Neglect is such a sensitive topic for trauma survivors. Most survivors with dissociative identity disorder (DID / MPD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) have had more cases of genuine neglect than their share.
For survivors of severe trauma, abandonment would have been experienced over and over in several situations:
- Every time his parents or caregivers turned a blind eye to the sexual or physical abuse that was happening to him right there in his own home.
- Every time her parents or caregivers abandoned their security role and became the perpetrators of her abuse.
- Every time your parents or caregivers ignored your physical needs, leaving you hungry, cold, neglected, poorly dressed, neglected in some way.
- Every time your parents or caregivers turned you over to another person who was physically or sexually abusing you
- Any time your parents or caregivers left you alone for extended periods of time, leaving you in charge of your own care when you were too young to care for yourself
- Anytime your parents or caregivers refused to provide you with proper medical care or treatment.
- Every time your parents or caregivers ignored your pleas or cries for help, turning a deaf ear and letting you deal with your crisis without their help.
For survivors with DID, this type of neglect occurred frequently. Too many survivors were abandoned on a weekly basis and, for some people, on a daily basis.
How does this type of abandonment affect people?
Severe, repeated, and excessive neglect teaches survivors not to trust. It teaches that you can’t count on other people. It teaches them that they are alone in the world. It makes them believe that no one will help them or that no one will be there for them.
What’s worse, it gives deeper emotional messages to survivors, instilling feelings about worthlessness, unworthiness, unimportance, being worthless, being bad, being stupid, being invisible. Eliminate and destroy any self-esteem the survivor may develop.
It creates a deep-seated anger, a continuous emptiness, a constant sense of isolation.
Leaves scars on the heart and pierces the soul.
How can survivors of extreme abandonment heal from such emotional wounds??
First of all, to recover from extreme neglect, it is important to realize and understand that your parents and caregivers were really wrong for neglecting your needs. When parents and caregivers make such a big mistake in their role of caring for children, the mistake belongs to them. It is not a message about the child, it is a message about the parents.
Parents are wrong, sometimes criminally wrong, legally wrong, in some of their abandonment behaviors. Don’t assume that your parents were “right” in their abandonment behaviors. It is very likely that they were doing something wrong.
Once a survivor truly hears and understands the fact that their parents and caregivers are responsible for the inappropriate treatment of a child, then that survivor can begin their own path to healing.
But healing from abandonment is not easy. The hurts went deep into your core existence, and overcoming that level of emotional hurts takes a lot of time and repeated effort.
Some of the steps involved in healing from abandonment are:
- Reminding over and over that the abandonment was not your fault
- Remind yourself over and over that you are not a bad person because your parents or caregivers committed crimes against you.
- Learn that while some people are criminals, not all people are criminals, that is, although your parents were willing to abandon you to such a degree, not all people will act in the same way.
- Learning to trust again, very slowly, little by little. Dare to try. Dare to reach out. Dare to build relationships.
- Finding people, even just one or two, with whom you can build meaningful relationships
- Be a trustworthy and trustworthy person so that other people develop trust in you.
- Addressing your anger issues towards the real culprits of your pain. If you “attack” people who make small mistakes in your relationship (while refusing to address your feelings with your parents or caregivers who made serious mistakes), you will find yourself alone over and over again. Strive to show the right amount of anger equal to the level of the error. Going overboard with people in the present day will not be helpful.
- Working really very hard to separate the problems that belong to the people in your past versus attributing your pain to the people in your current world.
- Develop relationships with pets or animals if you are too afraid to trust people. Establishing connections with another living being, where each of you depends on each other, is an excellent starting point.
- Remember and realize that safe people will come back to you again and again, unless you do something to drive them away again and again. You can keep good people in your life if you want.
- Finding little treasures / trinkets / little people reminders to help you maintain that sense of object permanence. Out of sight does not mean they are gone from your life.
- Work to expand your comfort zone in terms of how often you need to listen to someone to feel safe in that relationship. Repeated contact vs. excessive contact is an acceptable way to maintain relationships.
- Find safe but creative ways to build relationships. For example, if you are afraid of meeting people face-to-face, build relationships online. Use an online therapist or online support group as a starting point. Connect through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Abandonment is painful, but it is still possible to build positive, healthy relationships with other people. It will take constant work on your part to overcome the negative and damaging teachings given to you by neglectful parents and poor caregivers, but you can.
Unless you really want to be alone, you no longer have to be alone.
