Children experience childhood abandonment in several different ways. Sometimes children are given up for adoption, taken into foster care, experience the death of a critical parent figure early on, or as a result of divorce. In any case, the experience of abandonment in early childhood can upset the way a person will go on to relate to others, experience fulfillment in life, and the way they see themselves within the world. Healthy attachment to primary caregivers in the first few years of life lays the foundation for how we will see and react to the world with which we are forced to interact. This foundation is in part, found in our ability to self-regulate or maintain self-control. Self-regulation is a clinical concept, of which all parents should be aware. Or for those who have experienced such abandonment, it may also help to understand the mechanisms that are underlying their struggles to give them hope that these areas can be attended to for healing.
Self-Regulation
Self-regulation might not be something you think about every day. If you are lucky, you do not have to think about it because you were afforded the resources in your childhood that taught your body, emotions, and thoughts to work together in a way that maintains how you act and feel in a socially appropriate manner. If you haven’t heard of it, Self-regulation is the ability to manage your thoughts, feelings, and actions. It helps us remain calm under pressure and apply the right level of emotion to our responses. When you think about someone who overreacts to generally solvable stressors or someone who completely avoids stress and conflict, you are seeing someone who is not regulating well. They are not meeting the demands placed on them in a way that would resemble self-control.
Self-regulation is demonstrated in our ability to “Respond,” rather than be “Reactive” when we feel strong emotions or experience stress in our lives. It also involves the ability to mindfully notice and evaluate our reactions rather than assume they are telling the truth about our situation. Feelings always seek to be justified, and our cognitive brains will quickly find something or someone in the environment to blame for how we feel. Self-regulation allows us to think through how we feel without the feelings taking over and determining our actions. It will enable our thinking brain to have a say in the conversation with our feeling brain.
We often think of behaviors as things we can just learn or not learn to do. However, behaviors are built on a physiological platform that is powerfully tied to our survival system. How safe and secure we feel in our bodies, our relationships, and our environment is not merely a task you can think differently about and then automatically feel different. Many adults who lack emotional self-control know that the evidence in their environment does not substantiate how they feel, but they can’t just turn it off. That’s because the dominant player in the brain’s self-regulation ability is in deep brain areas that are built and reinforced in childhood environments, where they originally fit. When you take the adult out of that environment, you see a mismatch. Their self-regulatory system, which neurologically mirrors the childhood environment, is now being put on their current environment where it doesn’t fit. Without the ability to self-regulate, children grow up to be adults who struggle to solve problems without giving up. They struggle to communicate their feelings appropriately without blaming others; therefore, they struggle to connect in meaningful and sustained relationships.
Childhood and the Necessity of Healthy Co-Regulation
Children, particularly at very young ages, cannot regulate their own emotions. Everything is new and overwhelming, and they need the calm presence of caretakers to help them manage these new experiences. Over time, they learn to regulate based on the evidence provided by the caretaker in their response to the child. Does my caretaker seem overwhelmed by my needs, or are they under control, calm, and comforting? They learn to self-regulate over time through the repeated experiences of caregiver presence and reaction to their feelings through a process called Co-regulation.
Co-regulation is the primary function of parents. Parents need to know what they are part of is this emotional dance of child arousal, followed by the caregiver’s calming intervention. This is the basis of trust and safety in our physiological systems. We learn to self-evaluate the strength and meaning of our emotional reactions in this process. In this process, we learn relationships are safe because our parents are present and safe. They also provide us with rational explanations of our problems after they have calmed us down. Which, in turn, allows us to put words to our feelings for future use.
When someone experiences abandonment through the loss of consistent primary caregivers at an early developmental stage, what they have lost is the chance to Co-Regulate. This theme of co-regulation is so significant at that early age because there’s no other way of learning to cope. What intense emotions we experience during that time that do not get dealt with will remain unresolved and compound our day to day experience in life. The pain continues to persist, and the system will go into hyperdrive or shut down. Unresolved issues turn into defense mechanisms, addictions, and other compulsions that act to self-soothe the person. Without these behaviors in place, the person will experience being out of control. However, those measures of self-soothing are not necessarily healthy as they can not replace human connection. The unresolved trauma becomes a question that lingers forever in their lives until it does get answered through engagement in healthy relationships.
Self-Regulation, Sense of Self, and the
We know in life that purpose is found through our relationships. Relationships and self-regulation are tied hand in hand. Without healthy self-regulation, a person will find relationships a struggle and therefore find it challenging to discover meaning in life. They will struggle to engage in self-awareness and meaningful growth and also will lack a stable identity. When a person who has experienced abandonment finally gets the opportunity to co-regulate with either foster parents, adoptive parents, or future partners in a safe setting, their lack of ability to trust and inability to self-regulate put overwhelming demands on the environment. The new caregiver or loved one is inheriting an accumulation of pain that goes beyond the ability of co-regulation to solve.
When a child experiences discomfort or disruption in their childhood environment, and a parent comes by to soothe them, the child’s stress is relieved. Therefore there was no accumulation of pain in the system that regulates our emotions; it gets flushed out. However, when a child is left in a toxic state of abandonment with no relief, the brain develops around that experience as it lingers unresolved. The person has no choice but to identify with those feelings because they do not have an experiential answer for them. The core belief becomes, “I’m worthless,” “I’m unworthy,” “I’m going to be left,” and “I’m undeserving of love.” These beliefs will be maintained in the worldview perspective that guides the person’s walk into adulthood and which they will project onto new relationships.
Recreating Abandonment
To manufacture a sense of control in my life, I act out in ways that produce in other people the reaction I expect — thus existing in a cycle of my own self fulfilling prophecy. However, with no identity and no self-awareness, I am distinctly disconnected from the repetitive cycle of this experience when I am faced with the consequences. It’s self-sabotage, but we don’t know we are doing it because the feeling is so innate and pervasive that it is more real and trustable than anything new in my life. Therefore, life becomes an accumulation of reoccurring abandonments, and I eventually experience depression or anxiety. Although my brain might say, “I’m going to be left.” It’s also saying, “You need relationships, you need to attach to people,” which is also true. So now we have competing needs within us. We have competing ideas; one is you’re going to be abandoned, and you’re not worthy; while the other is, “You need love,” “You need attachment.” My survival brain is working against me in these instances.
Many of us have learned through our safe experiences with people that when we are upset or have an issue in life, it is best to reach out to people for support. Because we learned this from our parents early on, we probably also have the self-regulatory system that already allowed us to build these connections into our lives. However, those who never actually experienced that deep connection may have learned by the abandonment that they experienced that people are generally not safe and will not be there for them. With this lack of safety in trusting other people, they inadvertently keep people at an emotional distance.
What we know about the development of intimacy and closeness in attachment relationships is that it’s going to require us to challenge ourselves in the areas that we were wounded. It’s going to trigger that emotion, and it’s going to require us to self-direct our lives and stop reacting. We will need to understand how we are applying a lens of abandonment to our present situations and learn how this lens is misguiding us, or else we are going to fulfill that prophecy of abandonment. However, if we can recognize that the pain we are experiencing when we are triggered by our partner, family, or friends is a remnant of the past, we can choose to react differently. Although painful, we can work through our problems in the relationships that we’ve been given. It may be necessary that we start with an objective 3rd party, such as a counselor, to help us reframe our experience. But if we can grieve the loss of the opportunity to co-regulate and take responsibility to get that need met, perhaps in therapy, we can develop the underlying mechanisms and regulation skills to attract and keep those healthy relationships in our lives that we so desperately need.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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