Ep 40: Healing Abandonment Wound & Shifting from Codependence to Interdependence
[INTRODUCTION]
Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.
[EPISODE]
Welcome to episode 40 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.
Have you ever been in a situation like this? Your child missed their nap earlier this morning so now they’re a little- let me put it this way- not at their baseline. Your thinking brain knows your child needs you to step up, take charge, and offer boundaries and consequences. In fact, you have a blog post on boundary setting open on your browser (and if you’re like me, this tab is buried in the 67 other tabs you have open). Yet, deep inside your body, there’s a sense of uneasiness that’s holding you back from taking charge. You think: “Oh, I don’t want my child to get mad at me when I tell them to jump on the trampoline instead of on the couch.” Then you worry: “But what if my child doesn’t like me afterwards?” Your brain knows that wouldn’t be the case but the fear your body is feeling is so real. Or in a different scenario your child is 14, very vocal and thriving…thanks to your heart work of breaking generational cycles and re-parenting your inner child. Now she’s hanging out with her friends more. Your thinking brain is happy because friendships are important. And deep inside your body, there’s a sense of emptiness of “oh, she’s not my little princess warrior anymore” and you’re feeling a tinge of rejection that you can’t quite explain. If either scenario resonates with you, please know that many families experience this relationship dynamic too. There might be an inner child wound of emotional abandonment underneath it. And we can do something to heal this wound so that your childhood wound doesn’t end up taking the driver’s seat in your current decolonized parenting practice.
That’s why in this episode you and I are going to explore an aspect of attachment theories that can help us make sense of our fear of rejection and abandonment. As per usual, we’ll also layer a political analysis on top. Then, you’ll unpack one invitation you can experiment with to heal your wound of abandonment and shift from codependence to interdependence in your parenting practice.
We’ll do the unlearning together with the deepest care. Emotional abandonment is an incredibly tender topic. I’ll pause to check in with you throughout the episode. If you’d like, please pause the episode when you need to. Or, move your body, switch to your go-to music playlist, be with your pets and plants, and do what you need to return to your bandwidth where you feel safe enough and anchored enough. I know my care plan is to sip on my coconut water, walk around the recording studio aka my living room, and hand feed one of the squirrels, Nom Chompsky, when they stop by. You got your care plan in place? Alright, let’s get started.
Attachment Recap
In your adult relationships with your friends, partners, colleagues, or comrades, are you usually the one who’s really good at taking care of others and really easy going? Sometimes you even know what these people you care about want before they do. You’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves and put in the work to quote unquote make the relationship work. On days when your cup is not dry you’re your typical caring, curious, and compassionate self. It’s how you love and you’re so good at it.
But on days when your cup is dry and you get a whiff that something might go wrong in the relationship, the care you give so well becomes different. Instead of giving care out of love, you take care of others out of fear…fear that when you stop giving, doing, and providing, they’ll leave. Similarly, your typical easy-breezy-Cover Girl energy also becomes different. You set your needs, feelings, and desires aside to people please…abandoning yourself so they don’t abandon you first. This fear of abandonment and rejection takes the driver’s seat of how you show up in these adult relationships. And overtime, these partners might label you “too clingy,” “too needy,” “too much,” or straight up “codependent.”
Instead of looking at these words as deficits, I invite you to recognize that they’re simply your inner child wounds decontextualized. Meaning, at some point in your history, it was a good idea for you to be clingy, needy, and people pleasing to survive. Dr. Jonice Webb, a psychologist and an expert on Childhood Emotional Neglect, said and I’m paraphrasing “what happened or didn’t happen in our childhood is not our fault, but it’s our responsibility to heal.”
Here’s a quick recap of what inner child wounds are.
As children, we all learned quickly what’s acceptable and unacceptable in the family. What’s going to get us praised or punished from those who raised us. To make sure the grownups were there physically and available emotionally to care for us, we adapted how we talked, walked, and behaved to whatever our caregivers liked, accepted, or felt comfortable with; otherwise, we risked the emotional pain of rejection, humiliation, criticism, or abandonment. We adapted to blend in and belong. This adaptation is a survival strategy that children do unconsciously. If you’d like to hear more about the foundations of attachment theories but with our political analyses, Ep 39: Attachment Basics to Know Before Re-Parenting Your Inner Child has got you covered.
One common relationship pattern that inflicts an inner child wound of emotional abandonment is when those who raised you were available to you emotionally but this availability was touch and go. One minute they were present with you when you were sad, upset, or worried. You felt validated and seen. Then, the next minute they were gone. Or, one minute they helped you label your feelings and work through them, building emotional literacy with you. Then, the next minute they were gone. By gone, I mean they were emotionally unavailable whether they were working three jobs and didn’t have the bandwidth to be present with you, or they were struggling with their own grief, depression, addiction, divorce, or mental health. As a child, your caregivers’ inconsistency and unpredictability were felt as a threat to your survival. To protect yourself from being abandoned, you had to overlearn abandoning yourself to hyper-focus on what your caregivers needed and abandoning your authenticity to shape shift into the quote unquote “perfect child” they wanted you to be. By mastering this strategy of people pleasing, you hoped they wouldn’t have to leave you.
Umm, I’m noticing that I’m holding my breath like I’m bracing for the pain of rejection and abandonment. I’m going to roll my shoulders down and back…stretch the sides of my neck…exhale the breath I was holding. I’m checking in with you too. If you notice any collapsing or tightness in your body, please feel free to take a moment to rock your body, feel your feet on the floor, hum, move, or do what feels centering to your body. You did what you had to do to survive. People pleasing was exactly what you needed then for your protection as a child. And a part of being a human and a grown up is that we upgrade our childhood survival strategies. You’re not flawed. You’re not less than. You’re here. And we got this.
Alright, let’s carry on with care. By using people pleasing as a survival strategy over and over again, it becomes a habit. People pleasing also becomes what you believe about yourself and what you deserve in a relationship. This core belief might be something like: “I know you’ll leave me. So I must abandon myself to focus on your needs otherwise you’ll abandon me.” One outcome of this belief, which I think is heartbreaking, is when you abandon yourself over and over again, you don’t get to practice meeting your own needs or filling your own cup. So you enter adult relationships screaming “you complete me,” a famous line from the movie Jerry Maguire or from Keyshia Cole’s song…whichever floats your boat. To say it differently, you enter adult relationships expecting others to meet your emotional needs 100% of the time. And we already know that when we expect our partners to meet all of our needs all of the time, it’s hard to cultivate real, vulnerable, meaningful relationships. So, your fear of abandonment comes true when your inner child wound drives these relationships away. Do you see how this relationship pattern can be such a cruel paradox?
Codependence & Interdependence
This belief of “my needs can only be met by others” plus people pleasing plus constantly focusing on other people’s needs plus a fear of abandonment plus a lack of boundaries are often the main characteristics of a relationship pattern called codependence.
Allow me to share a bit of history of this term codependence before I connect the dots back to parenting. Codependence was the term used in 1940s to describe how the wives of those with alcohol use disorder (also known as alcoholics back then) were enablers who were going through their own mental illnesses too. Then the term gained popularity from the 1980s onward and you might have seen it in discussions around narcissism and so on. In a nutshell, the term has a long history of being deficit based and the definition of the term is still inconclusive. Scholars in the UK and Scotland wrote in an article in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction quote “The concept has attracted much criticism due to lack of clarity, strong stereotyping, and negative labelling attributes.” End quote.
That context is important because the codependence that you and I are exploring is not a negative label. It’s about our survival intelligence that we used as children to protect ourselves from being abandoned…but at the high price of abandoning ourselves.
As you can imagine, any relationship built on fear, on a lack of boundaries, on people pleasing can’t blossom into something meaningful. That’s why we seek to replace codependence with interdependence.
Interdependence in adult relationships is where you and your partners are individual humans who can pursue your own unique interests but are still connected to one another. There’s a flexible boundary between each of you and a mutual respect. In codependence, the core belief is “my needs can only be met by others.” In contrast, the core belief of interdependence is “I can meet my own needs and others can support me too.” With interdependence, there’s room for you to grow together and grow a meaningful relationship.
Since I want to keep our exploration specific to parenting, I’ll leave some resources on adult codependence and interdependence along with all the research studies mentioned and the transcript in the show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
Codependence & Interdependence in Parenting
We carry our attachment or survival strategies from childhood into other relationships in adulthood. They become a relationship script we live by. With our abandonment wound, the script goes: “I need to sacrifice my authenticity, silence my voice, and snuff out my power otherwise people will walk out on me.” And we copy and paste this script onto our relationships with colleagues, comrades, and partners. Because who would want to experience the pain of being abandoned ever again, right?
We also copy and paste this survival strategy or script onto our relationship with our children. And here’s a really important part we need to discuss. This copy and paste process is unconscious and it’s done out of love. You overlearned people pleasing to protect yourself from the pain of abandonment and rejection. Of course, you want your child to be able to protect themselves from this horrible pain too. And the whole point of this conversation is that we can do something about it. We can heal our own wound of abandonment so that we’re not copy and pasting codependence onto our child unconsciously or automatically 100% of the time. We heal our inner child wounds so that what’s unconscious becomes conscious and what’s getting passed down to our children on autopilot becomes more intentional. People pleasing or being codependent to survive under white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy isn’t bad…when we consciously use it as a strategy instead of believing that it is our entire personality. We can copy and paste people pleasing to our children as one strategy to prepare them for the real world. We can also copy and paste assertiveness, boundary setting, self-assuredness, interdependence, and the ability to take up space with compassion. And each of these skills can be different tools in your child’s life toolkit. I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying we heal our abandonment wound to never pass down people pleasing or codependence to our children. It’s more about copy and pasting a menu of scripts and skills that are balanced and wholesome so our children have agency to choose what’s adaptive in each situation.
I’m so grateful that my mother who’s quite an expert at being codependent with patriarchy copied and pasted people pleasing to me. I can use people pleasing to protect myself when I talk to the customs and immigration officer so that they don’t perceive my transgender identity as a threat. And a part of being an adult for me is healing my own abandonment wound by learning to set this people pleasing aside when it’s safe and take up space when I need to. If I hadn’t stopped making myself small for other people’s comfort, it would be really hard for me to ruffle feathers, agitate against the oppressive status quo with sass, and do community organizing work. If I hadn’t reclaimed my voice, this podcast wouldn’t happen and I wouldn’t get to do this decolonized parenting and inner child re-parenting work with you.
To make the unconscious copy and paste process of people pleasing and codependence conscious is to first know what you’re looking for. So next I’ll share some obvious and not-so-obvious patterns that come from a fear of abandonment in parenting. Then, you and I will explore one invitation that you can experiment with to begin healing this abandonment wound and re-parent your inner child.
The obvious pattern lies in the family rules you teach your child. If you take a moment to sit with these rules, you’ll see if these rules are your survival script from the past or something adaptive that’s aligned with your parenting values now.
A common one that families in our In-Out-N-Through decolonized parenting cohort discuss is the rule about sharing. “You need to share your toys. Share, please.” Does that ring any bell? If you’d like, I invite you to reflect: are you teaching your child to share to be nice or to be kind? Nice or kind? If you were to put your X-ray glasses on, you might see that underneath “kind” you’re saying to your child “You need to share your toys because you’ve had enough turns with the trucks. It’s joyful to see others enjoy these trucks too.” Being kind is more aligned with social justice parenting values of not hoarding power and resources, of building mutual aid networks, of solidarity, and so on. On the contrary, if your X-ray vision shows “nice,” you might see the hidden message to your child of “You need to share your trucks otherwise your friends won’t like you. They’ll leave you and you’ll have no friends left.” I deeply trust in your capacity for discernment once you slow down and reflect. Thank you for being in discomfort with me there.
Alright, the not-so-obvious patterns often show up in two ways. At the heart of it is the fact that your child’s autonomy often feels like abandonment. Or, your child’s independence often feels like rejection.
In Episode 37: Where do I start “meeting my child where they’re at”? we discussed how our children’s emotional needs can be placed into two categories: attachment and autonomy. Attachment means your child’s asking for comfort, closeness, and connection. Autonomy means your child is going out in the environment to explore and separating from you to be their own person. Both are needed for a wholesome development.
You can already see that when your child is asking for snuggles, or for help, or to do activities together, these bids for connection are like sweet treats for your inner child wound of abandonment. It feels good to be needed, especially when you don’t want your child to quote unquote abandon you. But, when your child says “no,” has opinions that are different from yours, doesn’t seem to be listening to you, or they want to play by themselves…you might feel a level of discomfort. To get rid of this discomfort from the abandonment wound getting triggered, you might react and try to keep your child close to you and pay attention to you. And it can look like a variation of these two patterns.
First, you’re very involved in your child’s life to the degree that it limits their autonomy. Your child might want to hang out with their friends after soccer practice. Your thinking brain knows it’s fine. But your discomfort from the past abandonment wound isn’t loving this idea. So you might say to your child “or we can stay home and have pizza and ice-cream together?” The fear of abandonment takes the driver’s seat so much so that the act of mothering (gender inclusive) can feel like smothering to your child. When the abandonment wound is triggered, your involvement in your child’s life is more about needing to do something to keep your child from quote unquote abandoning you than your child’s need for developing self-esteem.
Second, you’re uncomfortable stepping up, stepping in, and taking charge when your child needs boundaries and consequences. Because using your voice, expressing your needs, and taking up space in a relationship could risk you losing that relationship. You overlearned that it’s safer to make yourself small and people please. Your thinking brain knows children need structures, boundaries, and consequences. But firmness brings fear of abandonment. Assertiveness could lead to abandonment too. I mean it actually did when you were little. Plus, you really want to be the fun and easy-going parent of the family. But it’s often more about your need to be liked than your child’s need for developing a sense of self.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be involved in your child’s life, especially if you grew up without this emotional connection with your caregivers and you want to give your child a different childhood. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the fun, easygoing parent. We’re talking about these two patterns because when they happen on autopilot, children learn to set their curiosity, exploration, and independence aside to satisfy your need for emotional connection - just like you did when you overlearned people pleasing. And that’s how the generational cycles get passed down unintentionally from one generation to the next.
If your inner critics, guilt, and regret are creeping up right now, please tell them to hold the phone. I’ve never met any parent who rolls out of bed and says “Today I’m going to limit my child’s autonomy.” And I know that’s not you because you’re taking time to explore this topic with me- despite the discomfort- to re-parent your inner child and break the generational cycles. Your nervous system detected the threat of being abandoned when your child wants independence, so it kicked into gear to protect you. But it’s simply using an outdated survival strategy from the past that’s not helpful for you to meet your child’s need for autonomy right now.
When my fear of abandonment gets triggered and I text my partner “When are you coming home? It’s late.” Exclamation points. And mind you it’s only 11 pm, I would feel so embarrassed for being clingy. My inner critics usually chime in saying “No one should be this needy. Why do you need so much validation from others? Grow a thicker skin.” Does that resonate with you? I have to check my inner critics that “No, I can’t grow a thicker skin because I exfoliate my face with Polyhydroxy acid every night. Asians don’t raisin.” Also “Of course I freak out at a sign of abandonment. The pain is real.” Susan Anderson, a psychotherapist specializing in abandonment recovery, describes this pain so vividly as quote “The sudden disconnection sends you into panic, devastation, shock, and bewilderment…you feel a painful aching, longing, needing a love fix and can’t get one… You begin to turn your rage over being rejected against yourself which accounts for the intense depression that accompanies abandonment…your wound can become infected, scarring your self-image. Your self-doubt has the power to implant an invisible drain deep within the self that insidiously leaches self-esteem from within.” End quote. If you need to tell that to your inner critics too, please do.
That’s my loving way of saying the freakout you and I feel when we get triggered is valid. And…it's possible for you to upgrade this survival strategy and heal the wound of abandonment so that you can shift from codependence to interdependence.
Interdependence with your child often looks like there’s a me in the we. (I’m paraphrasing Dan Siegel). That means you and your child are two unique individuals while still connected. No one is sacrificing who they are for the other 100% of the time. Maybe the self-sacrificing is done 40% of the time but not out of you trying to be a martyr to prove to patriarchy that you’re a good parent. But it’s done out of survival necessity because white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy isn’t providing any structural support to families so you do what you need to do to get through each day. Interdependence means you can put your oxygen mask on first then show up for your child in solidarity with them instead of as a savior.
[PATREON CTA]
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Healing Abandonment Wound
Now that you understand your inner child wound of abandonment better, let’s begin to heal it. The heart of re-parenting your inner child is being in a relationship where you feel safe enough to pause your automatic survival reactions and instead give yourself what you didn’t get as a child. I often share examples of your community organizing buddies who have your back when you’re relearning taking up space. Or your partners who are so patient and kind as you’re unlearning perfectionism and relearning asking for help. In our discussion in this episode, it’s using your relationship with your child as an opportunity to give yourself the consistent and predictable emotional availability your caregivers couldn’t give you. To be clear: your relationship with your child can be a catalyst for recognizing these people pleasing patterns in yourself but your child is not responsible for this healing – you are.
To practice showing up for yourself emotionally is to slow down and feel the feelings. I know, I know that it sounds simple…silly even. But for those of us with abandonment wounds, remember we’re not good at this. Because we had to overlearn how to stuff our feelings down instead of feeling them in order to people please and focus on our caregivers’ needs. To rub salt on this wound, children learn that their feelings are valid when their caregivers validate them back. When your caregiver says to you “Oh you’re crying. I know you’re sad and I’m here with you,” you learn that this feeling has a name, sadness. When your caregivers meet your emotional needs, you learn that your needs are real and your feelings are valid. That makes it harder for you to stuff your feelings down for other people’s comfort. Still with me?
So with our abandonment wound, we need extra practice of feeling our feelings instead of stuffing them down, minimizing them, and overriding them. Over a decade and then some of supporting parents in therapy sessions, one thing that’s been helpful when parents get triggered is having a simple strategy in their pocket that they can whip out to slow…. down, pause, and feel their feelings. So that there’s space between the trigger and the reaction which in our case is people pleasing. In this episode, I’d love to share one acronym with you. The acronym is RAIN by Tara Brach, a psychologist and American Buddhist teacher. It’s R-A-I-N like rain and thunder and it stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. One parent in the In-Out-N-Through social justice parenting and inner child re-parenting program shared that when they felt the urge to not set boundaries out of fear that their toddler would no longer love them, they would say “rain, rain, rain, rain” really fast in their mind as a reminder to pause and choose how they wanted to teach their preschooler that drawing on the wall wasn’t okay instead of automatically reacting out of fear of abandonment. If you don’t like this acronym, please design one for yourself. It can be anything from self-affirmations or body-based gestures- that helps slow down that automatic reaction of people pleasing so that you can choose how you’d like to respond intentionally to your child. Please make it your method.
I’m adapting what each letter in RAIN entails a bit to fit with our context of healing the inner child wound of abandonment. Here we go.
R is Recognize what is going on.
How do you know when your abandonment wound gets triggered? For some it’s a flood of anxiety that spills over into clinginess. For others it’s a feeling of emptiness and numbness that leaks out their self-esteem. For many it’s discomfort that makes them want to be small and holds them back from stepping up, taking charge, and taking up space.
Once you recognize how your fear of abandonment unfolds, it’s a bit more manageable to hold space for this fear…which is the second letter A.
A is Allow the experience to be there, just as it is.
That means you can name it for what it is: “ah, I know this pattern. It’s fear of abandonment.” When we can name any experience for what it is- no matter how intense- it often has less power over us. It applies to our fear of abandonment too.
The third letter is I.
I is Investigate with interest and care. The next time you want your child close or you don’t want to take charge, perhaps ask: who’s bidding for connection: your inner child or your child?
Once you know who’s bidding for connection- your inner child or your child- you can nurture or meet the right needs with the right tools.
Lastly, N is Nurture with self-compassion.
To say it differently, now you understand the wound from the past, what are you going to do about it right here, right now?
Maybe you’re telling your 12- year-old that it’s not safe to go to a sleepover. But after careful reflection, you realize you want your child home with you and it’s more about your need to not feel abandoned than your child’s need to strengthen their social skills. So, you do what you can to settle your fear of abandonment and find a sweet compromise that your child needs to text you before they go to sleep. This way your past wound gets nurtured with that reassurance and your child’s need for autonomy gets nurtured too.
This RAIN acronym is only one invitation for us to start planting seeds of healing. How would you adapt it to make it your method? This healing work is lifelong and it’s never too late to start or start again.
It’s an honor to unlearn people pleasing and upgrade codependence with you in this episode. So we can bring our full selves to both parenting and social change advocacy.
I’ll wrap up our exploration in this episode with wise words from Morgan Richard Olivier, the author of the Tears that Taught Me, who wrote quote: “May every kind thing you do be out of love, not for love.” End quote.
Every link to the research studies, books, and extra resources mentioned in this episode along with the transcript is in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.
To support my work and keep our psychoeducation and political education free and accessible, please sign up for the newsletter or become a patron by joining our Patreon. You’ll find all the information at comebacktocare.com/support.
As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.