Re:abandonment

I'm not going to comment on either of the two particulars that you have kindly posted here, as we don't do case consultations (sorry about sounding like a broken record).

I'll make a couple of comments about abandonment.

In the first couple years of life a baby is supposed to attach to a loving, nurturing, accepting, protective parent who mirrors her infant empathically. That is how we establish good self esteem, good ego boundaries, and some say even how our brain gets wired. That foundation serves for our whole lifetime.

If at that time the attachment doesn't occur or partially occurs, or if later in childhood the attachment is broken through abandonment (and by abandonment I mean to include departure of a parent by death, illness, divorce, or even by mental illness or other kind of unavailability) the basic foundation isn't completed. The degree of injury is determined in part by how far the child progressed through the developmental stages of infancy, toddler, childhood, adolescence, etc. It is of course also affected by the deliberateness or malice if any, vs. accidental nature of the abandonment, by the amount of pathology in the family system, and more.

For people who were literally or virtually abandoned, the need to avoid the pain of wishing to attach and suffering the loss again, or, in contrast, the tendency to recreate the original abandonment dynamics, can drag people around by the nose for a lifetime.

EMDR can sometimes help resolve these issues by targeting early relationships with the mother and father, or the abandonment trauma itself if available. Sometimes these are hard to target as there may be no conscious memory of the events, but even targeting the space where the relationship would have and hsould have been can turn up enough material to get access to these unresolved emotional experiences.

Resource development and/or positive installations about being able to attach can be helpful in reducing the intensity of abandonment pain for those for whom this pain is an ocean.

Folks carrying a DID diagnosis need always to have their treatment follow appropriate protocols for the highly dissociative in order not to overwhelm the self system and in order to not premature take down dissociative barriers.

Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD
Fair Oaks, California

Replies:

thank you, by an EMDR client, 07/01/01

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