An excerpt from The Abandonment Recovery Workbook by Susan Anderson
Psychotherapist Susan Anderson had been helping her clients overcome heartbreak and loss for over twenty years when her longtime partner told her he didn’t love her anymore and left their relationship out of the blue. As she struggled to cope with her own pain from that abandonment, she recognized the extent to which realistic, well-researched, and clinically tested steps are required in order to heal from such a deep emotional injury. That is what her The Abandonment Recovery Workbook (New World Library, August 17, 2016), which explores five stages of abandonment — shattering, withdrawal, internalizing, rage, and lifting, is designed to provide. We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the book, which focuses on the internalizing stage.
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About six months into my heartbreak, I had a rude awakening. I was sitting on my bed pulling up my stockings. A mirrored door was ajar and its reflection caught me off guard. In a flash, I recognized the woman hunched over her feet, glowering at the mirror. It was me, caught in a moment of self-revulsion.
I undertook an immediate reality check. I’d always considered myself to be a reasonably attractive woman, and my friends and lovers had thought so too, I told myself. And besides, I’d just lost at least fifteen pounds of abandonment weight, and I knew I looked better than ever. It was unmistakable what this sudden negative image of myself meant: I had managed to internalize my partner’s rejection. My abandonment wound had become infected.
For decades I had watched this same process in my clients after they survived a breakup. They’d take their rejection to heart, as evidence of unworthiness. But how had I, a therapist with over twenty years of experience specializing in this issue, managed to fall prey to the same dynamics?
Internalizing is the I in the middle of the S.W.I.R.L. Process — the eye of a hurricane wreaking destruction on the self. Internalizing is the most critical stage of abandonment, when your body and soul incorporate the deep personal wound of losing someone’s love. Without recovery, this wound can leave permanent scarring. It burrows beneath the surface where it continues to generate insecurity and undermine your self-esteem for decades to come.
Internalizing is what distinguishes abandonment grief from all others. You grieve not a loss of someone’s life, but a loss of his love and, in the process, doubt your own worth. Peter Yelton, a friend and personal guru, says that abandonment is a profound enough trauma to implant an invisible drain deep within the self that works insidiously to siphon off self-esteem from within. The paradox for abandonment survivors is that no matter what they do to build their self-esteem, the invisible wound of abandonment is always working to drain it away.
Although its appearance in my mirror caught me off guard, as a therapist, I understood what my sudden bout of self-loathing was all about. Abandonment is a cumulative wound, containing all of the disconnections, disappointments, and heartbreaks of a lifetime. My current heartbreak had reopened that wound and bombarded me with emotional memories of a painful past. The ugly duckling phase I’d gone through as a child had come back to haunt me full force. Between the ages of eight and eleven, I’d been obese. Not only was I gigantic, but my teeth managed to grow in crooked. To make matters worse, I suffered through 365 bad hair days per year. I was always getting home perms to improve the situation, but these experiments created bald spots on one side of my head and frizzy puffs on the other. The only thing that changed was which side they were on.
Now as an adult, I avoid perms and I zealously diet and exercise to keep myself trim. Though more slender than usual and appropriately coiffed at the time of my abandonment, that glimpse into the mirror revealed what I was feeling about myself on the inside. In a split second of awareness, I witnessed my damaged self-image rise up from the ruins. It was heartbreak’s ghost staring me down. A negative self-image is an apparition of abandonment grief.
Having already scoured the psychology shelves over the years for all available information on abandonment’s ability to diminish one’s self-esteem, I was now living proof that its wisdom was insufficient. I searched in adjacent fields for answers. Finally, in an improbably obscure journal called Social Subordinance, I found what I was looking for.
I learned that when alpha males—the head honchos of baboon societies—become stricken with grief following the breakup or death of a mate, it causes their glucocorticoid stress hormones to skyrocket. With elevated glucocorticoids, they no longer demonstrate dominant behavior. In other words, alpha males let their lower-ranking troop mates get one over on them. I identified with the plight of these grief-stricken alphas who’d become so debilitated by increased glucocorticoids, they stooped to asking permission from lower-ranking males for a share of the food supply.
When alphas become wimpy with grief, the others begin jockeying for new positions within the rank and file. The ensuing mayhem causes all of the baboons’ glucocorticoids to rise, but with intriguing differences. The males who fight to gain higher rank show a smaller increase in glucocorticoids than those who fight to defend their existing ranks.
This told me what I had to do. I had to act like the upstart baboons who fought, not to protect their present position but for higher gain. I’d have to fight my own internal restrictions and barriers to avenge my abandonment wound. I’d prove the old maxim correct: the best revenge is success. I’d raise my esteem and lower my glucocorticoids by fighting my way out of the lockstep patterns that held me in place. I’d forge onward to higher ground.
Fighting was the last thing I felt like doing. “Fake it till you make it”—a trusty slogan borrowed from twelve-step programs—proved true. I forced myself through the motions of building a new sense of self, acceding to my highest goals, and I developed a whole new technique in doing so.
Susan Anderson is the author of The Abandonment Recovery Workbook, as well as Taming Your Outer Child and The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. The founder of the Outer Child and Abandonment Recovery movements, she has devoted the past 30 years of clinical experience and research to helping people resolve abandonment and overcome self-sabotage. Visit her online at www.abandonment.net.
Excerpted from the book The Abandonment Recovery Workbook: Guidance through the 5 Stages of Healing from Abandonment, Heartbreak, and Loss. Copyright ©2003, 2016 by Susan Anderson. Printed with permission from New World Library.