The Wounds Left When You Left Me

One of my earliest memories is the image of you when you walked out the door and never came back. The sound when you slammed this one still gives me shivers and scarred me for life. You don’t know how deep my wounds are from your choice to leave me, Dad.

When your father leaves and never comes back, when no one tells you what’s going on because they think you’re too small or because they’re trying to protect you, you’re the worst affected. This is because you are the one explaining what happened with reasons that can only be found by reading between the lines.

It is these reasons that can hurt you the most. It is they who can damage your future bonds with other men and with your partner, because the guilt that is left behind is yours alone. You’ve been naughty and you don’t deserve your father. You have no awareness of relationship issues, but you do understand punishment. Losing your father is a punishment.

That you left me made me feel guilty

That absent father, who left you of his own free will, will create emotional voids that you will try to fill with guilt. After all, you feel that if you had been a better kid, he would never have left. You believe that if you had been kind, you would have deserved a father.

You have lost your courage because you have been a bad daughter. That’s the reason he left. There is no other reason, and no one has given you the idea that there is. You are a child, and as such your world revolves around you, which makes you think that everything is in your own hands. Everything has a reason, and everything is related to you.

Being abandoned brings an emotional void beyond physical absence. After all, physical absence can be disguised by the efforts of a single mother or other relative or father figure. However, emotional absence is an irreplaceable void that cannot be filled since only one of the two parents exists.

When you’re a kid, you think the bad things that happen to the characters in stories are nothing more than the result of their own bad behavior. That’s the moral. Guilt is therefore the emotion that best explains what you feel now that you have been abandoned by your father. You feel bad because you don’t know any other way to understand the emotional emptiness.

Early Abandonment Affects Your Future Relationships

Emotional absence is a void that scars you and is impossible to hide. It is a vacuum and you are afraid that you will experience it again in the future. The emptiness makes you think that all men are the same as that man who left you when he should have taken care of you.

Another thing that this emotional vacuum of abandonment creates is that you question your worth. Your self-confidence is damaged, and it is not easy to love yourself. After all, if you have experienced abandonment at a very young age, your worth will be confirmed by the others who do want to stay by your side.

And that’s the reason for your bonding problems. Your relationships are marked by fear and loneliness, which makes you distant. You become emotionally inaccessible because you try to protect yourself. Your relationships follow a pattern:

• Initially, you act cold and aloof to avoid being vulnerable to others. If they don’t know you, they can’t hurt you.
• Then, if they manage to get to know you, you begin to isolate yourself from them. You don’t necessarily do this consciously, it is rather an instinctive way to protect yourself. If there is no emotional connection, you cannot be hurt.
• This amplifies your fears. It is, after all, a self-fulfilling prophecy: they leave you. This is when you feel the loneliest. You think that the world is a hostile place and that you cannot prevent others from leaving you.
• This causes your self-confidence to shrink even more. You think the reason everyone leaves you is because you don’t deserve them. The same thing happened to your father. You don’t deserve to receive affection.

Overcoming abandonment is a step towards emotional maturity

Overcoming abandonment is a step that, once taken, always leads to emotional maturity. It includes rebuilding yourself, building your confidence and your ability to relate to others. Overcoming abandonment starts with loving and accepting yourself, even though you have been abandoned.

It means accepting the pain of the absence and understanding that some love relationships break without anyone to blame, sometimes love fades and sometimes love hurts.

This is why it is so hard to give love to someone who has experienced abandonment.

Often, overcoming abandonment involves learning new ways to communicate socially and emotionally. You do this by learning social skills that allow you to be accessible without being dependent and without pushing away the people who can help you.

Finally, overcoming the negative feelings that can lead to divorce will keep you from continuing your parent’s pattern. Understanding that it is a natural and unnecessary process will allow you to feel free in your relationships. At the same time, you will ensure that your memory does not become a source of all-consuming and contaminating fear.