The Wisdom of Walt Glenveiw

[Eric "Herbie" Watson]

I can relate to the fear of abandonment. It may be my most repressed emotion.
My parents divorced when I was about eight years old. It was for financial reasons during the
1930s Great Depression. A month later she married the mailman because he had a house which
meant a roof over the heads of my mom and my older sister and brother and me.
That turned out to be a disaster and a year later she and my birth father remarried.
More money problems until he died, when I was a college freshman. A few months later
she married his brother who had already been divorced twice and was very jealous, making
life really miserable for me and my sister. He died after ten years.

So I grew up with four fathers. I developed severe back pain about a year ago and through
reading Dr. Sarno and practicing TMS techniques (probably the most helpful was journaling)
I realized how traumatic my boyhood had been, from divorces and separation anxiety.

What cause the back pain to surface from all that was a recent trigger. My closest friends divorced.
I had been like part of their family, but they were not separated. I lose the feeling of family and
it left me with separation anxiety. Telling my unconscious mind that was the cause of my back pain
ended the pain. I then had to learn to live without that friend-family situation. As my favorite author
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, there comes a time when "Even your friends can't help you."

The truth is, we're not abandoned, and never will be. We have God and He never abandons us.
And we are all part of the family of Man.

TMS can be a blessing. It teaches us to learn to live with ourselves and others and even to love.

 

[James59]

Hmmm. I hadn't considered abandonment issues in my case. I've considered other factors, moving to a strange city when I was 8, being bullied in the schools there (and bored out of my mind in the classrooms), a father who had a rather hot temper, inability to find any girls who were interested in me during my teenage years or even into my early 20s, and a rental truck fire that destroyed most of our belongings during a move.

But you may be onto something Eric. My current symptoms developed slowly almost 8 years ago, starting shortly after someone left my life, a co-worker who I didn't even realize had become important to me until after she left. It was the strangest emotional experience of my life. I never gave her much thought when she was around, but after she left, I couldn't think about anything else for months. I even wrote a poem about her, a darn good one, too. I'd written poetry before, but never about anyone I knew.

I don't think it was entirely about her, specifically. At least part of it was a cumulative feeling about relationships in general. They start out small, like a tiny seed. The relationship grows deeper roots, and spreads wider and wider upwards and outwards then WHACK, like a chainsaw cutting down a tree it ends abruptly, either by someone moving away or by them dying. All of the time invested, all the energy put into the relationship, all of the fruit that relationship bore, all gone in a flash and you're left to start over somewhere. It all seems so unfair.

 

[yb44]

SteveO in the Great Pain Deception writes about abandonment. This passage is on Page 3:

Any stressful emotional or physical trigger like a twist or turn, birthday, retirement, or financial worry, may reactivate these old abandonment wounds and fuel the fires of separation rage, which then begin to manifest in the form of symptoms. You don't have a bad back (or hip, knees or chronic fatigue disease), you are re-experiencing the fear and anger of the separation you experienced at a very early age - even from birth. Your symptoms, as experienced in adulthood, are simply an expression of how you learned to handle the sensation of helplessness and anxiety.

SteveO goes on to say that you don't actually have to resolve these abandonment issues to heal. Just knowing they are there and the role they play in your symptoms along with a full belief in TMS can free us from suffering.