a hurtful reaction to us. If you find yourself always avoiding conflict you may wonder if you really are avoiding bothering people and having a negative effect on your relationships? People organically feel when someone is being honest with them (and themselves). The more people feel passivity in place of genuine emotion the more they feel isolated when with you. This is because they don’t feel resonated with as an emotional person. Over time that creates unconscious reactions to you that will cause people to avoid bringing things up to you. You will cut yourself out of the communication. So, if avoiding conflict is a problem for you maybe some self work is needed so you can give yourself the best chance for connection in the future.

5 tips for helping your kiddo when they blow up or shut down

For years I taught a seminar called “Good Enough Parenting”. Here are a few things I learned from it.

1. check your own attitude and nervous system

   • Make sure your attitude is not “they are just trying to…” or “they are so ungrateful”. Basically make sure you’re not making it about yourself because if you do you will misunderstand your kids. What they are doing is different than what they are trying to communicate. They are trying to communicate they are overwhelmed by something. Their goal is not to hurt you or disrespect you, their goal is to get your help even if they struggle to accept it.

   • They need your nervous system to re-balance. You need to be in an emotional place where you can stay reasonably stable so they can be co-regulated by your steadiness. If you need to, take a break (with good communication about why you’re breaking in effort to decrease misunderstanding) before you engage or have someone else engage for you.

2. Ask yourself if they need to SEE: sleep, eat, exercise

   • Check the basics. Do they need food or sleep or to get some energy out? Is there something obvious that could be bothering them? No need to make things more complicated if they are simple.

3. Don’t stand, get to their height

   • The height difference between you standing and them may be enough to activate a threat response in them increasing an already stressful situation. Getting down to their level helps bring more calm to the situation.

4. Music & touch

   • You’re trying to help them rebalance which may really be helped by music or touch. Have a calming playlist made ahead of time (here’s one from Spotify already) you can stealthily put on when the blow up/shut down is simmering.

   • Ask before you touch. Showing them respect and not talking down by asking if it’s okay to give them a hug or to scratch their back or to pick them up, etc. Allowing them to be in control of their own space. But if you’re allowed, hugging, etc. can be so helpful for co-regulation.

   • If they’re open to it wrestling might really help to start to re-open them up.

5. Connect BEFORE you redirect

   • This comes from Dan Siegel’s work and is huge. Emotionally validate and understand (from their perspective) before you move to correct or change or put in some kind of limit. I can’t stress how important this is. One reason is to do this requires us as parents to slow down in the moment to make emotional space for them. That alone is valuable plus when our children feel understood you’re more than halfway to victory in terms of helping them cope. (BONUS TIP: it doesn't really matter if you or your kids are late. Letting go of the stress to be on time opens up the space needed to tend to what's needed.)

Social situations are the new stalking lions in our lives. How can we survive?

The bullets:

• The brain reacts the same to emotional threat as to physical threat.

• Threat takes us out of the game and majorly decreases our creativity.

• Knowing you're in threat is powerful to combating an unnecessary threat response.

• There are some steps you can take to help restore peace.

The brain can’t tell the difference between physical threat and emotional threat. It is going react (ie fight/flight/freeze) to both the same.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU'RE POSSIBLY IN THREAT

• Heart speeds up

• Sweating Blood will flow to larger areas like your legs to prep you to run away

• Hearing negatively effected (less middle frequency)

• Ability for eye contact goes down

• Ability to think smoothly and reflectively diminishes

• Becoming more reactive

• Less creativity

• Vigilance (noticing every little problem)

• Thoughts that see others as a threat (likely in the form of judging people) and yourself as vulnerable (likely in over inflating yourself or under inflating).

2 STEPS TO CONSIDER FOR RESTORING PEACE:

1. Awareness: notice that you’re in a threat response without judging yourself. This is MASSIVELY different than just being IN a threat response.

2. Shift from inside focus to outside focus: this comes from Somatic Experiencing. We take 80% of our content in from sight. Using your vision, let your eyes go wherever they want. SLOWLY. You are trying to not think and just notice the outside environment: colors, lighting, textures, objects, details, shapes, etc. Doesn’t matter why you want to look at anything. The point is to shift from the brain focusing on the inside to focusing on the outside. This literally shifts which part of the brain is activated and can give your nervous system a chance to reset. Notice if you spontaneously take a deeper breath or sigh or yawn or want to stretch. It could help to tap your feet while you do this.

Are these feelings shadows or real?

Here is this post summarized in three sentences:

1. Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.

2. Slowing down and reflecting using non judgement and lots of self acceptance helps us suss out whether our feelings are adaptive or not.

3. Working on our past helps our present be clearer.

It’s popular to say that you won’t let fear drive your life. While that’s maybe an important counter balance to living too much in fear or giving away your personal power it’s also a misnomer. The goal shouldn’t be to get rid of any core emotion, instead it should be to slow down when we are sped up and automatic so that we can listen to what we’re feeling (this might take a lot of self acceptance and be alarming to do). That is how we start to be truly adaptive. Remember what we feel is going to be based on both the present moment and your past. So it takes some time to suss out whether your intuition is adaptive emotions to the present moment or out of date feelings from the past being put on the current moment. Our brains are prediction machines. Their job is to efficiently predict what will happen based on the past. When the past is incomplete then we inaccurately predict. So in order to be more present we need to not only slow down we also need to process and complete or re-complete the past. Fear is important, without fear we would be much more vulnerable to being taken advantages of. That said, unnecessary fear keeps us small and under selling ourselves.

So to recap once again in those three sentences:

1. Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.

2. Slowing down and reflecting using non judgement and lots of self acceptance helps us suss out whether our feelings are adaptive or not.

3. Working on our past helps our present be clearer.

Why organizations risk getting It wrong if they don’t understand the unconscious.

Much of our life is not conscious. We are designed to be efficient, life preserving beings which means that our brains will automate what it can when it can. How much of your day is automatic? Think about yourself at work (maybe in a meeting or in an interaction with a colleague). How much of how you feel, react, don’t react, hold your body even is automatic and repetitive? If organizations want change in their culture they need to focus on bringing people to the present moment. When we are in the present moment we feel our feet on the ground, we feel our sense of choice even though we’ve been in this moment thousands of times before. In the present moment we can identify fears that are not really adaptive and fears that ARE really adaptive. Here is one thing that makes being present more possible and one reason the present moment threatens people’s nervous systems and gets resisted:

1. Co-Regulation is easier when: we have another nervous system with us that is emotionally regulated (able to de-center from their own perspective and hold the other person’s without too much stress) it’s like we go from arms shaking trying to push that last rep up to a renewed strength and ability to smoothly push the bar back up. Co-regulation is increased by good eye contact, a tone of voice and emotional intensity that is in the ballpark of where the other person is but not exactly where they are (back it down a bit), reflective listening and plain listening.

2. Being present is threatening to some nervous systems because: a person may be in a self protective automatic mode. Meaning that doing something other that what they’re doing registers as moving away from safety and towards danger. Becoming present can feel relieving for some and for others it can activate an internal alarm system which may cause some anti-social behaviors. Knowing how to engage someone in those moments in order to increase safety is crucial for the psychological safety of a work place.

The 5 Reasons therapy or counseling is actually valuable for you!

Therapy or counseling is often under sold or over sold. When it’s under sold people say it’s just talking to someone and that helps you feel better. It’s much more complex than that with a well trained and experienced therapist. When it’s over sold it’s put inside of marketing language that says it will solve all your problems instantly: all of a sudden you’ll be great with money, relationships are a breeze, you feel balanced emotionally all the time and you find $20 in your pocket. Obviously that’s not right either. So what makes therapy or counseling actually valuable?

Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to feel seen and known.

Don’t under-estimate this. Feeling seen and known is important for everyone and it causes us to feel better. It helps our emotions to express and feel relieved. It helps us feel like we’re not an alien and that we’re not alone. It helps us feel connected. All of this moves us into a place where we can be ourselves more naturally.

Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to change the memories that are responsible for the automatic ways you interact with yourself and the world that are a problem for you.

Likely the brain mechanism at the core of any real change in therapy is something called, memory reconsolidation. When we go through something enough times or intense enough one time we remember it and our brain creates an automatic way to “adapt” to such a moment. This includes what emotions to feel, the meanings we make about ourselves and others, how to hold our body, what to do with our voice and our gaze, how intense to feel, what to do behaviorally, etc. This automatic thing becomes unconscious and then starts to control our lives around those situations or similar situations that still activate those automatic ways. Impacting those memories (whether they are memories we think or memories we just feel) causes new automatic ways to begin to be made.

Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to gain skills of self regulation.

This is not easy and a lot of therapies don’t teach this well enough. Knowing how to regulate your emotions and re-balance your nervous system is not intuitive to most. Learning this skills can change your life. In therapy we learn these skills both through education and practice together but also through the co-regulation of being with the therapist’s nervous system. Having a steady AND open person with you when you start to feel deeply helps you hold and manage your feelings better.

Therapy or counseling offers you the chance to learn about yourself.

Who doesn’t like to learn about themselves!? In therapy we come to know things about how we really feel or think or what desires we have that might be tough for us to come in touch with on our own or in our normal life. I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me or I have said myself in my own therapy, “I am just realizing this right now as I say it…”. Would you rather be on auto pilot or know what you really want?

Therapy or counseling offers you the chance to make sense of your life.

There’s something calming to the brain when we can name what emotions we’re feeling, when we can put together a narrative that helps us make sense of why we feel the way we do or why we do what we do, etc. In therapy we work towards this often so your brain can calm down and be more present.