How To Recover From Childhood Emotional Abandonment

One of the most challenging childhood scenarios for a man to recover from is emotional abandonment. I grew up in a household where emotions weren’t dealt with openly in ways that felt safe to me, so I know this scenario backwards; and so do most of my clients.

However, emotional abandonment can be hard to spot unless you know what you’re looking for so to find out whether emotional abandonment in childhood could still be affecting your adult life, check out my article on 12 Adult Signs That You’ve Experienced Emotional Abandonment In Childhood.

Emotional Abandonment as a Boy Can Have A Big Impact on a Man’s Life

Now that you know what the problem is, here’s how to recover:

Recognise The Problem For What It Is

The first challenge in recovering from emotional abandonment in childhood is recognising that this is the core problem. It’s not something that is often talked about in our emotionally avoidant western society, and especially not between men. We tend to be educated with the notion that a “real man” should be emotionally stoic. While there is some truth to the idea that a mature man is less emotionally volatile than an infant or teenager, the problem is that boys are routinely told to suppress their emotions with notions such as “boys don’t cry” that shut down grief and hinder normal brain development.

As a result the strong feelings typical of childhood and adolescence get denied, unacknowledged and ultimately suppressed instead of processed in a healthy manner that would ultimately lead to the degree of emotional stability that we seek as adults. This means most men never mature emotionally, leaving us feeling vulnerable internally, while hiding behind an impenetrable external veneer of stoicism. Then to cover up the inner pain, we resort to all kinds of addictive and ultimately self-destructive behaviour.

Learn To Express Our Feelings

The primary solution to this problem is to learn to express our feelings cleanly and constructively. In principle this is very simple, yet many western men lack a basic emotional vocabulary because we’ve been taught to navigate and survive in the world using our intellect rather than our emotions.

Essentially there are only about 6 basic unpleasant emotions, so when we’re upset it’s always one of these:

• Anger
• Sadness
• Fear
• Guilt
• Shame
• Disgust

… or some variation thereof. All you have to do is learn to say “I feel X”, where X is one of the emotions listed above. Part 2 of The Confident Man Program Guide goes into this in much more detail.

The problem when we have been brought up by emotionally unavailable parents is that we’ve often been taught to rationalise, internalise or feel ashamed of our basic feelings rather than express them. This means we might need to …

Clear Our Emotional Backlog

When we first start expressing our true feelings, it’s likely to unleash a flood of previously suppressed emotion.

We might find ourselves crying in situations that haven’t moved us in the past. We may feel anger or rage when other people violate our boundaries. We may tremble with fear in situations of danger. We may be overwhelmed with guilt over seemingly trivial things from the past or present. We may feel defensive when someone else expresses their own emotions cleanly because we get triggered. The emotions may even overwhelm our nervous system and make us sick. We may feel tremendous shame over all of our feelings and just how strong they are.

All these things are signs that we have an emotional backlog to process. This is the purpose of effective therapy: to release the stored emotions from the past that control us in the present so that we can be free in the future.

Learn To Empathise With Other People

One of the consequences of growing up around adults who invalidate our feelings is that we never get taught how to validate another person’s feelings either. This is a core relationship skill. Having feelings validated is what makes human beings feel understood, accepted and ultimately loved.

Validating thoughts and ideas is great, but isn’t anywhere near as powerful in forming connections with other people as validating feelings. Women in particular understand how valuable this is. Note that you don’t have to agree with what another person thinks, believes or does to validate their feelings; you’re merely showing that you understand how they feel.

The empathic act of validating another person’s feelings has tremendous healing potential because it allows the other person to express and release their feelings free of judgement. When feelings are fully expressed, they tend to pass. Learning to empathise with other people is another way of healing your own past by deepening the empathic connection you have with other people.

Empathising with other people when they are in pain will tend to bring our own pain to the surface, which can sometimes become overwhelming. This is why so many people don’t do it, and another reason why it is important to clear our own emotional backlog so we can be free to connect with other people without being triggered.

Develop A Creative Emotional Outlet

I was partly joking when I said that expressing your feelings was “very simple”. In practice, it’s a life long journey; especially when early life conditioning from emotional abandonment gets in the way. Fortunately there are some avenues even in our emotionally repressive western society for creative emotional self-expression such as art and music.

Even if you’re not a great artist, you can always learn to express yourself by taking a community college course and learning to draw, paint, write or whatever takes your fancy. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece and you’re not doing it for anyone else’s approval; just for your own emotional sanity.

Creating art can tap into your unconscious mind and release pre-verbal emotions that you might not even know are lurking in your subconscious from infancy. If creating your own art sounds like too big a step initially, go visit an art gallery or read some classic literature and see what existing works resonate with your own life experience.

Music is also an awesome outlet. As I write this, I’ve been formally studying Music Performance at a local college full-time for 18 months now after only starting to play guitar in my early 40s. It’s been an incredibly healing journey for me to write, play, record and release my own music. It’s also been extremely challenging at times since it’s brought many of my latent insecurities to the surface.

Anyone can learn to play guitar and even if you don’t write your own songs initially there’s a wealth of existing songs for any mood you can choose to play. And most of them only have 4 chords!

Part 4 of The Confident Man Program Guide has many more suggestions of avenues for creative emotional self-expression and connection with other people.

Connect With A Supportive Community

Recovering from emotional abandonment in isolation is impossible because the neglect involved creates an interpersonal wound which requires an interpersonal solution. Fortunately we can heal from childhood emotional abandonment through emotionally safe and engaging adult relationships.

One of the reasons that emotional abandonment by our parents or original caregivers is so devastating is that once we learn to shut down the emotional connection in this primary relationship, we’re likely to also do the same in relationships with other people. This leads to a general lack of connection, fear of intimacy, and a discomfort that other people will sense, leading to a constant cycle of rejection that wires our childhood brains for fear instead of love.

To counter this we need to surround ourselves with emotionally available non-judgemental people who are willing to listen to how we feel and to share how they feel without any negative judgements. Empathic friends are invaluable, so long as they don’t fall into the trap of trying to “fix” our feelings or to rescue us from them. Our feelings do not need “fixing”; they need to be faced, acknowledged and processed so that we can be empowered around our previously disowned emotions.

This requires a community of like-minded people who understand empathy and know how to practise it. Don’t expect perfection since everyone is wounded in some way. Experiencing emotional intimacy may feel a little scary at first, but we can learn to listen to our gut feeling about whether the communities we frequent have the degree of emotional safety and healthy boundaries we need to help us heal.

Communities come in all shapes and sizes, and don’t necessarily need to have healing of emotional abandonment as their primary intention in order to be helpful in overcoming abandonment trauma. The important point is that we feel safe to connect to other people emotionally. I’ve experienced benefits from communities as diverse as volunteer organisations, personal development courses, religious institutions, spiritual communities, dance communities, theatre companies, acting colleges, music colleges, therapy groups, sexuality retreats and laughter clubs.

Get Professional Support

To begin the healing process we need a safe place to start expressing our feelings, releasing our emotional backlog and receiving unconditional love, support and approval in return. This can be challenging when it wasn’t our earliest experience of relationships with other people, and helping professionals can offer a valuable starting point.

Effective therapy works by providing this safe place to express the emotions, learn the relational skills and receive the unconditional love we missed out on from growing up in an environment of emotional abandonment. The relationship with a therapist then becomes a practise ground for emotionally healthy relationships in the real world. If you relate to any of the other articles on this website and would like some help dealing with your own history of emotional abandonment and it’s impact on your adult life, please get in contact about my coaching services.