Emotional Abandonment Looks Like……

By Darlene Lancer

Many people don’t realize that they’re feeling emotionally abandoned or that they did as a child. They may be unhappy, but can’t put their finger on what it is. People tend to think of abandonment as something physical, like neglect. They also may not realize that loss of physical closeness due to death, divorce, and illness often is felt as an emotional abandonment.

However, emotional abandonment has nothing to do with proximity. It can happen when the other person is lying right beside you — when you can’t connect and your emotional needs aren’t being met in the relationship.

Emotional Needs

Often people aren’t aware of their emotional needs and just feel that something’s missing. But people have many emotional needs in intimate relationships. They include the following needs:

• To be listened to and understood
• To be nurtured
• To be appreciated
• To be valued
• To be accepted
• For affection
• For love
• For companionship

Consequently, if there is high conflict, abuse, or infidelity, these emotional needs go unmet. Sometimes, infidelity is a symptom of emotional abandonment in the relationship by one or both partners. Additionally, if one partner is addicted, the other may feel neglected, because the addiction comes first and consumes the addict’s attention, preventing him or her from being present.

Causes of Emotional Abandonment

Yet even in a healthy relationship, there are periods, days, and even moments of emotional abandonment that may be intentional or unconscious. They can be caused by:

• Intentionally withholding communication or affection
• External stressors, including the demands of parenting
• Illness
• Conflicting work schedules
• Lack of mutual interests and time spent together
• Preoccupation and self-centeredness
• Lack of healthy communication
• Unresolved resentment
• Fear of intimacy

When couples don’t share common interests or work and sleepschedules, one or both may feel abandoned. You have to make an extra effort to spend time talking about your experiences and intimate feelings with each other to keep the relationship fresh and alive.

More harmful are unhealthy communication patterns that may have developed, where one or both partners doesn’t share openly, listen with respect, and respond with interest to the other. If you feel ignored or that your partner doesn’t understand or care about what you’re communicating, then there’s a chance that eventually you may stop talking to him or her. Walls begin to build and you find yourself living separate lives emotionally. One sign may be that you talk more to your friends than to your partner or are disinterested in sex or spending time together.

Resentments easily develop in relationships when your feelings, especially hurt or anger, aren’t expressed. When they go underground, you may either pull away emotionally or push your partner away with criticism or undermining comments. If you have expectations that you don’t communicate, but instead believe your partner should be able to guess or intuit them, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and resentment.

When you or your partner fears intimacy, you may pull away, put up walls, or push one another away. Usually, this fear isn’t conscious. In counseling, couples are able to talk about their ambivalence, which allows them to get closer. Often abandoning behavior occurs after a period of closeness or sex. One person may physically withdraw or create distance by not talking or even by talking too much. Either way, it may leave the other person feeling alone and abandoned. Fears of intimacy usually stem from emotional abandonment in childhood.

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