Dating under The Influence of Our Abandonment Wound

I know that dating and falling in love seem to “just happen” and most of the times it feels like we are following our hearts.

But after years of seeking to understand relationships and intimacy, I can see that our dating has a lot to do with our Abandonment Wound.

And how could it not, since this particular wound influences:

* how relaxed we show up in our relationships,

* how confident we are,

* how spontaneous and authentic we can be,

* how much space we give the other (as opposed to pressure).

The more we are under the influence of our abandonment wound, the less of these qualities is available to us.

And that, in turn, creates distance, disconnect and ultimately not enough energy to move into a relationship.

… Which, by the way, it is part of dating – so that shouldn’t be a problem...

However, if that is what we experience more often than not, then it is definitely worth looking into the abandonment wound.

And as you probably know, I got passionate about relationships because I failed in many – I know how it is to be friendzoned, ghosted, dragged on for years, waiting for the other to make up his mind, in love with closed off or wishy-washy people.

If I managed to untangle all of that and turn it around, into beautiful connection and growing intimacy, it is mostly because I got a good grip of this. And that is why I am now so keen to share it with you.

What is the abandonment wound

Think of the abandonment wound as the natural response to all the experiences we had as babies and little children when we didn’t receive the love we would have needed. 

Sometimes we are aware of that (like when a parent was physically absent or there was obvious neglect). But most of the times the lack goes unregistered because at that time, in the universe of our family, that seemed to be “the normal”. 

The wounding sometimes happens because our mother is not really present when she is holding us, sometimes because we are not looked in the eyes or responded to with love and patience, sometimes because the adults around us are not in-tune with us or they didn’t know how to sooth us. The wounding happens also when we are are not seen, listened to, appreciated in our uniqueness (instead we are compared with siblings). 

It also happens when we are not encouraged (or the encouragement is kept only for school endeavours). It happens of course when we are verbally or physically punished. And it happens when we miss the basic food, shelter and protection. 

The result: that unsatisfied longing for presence, for bonding, for closeness stays with us as an unnoticed hunger for connection. Later on, we bring it in our relationships.

The paradox of the abandonment wound

When we are under the influence of this wound we crave the presence of the other. This makes us grasp at our date, have a subtle aura of neediness and push for “us” time (even when we think we don’t). That in itself is difficult for the other, because it feels like pressure, expectation, demand. 

BUT more than this, something that is at work but more hidden is this: while we long for connection, at the same time we have a strong expectation NOT to get it, to be disappointed (the way we were disappointed as children and afterwards a few times as adults). We use each disappointment to cement our deep belief that nourishing connection is not in store for us. And then we move on to the next relationship and… you know how it goes with self-fulfilling prophecies.
 

Here is how our abandonment wound plays out in our dating

Unresolved abandonment makes us do things in our dating… We call it “just following my heart”, but it’s not. It’s actually us (that little sensitive part in us which got hurt a long time ago) looking to create connection in the only way we know, and at the same time expecting to be disappointed.

Here is what happens...
 

1. We go for unavailable people
 

Married people, long-distance relationships, withdrawn men or women, mysterious ones, hot and cold ones – they look alluring to us. 

I guess that deep inside we sense that the situation has the seeds of disappointment planted in it from the beginning and that’s magnetic for where we come from. 

In a very weird way, it all feels familiar. And it feels ...like love. 

2. When we fall in love, we do, do, do and give, give, give
 

A deep feeling we have under the influence of this wound is that we can’t get it because we don’t deserve it. As a result, we feel compelled to do and give so that we earn it. 

Maria, a client of mine, while painfully aware of her pattern, couldn’t help but lend money to the people she dated, go out of her way to buy the most considerate present, find restaurants that they’d enjoy, make all sorts of surprises and even sit their pets while they were out of town. 

Other ways we fall into this pattern is that we dress and talk in ways the other appreciate, we fill in the gaps of silence, we entertain and we land our ear to their stories even when we don’t have the inner space for that. 

The result is that our dates feel pressured – in giving back or in making a commitment. Sometimes they might describe this situation as us behaving like a girlfriend or boyfriend ahead of time. And of course that many times makes them take distance. 
 

3. We prefer the ambiguous

Under the influence of this wound, we sometimes entertain the equivoque, the innuendoes, the unspoken messages. We build a castle on them and we postpone finding out whether anything of it is true. 

In one particular situation, I spent years in a sort of relationship where we were giving each other “important messages” via movie quotes. Another one was entirely based on an exchange of music videos. 

I also sometimes hear of people who have a relationship based on what each of them posts on their social accounts. 

Why do we do that? It is because for the little child inside who experienced abandonment a long time ago, the equivoque is more bearable than the certainty of rejection which might be there, should clear communication happen. 

But the reality of life is that no true intimacy can be built on fuzzy, unclear, double-meaning messages. 

4. We don’t receive the signs of love that ARE there

This is so difficult to grasp….

As we carry inside the fear of losing the love, we have a sort of “learned blindness” that makes us see the love that is missing, and not at all the love that is there.

I could only explain this blindness by a twisted way of trying to manage our fears: “If I don’t have it, then I cannot lose it”. 

In my dating past, there were situations when I couldn’t say yes to offers like “can I bring you something from the bar?”. I couldn’t be ok with the man paying for our dinner together. I pushed away compliments and I had inner comments on anything nice the other was doing for me ( “yes, but…” and then going into what was missing). 

Not only that we deprive ourselves of nourishing love, but we also frustrate the people we get close to. We all have the need to receive and give love. When their love is not received, it is understandable that they start reconsidering if they want to be there or not.

5. We don’t have boundaries

The abandonment wound makes us feel so afraid of losing the connection that we don’t want to risk it by saying “no” to the other. 

The only problem is that, if we can’t do that, he/she cannot feel us. If we are ok with “whatever”, they tend to feel alone in the relationship that is trying to take shape. In worse cases, they even cannot respect us. 

How does that look? You can find all about it in this article dedicated to boundaries in dating, but here are a few highlights:

* dates get cancelled in the last minute (sometimes repeatedly) and we don’t say anything;

* we are spoken to ironically and we don’t take notice;

* we get uncomfortable with our date talking about their ex, and we don’t address it;

* things move too fast and yet we don’t say “no”;

* too personal questions get asked too early and we don’t refuse to answer;

* we engage in a conversation and the other all of a sudden disappears... and that is ok for us.

6. We give ultimatums

In the space of the abandonment wound, everything is black and white.

We don’t have enough relaxation inside to allow for the relationship to move through its natural greyish stages and develop, as our feelings grow. 

It is difficult to accept that it takes time to move from I feel attracted to you to I really like you, I like to spend time with you, I love you, I’d love us to move in together and so on. It doesn’t have to be in this order, but some stages are always there – we need to know a person before we decide we’d like them more permanently in our lives. 

Under the influence of the abandonment wound we don’t give the other this time.

And funnily enough we don’t give this time to ourselves. For us it is more important to know that that person is “there”, that we can count on that the connection doesn’t go away, not really being aware whether we like the person yet. 

So we give ultimatums – “You either love me or not”, “Are we together or…?”. There is a lot of expectation that he/she behave as “together” from quite early on. 

7. We eroticise the rejection and feel that love is boring without a constant aching-bliss-aching cycle 

I’ve read about this a couple of years ago and I was so surprised – it was exactly what I felt in my most painful relationships but I couldn’t put it in words so precisely.

Because it’s just too mad to make sense, right?

I still haven’t made complete sense of it, but my guess is that, as children, we got addicted to the adrenaline of constantly living with the question “will I be loved?” and then, as adults, we confuse this adrenaline with aliveness. Life without it just seems boring.

Luckily we can have aliveness in our lives (and much more than that) when we manage to get off this cycle of craving and getting, craving and getting, when we relax into who we are, when we feel there’s no need to do anything special to be loved, we simply be, love and fall in deeper and deeper intimacy with another. 

When we are that relaxed, we realise that every day offers something new to discover about ourselves and about the other and that in itself is life, is excitement, is a mystery to unfold day by day. 

Healing the abandonment wound

We do things this way not because we don’t know better, but because we feel compelled to.

We carry this little, hungry and anxious child inside who is looking at the world through his eyes: “am I truly loved here?”, “have I finally found the one to always be there for me?”, “what if I lose him (her)?”.

And many times the answers we give ourselves back are “no, you are not loved, you need to work for it… and even if you do, you will not get it, because you never get it… love is not in store for you”. 

All this happens unconsciously but we act out of it. Grasping, expecting, demanding and at the same time shying away, hiding, not trusting. 

As you could see – rejection is almost coded in for us. All of the behaviours coming from this place lead to being dragged on in relationships, kept at an arm’s distance, avoided or straightout rejected. 

So how do we heal?

Well, there are a few avenues I take people on when we work on this particular one, but the main thing is this: 

The abandonment wound makes us put all of our focus on the other. In that, we forget about ourselves, we abandon ourselves. What needs to happen is for that focus to shift from the other towards ourselves. 

I don’t mean by that “go to the mountains, stay there with yourself only and meditate over your life”. That could be a stage... But what really needs to happen is, while being with people, while dating the one you are dating now or someone new, keep finding your way back to yourself.

Practically, this means:

1) Really taking stock of what of the above behaviours you notice in you and then, when possible, decide to stop or at least question it:

- when I decide to pursue someone, is that person available? (who we fall in love with is not in our hands, but who we pursue is);

- when I catch myself doing and giving, is it really coming from my heart or is it a way to keep the other close?;

- do I give enough space for our feelings to grow and intimacy to develop or do I rush into a “deal?”;

- do I favour ambiguity and how can I make things more clear?;

- am I saying “yes” to things I’d rather say “no” to?;

2) Learning about your abandonment story:

This is about spending time with yourself in silence, talking with a therapist or sharing with a compassionate friend, looking at the big and small events in your childhood, or maybe little things happening every day back then, that made you feel insecure about love. 

Go back to the chapter on what the abandonment wound is and see what from there resonates with you and here is another article you might find inspiration in.

Take some days or weeks to do a little of this every day and alternate it with nice walks in nature or listening to soft music you love, so that the discovery is not just of the mind, but also that you tune in to how it must have felt for you as a child. 

If you at any point feel that that becomes overwhelming, take a break from the exercise and go back to it later, when you feel ready to pick it up again. 

3) Growing your capacity to be with the uncomfortable feelings which WILL come up once you decide to do things differently.

As we stop acting out of the compulsion of the little child inside, then feelings will come up. 

Let’s say we decide to not pursue a woman who is married (because we have a long pattern of that) – of course pain will surface, sadness, maybe even anger. 

Or we stop giving as much to our date as we did in the past, or we stop compromising and start saying ‘no’. Fears that he will not love us anymore will come up.

This is the big turning towards ourselves I was talking about earlier. Instead of looking at the other to protect us from feeling these uncomfortable feelings, we for the first time decide to face them ourselves. 

Much of what we feel is really the pain, the sadness, the fears of the little child inside – resurfacing. What we couldn’t feel back then because it was too much for a child, comes up now so that we can feel as adults – because now we do have the ability. 

This capacity to feel the uncomfortable is something to open to and then cultivate. Because our society doesn’t favour it and most of us have not had role models for that, it is almost counter-intuitive for most of us.

However, it is possible. 

And once we engage in this, we will realise that a cleansing is happening. 

We become more clear-visioned. 

More full. 

More content just being with ourselves (without having the necessity for company).

More relaxed in the presence of people we like.

More allowing with the people in our life to be as they are and do what they want.

More clear about what we accept and what we don’t from a person, and by that we start choosing more wisely. 

Well, here we are, at the end of this long article. I hope it brought some light in your love life or that it has been helpful in other ways. 

Thank you for being with me all this time!

Love,

Radha

PS If you feel this would be useful for somebody you know, don’t hesitate to pass it on to them. 

PPS Did you know that I am online to chat with you on every first Wednesdayof the month, in a free zoom call? The next date is 1st of Feb. If you'd like to come ask a question or simply say "hi", here is where you can get the zoom link.