How I Released My Fear of Rejection and Abandonment

One of the consequences of being a sensitive child growing up with emotionally unavailable parents was that I didn’t feel loved and accepted for who I was. I developed a strong fear of rejection and abandonment which lasted long into adulthood. It would most often come up in conversations with women, especially if I got the sense that they didn’t like me or didn’t seem to want to talk to me.

For example, I was at a birthday dinner for a female friend a few years ago and was sitting next to an attractive young woman who my friend worked with. We struck up a conversation which went quite well and lasted for several minutes. After a while when there was a lull in our conversation, she turned to the woman sitting on her other side and started talking with her instead of me. I broke out in a sweat.

More recently I was at a Louis Theroux concert with my sister and her family, seated next to two young female strangers. I thought it might be fun to strike up a conversation with them before the concert started, so I turned and said in a friendly tone: “Hey there. Are you ladies Louis fans?”

The response felt rather defensive to me: “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t!”

I’ve learned not to take someone’s first response as being written in stone, particularly given that people are often wary of talking to strangers, so I persisted in engaging my hopefully new friends. We had a brief conversation; but I was distracted the whole time by the fearful thought that they didn’t want to speak to me.

So what if they didn’t want to speak to me, you might think? Everyone has their own thing going on and not everyone is going to be in the mood to talk with me. I get that. The problem for me was that it triggered my deep-seated fear of rejection and abandonment.

My uncomfortable feeling took several minutes to dissipate even after Louis came on stage and we could no longer speak anyway. It took a while before I could really relax and enjoy his quirky storytelling and sense of humour because I was still triggered from the proceeding conversation which I perceived as having not gone very well.

I was talking to a good friend of mine at a party recently about the mutual fear of rejection we share and how it makes dating particularly painful. It makes any social interaction rather awkward and the fear can become self-fulfilling: needing acceptance from other people can make us come across with an uncomfortable energy that can make other people wary and want to distance themselves from us. My friend seemed rather despondent about it: “You’re very brave the way you are always confronting your fears”, she said, “But this one is not going away”, she said.

I felt her frustration, but I wasn’t willing to give up so easily.

Recently I was talking about my fear of approaching attractive women with an older male friend who is something of a mentor to me. His suggestion was to tell the person who I am afraid of being rejected by exactly how I was feeling. “It’s the compassion of their response that will heal the fear”, he said.

“What, are you crazy? Tell a stranger that I am terrified simply of talking to them? That would be humiliating”, I thought.

I could imagine the whole scene going badly and leaving me feeling vulnerable, exposed and deflated if the response I got was less than compassionate. I had years of hearing my narcissistic mother berate and humiliate my passive father and shut me down with criticism whenever I was upset about anything. My negative programming around how women respond to men when we’re feeling vulnerable ran deep into my nervous system.

Having Emotionally Unavailable Parents In Childhood Can Leave Us With A Fear of Rejection and Abandonment in Adulthood

I also suspect I just didn’t get enough hugs when I was a kid; I certainly never felt a feeling of physical warmth from either of my parents and suspect this is where my insecurity around rejection originally stemmed from. My stoic mother always felt cold and distant to me and felt hostile when dealing with my upsets. My father was always there physically but maintained an emotional distance too.

Although I don’t consciously remember anything from the first few years of my life, when I imagine what it would have been like as a baby looking up into my mother’s eyes all I feel is fear. An infant’s brain develops in response to the emotional connection it has with its mother, and to a lesser degree its father. Having emotionally unavailable parents makes it difficult to feel secure around people and wires a baby’s brains for fear of abandonment.

One of the many self-help books I’ve read on my recovery journey said that:

Some fears are hard to extinguish

This seemed like one of them. On the other hand, I knew my mentor was right. Since the original emotional abandonment wound is fundamentally interpersonal, it requires support from other people in order to heal it.

My mentor had studied and practised emotional release breathwork, a breathing technique which releases emotional trauma and associated tension from our nervous system and body. He offered me a free session. Perhaps that could help me release this fear, which the many other therapies I have tried failed to get to the bottom of?

I’d done some breathwork before, and while I understood the idea behind it and knew some practitioners who swear by it, I’d never found it particularly powerful myself. In fact, I’d often hated it. However, I was willing to give it another try. While I didn’t manage to line anything up with my friend, a Facebook event popped up in my feed for The Wisdom Within: A Body Psychotherapy & Breathwork Immersion workshop run by Breathwork Practitioner Lynsey Chan and Body Psychotherapist Briony Pilkington, and signed up.

On turning up to the workshop, I sat down to take my shoes off and fill in the release form along with the other workshop participants. An attractive woman who I vaguely recognised sat down beside me and I jokingly complemented her on her reusable supermarket shopping bag: “I like your bag”, I said. I had a similar bag myself.

“It’s Louis Vuitton”, she replied. It clearly wasn’t.

“Limited edition!”, I continued.

We hit it off and started talking about how we came across the workshop and what we wanted to get out of it. It turned out we’d both done The Hoffman Process and had met previously at a local laughter club, so we had a bit in common.

“I’m here because I want to release my fear of rejection and abandonment”, I confided. I felt some of the pain and grief around it in my throat as I spoke my truth. I told her the story about the two ladies at the Louis Theroux concert and how I had been triggered.

“This interaction with you feels good”, I said, “But the problem for me is when it doesn’t go so well. Any kind of microrejection and I go into fear and shame. I have no control over how other people respond to me and I’d prefer not to feel so bad when they don’t want to engage with me. That’s what I’d like to release today.”

She said she’d had a similar thing, that it was caused by feeling unworthy, and that the solution was to learn to love herself. I could relate. Hopefully that would start today.

At the start of the workshop, we were asked to find a partner to work with for the emotional release massage we would be doing. I’ve done a lot of workshops involving partner work, and I always hated this part because it triggered the very fear of rejection and abandonment that I’ve come to try and heal.

In this case it was fairly easy: the woman I had met outside was a natural choice of partner, and a mutual glance confirmed that she was happy to work with me. One of the first activities was to share how we were feeling with our partner, and I said: “I’m feeling anxious. I hate having to choose a partner; it brings up that fear of rejection I was talking about before”, as I cried tears of grief. “I’m relieved that we have connected now though.”

Then the leaders gave us the opportunity for a few people to share why they were there in front of the whole group of about 20 participants.

“I’m here because I want to release my fear of rejection and abandonment”, I announced tearfully. I felt the grief rising and the tears of abandonment trauma flowed from my eyes. While I used to feel great shame sharing how fearful I feel and crying in front of strangers, I’ve done enough trauma healing work to know not to shut down this process anymore.

Expressing the painful, hurt feelings and receiving a compassionate, empathic response is what heals emotional abandonment trauma.

I took a moment to breathe as the tears ran down my face, before continuing.

“I’ve done a lot of workshops. Like, shitloads. And the first thing the leaders always get us to do is pick a partner. I hate it. I go straight into panic.”

I was crying more tears of trauma as I said it and noticed approving nods from other workshop participants. They could relate. This was the healing compassion that my mentor was talking about.

“I usually end up resenting the workshop leaders”, I added. Everyone else laughed, but I was serious. “I’ll try to forgive you by the end”, I said only half-jokingly.

The emotional release process was working… and we hadn’t even started the breathwork yet.

One of the leaders came up to me, put her hand on my back and said: “We’re here for you.”

“I don’t believe you”, I was surprised to find myself saying, “I don’t really trust you”.

“I’ve done a lot of breathwork in the past”, I pondered aloud, “But my facilitators have usually been men”. This time it was women leading the workshop. I suspected the fact that I never felt safe expressing my feelings around my mother meant that it would take me some time to learn to trust the women leading the workshop too.

They didn’t seem offended as they knew that my lack of trust wasn’t about them. “We’re all here for you Graham”, they reiterated.

During the day we did a couple of breathwork sessions and an emotional release massage. The massage felt great, but I wouldn’t say I noticed any emotions being released. My partner on the other hand had a very cathartic experience. It’s all part of the process.

Shortly before the final breathwork session one of the other participants asked the leaders whether there could be an emotional reason for a recurrent injury she was experiencing. “I have a sense that your mother tried to crush you”, the leader responded intuitively. I felt grief in my heart just hearing this as I could relate: my mother had tried to crush me too.

When it came to the final breathwork session, I found it a little difficult to get into at first. After a while I was triggered by the collective pain that other people in the room were expressing and that put me in touch with my own.

As I was doing the deep connected breathing practise, I started to feel a buzzing feeling in my pelvis. I began to shake and cry. Continuing to think “They must be in a lot of pain” connected me with my own pain that didn’t feel safe to express in the past.

Then the core belief that my mother instilled in me came to me:

If I don’t behave, the love will be taken away.

I let the buzzing, shaking and crying take their natural course for several minutes until the session was over. By the end I was absolutely exhausted.

I shared my experience briefly in the final sharing session before the workshop wrapped up. “I’ve had a lot of therapy and done breathwork before”, I said, “And I still can’t believe just how deep that shit can go”. I had so little energy left that even just getting up off my yoga mat at the end was difficult.

I farewelled the other participants and headed home for an early night and some self-care.

For the next few days I felt waves of nervous energy passing through me. During a follow-up phone call with Briony a few days later, I felt a buzzing feeling and shivers going through my nervous system hearing her experience of childhood trauma. While her physical experience had been quite different to mine, the common element I could relate to was emotional abandonment and overwhelm.

Emotionally overwhelming experiences can remain trapped as energy in our nervous system and tension in our body until we feel safe to release them. This stored emotional residue is called trauma. I realised I had more work to do and joined Briony’s weekly emotional release massage collective to help integrate and reinforce my workshop experience.

Over the next couple of weeks, I had several conversations with friends about my fear of rejection and abandonment, and the workshop experience. Each time, I felt a little more grief coming up again: a choking feeling in my throat, a heavy feeling in my chest, and the tears would flow. Each time the feeling was less intense. Rather than trying to shut me down like my mother did, my friends seemed to really appreciate my free expression of emotion. The fear was in my nervous system, not just in my head, and would send shivers through my whole body as it released. I just wanted it to go away but I knew that working through it was the only way that was going to happen.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is considered the gold standard of psychotherapy treatments, but experiences like this make me question one of its basic premises: that emotions arise in response to thoughts. I don’t believe this view accurately represents what actually goes on deep in our brain, nervous system and body physiologically. I have more faith in Non-Violent Communication’s model that emotions arise from the nervous system in response to unmet physical and emotional needs. In this case, my need for loving empathic connection with other emotionally trustworthy individuals in early childhood.

I became keenly aware of just how often I experience rejection in my daily life, and how painful it still was. The universe has a way of putting our intentions to the test and this had been coming up a lot: friends who say they want to get together but don’t contact me to arrange it, getting cut off in conversations, having applications for university courses declined, family members I didn’t connect with, being told a song I like is boring, and new potential friends I never even met because I was too scared of them not liking me.

The emotional release massage sessions were really helpful as another environment to share how I was feeling and get some healing physical touch. Before each massage session we had the opportunity to share briefly our intention for the session and what we wanted to release. Themes that kept arising for me included grief over my father’s impending death due to cancer, my controlling mother’s impending survival, fear of rejection by the other students as I start university this year and anxiety around approaching attractive women.

During each massage I often felt more grief arising and being released through tears. I found the light touch worked best for desensitising my adult nervous system from a perceived lack of childhood hugs and supportive touch. Feedback from the other participants was that the physical tension in my body seemed be getting less each time.

Between emotional release massage sessions I would often feel an almost overwhelming feeling of anxiety in my body. It was the holiday season and I was spending much of my time alone playing music, preparing for university or just relaxing in front of French movies on TV. My father was also in the final stages of dying from cancer, so I had a lot going on. Some days the anxiety felt so strong it was difficult to breathe. I had the sense that this was a core wound that I was dealing with, and it wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Ongoing support of friends who I shared my fear of rejection and abandonment with was vital. I had many synchronistic conversations with friends about how this fear was impacting my life, and the grief that I had about what it had cost me in the past.

A month later I did a second body/breathwork workshop with Lynsey & Briony. I found the final breathwork session a little difficult to get into as I was feeling very tired and found myself curling up in a foetal position. One of the facilitators came over and cradled me from behind as you would an infant, and I started to sob and shake for a couple of minutes. My guess is that I didn’t get enough of this kind of physical comforting as a child either.

While a cathartic workshop experience is one thing, what really matters to me is the impact that healing old emotional wounds has on my day-to-day experience in the real world. Healing a core wound like emotional abandonment can take time and requires a lot of nurturing self-care. I was a little cautious at first, but over time I discovered that I’m no longer so afraid of rejection when meeting people. I can take greater social risks without worrying that the awful old abandonment terror that used to lie dormant inside me will be triggered by any kind of current-day rejection.