The Abandonment Recovery Workbook: Guidance through the Five Stages of Healing from Abandonment, Heartbreak, and Loss
400
The Abandonment Recovery Workbook: Guidance through the Five Stages of Healing from Abandonment, Heartbreak, and Loss
400Paperback
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Overview
One day everything is fine. The next, you find yourself without everything you took for granted. Love has turned sour. The people you depended on have let you down. You feel you’ll never love again.
But there is a way out. In The Abandonment Recovery Workbook, psychotherapist and abandonment expert Susan Anderson explores the seemingly endless pain of heartbreak and shows readers how to break free—whether the heartbreak comes from divorce, a breakup, a death, or the loss of friendship, health, a job, or a dream.
The Abandonment Recovery Workbook provides an itinerary for recovery. A manual for individual or support group use, it includes exercises that the author has tested and developed through her years of expertise in abandonment recovery.
Anderson provides concrete recovery tools and exercises to discover and heal underlying issues, identify self-defeating behaviors of mistrust and insecurity, and build self-esteem. Guiding you through the five stages of your journey—shattering, withdrawal, internalizing, rage, and lifting—this book (a new edition of Anderson’s Journey from Heartbreak to Connection) serves as as a source of strength. You will come away with a new sense of self—a self with an increased capacity to love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608684274 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 08/16/2016 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 243,375 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Abandonment Recovery Workbook
Guidance Through the 5 Stages of Healing from Abandonment, Heartbreak, and Loss
By Susan Anderson
New World Library
Copyright © 2016 Susan AndersonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60868-427-4
CHAPTER 1
Centering
When I was going through Shattering, I was astounded by the intensity of my feelings. I had been at the other end of this pain for years, helping my clients cope with the panic, hopelessness, and despair of abandonment. In the midst of their initial throes of grief, it was always difficult to convince them that the devastation was temporary. Now I had trouble convincing myself.
Hopelessness is a powerful feeling belonging to the Shattering stage, but it is a feeling, not a fact. It passes, giving way to a brighter outlook. When you're in its grips, though, your sense of dead and panic feel real, warping your sense of reality with visions of always and never.
"I'll always feel broken and alone. I'll never love again."
I'm going to take you through the feelings of the Shattering stage. We'll explore what makes them so intense and what to do about them. We'll discuss the shame, fear, and sense of doom of this initial stage and take you through the first step in the healing process.
Shattering is the first stage of abandonment — when your love is torn and your security's ripped away. You are suddenly in disconnect mode. Your heart pounds and stomach turns upside down. Severing a relationship creates real trauma. It sends you into shock, disbelief, bewilderment. You feel unable to face the reality of your life. You're alienated from your feelings, literally disconnected from self. Nothing seems real except the pain.
"When Julian left me," said Sandra, "he took all of my hopes and dreams with him. My future suddenly went up in smoke. I didn't want to live without him. I was shattered."
Shattering fractures the lens of reality. We experience visions of our lost love in every blue car that drives by or think we hear her voice coming from somewhere in the crowd. We overreact to every love song on the radio and agonize over every lost caress.
Shattering also occurs in ripples. The emotional volcano of a breakup produces aftershocks and reverberations that affect the landscape of our future. If we know how to handle the feelings, this change can be for the better. The everyday trials and tribulations of life trigger emotional memories of earlier losses, flooding our current crisis with old familiar feelings of helplessness and insecurity. The tools of abandonment recovery allow us to administer to these primal needs and feelings, enabling us to finally heal from our oldest wounds.
Many people have probably been through Shattering but have yet to resolve the leftover tears and broken dreams. They experience patterns of abandonment, set in motion by the aftershocks of a previous loss. Bits and particles of a shattered self, from previous losses, continually work their way up from the wound to the surface. They block the healthy flow of your relationships and your life. The next few chapters help you work the splinters through — from your Shatterings past and present.
Swirling through Shattering
If you're going through a loss of love, you tend to swirl from Shattering through the rest of the stages and then come back again to Shattering to revisit the realization that the bottom has dropped out of your world. You revisit Shattering each time you have contact with your ex, go through a Saturday night alone, or deal with another holiday and suddenly feel desperate for that special connection you no longer have. Many people attempt to medicate their pain with alcohol, drugs, sleep, food, sex, shopping — anything to dull the sensations, quell the anxiety, ease the hurt.
Whether you're reading this book to heal from a recent heartbreak or because you're experiencing waves of insecurity from previous losses, the feelings of Shattering are potentially valuable. As you learn how to harness their energy, you turn adversity into triumph.
In the meantime, it's important during Shattering to accept the possibility that the following facts are true.
IQ
Check the items you agree with.
[] The intense feelings of Shattering are temporary.
[] The intensity is natural and universal to human beings.
[] In fact, there is a biochemical basis for feeling so wounded and afraid.
[] Childhood losses remain imprinted in my brain and are being reignited by my current experience of abandonment.
[] These deeply personal feelings are the tools with which I will construct my healing.
[] By staying in the moment I will learn to manage my pain.
[] Progressing through recovery, I will eventually come to view Shattering as a gift, an opportunity for a fuller self to emerge, a chance for a whole new life to start, an awakening.
[] By facing my personal truths and maintaining a vision for a better future, I will learn to increase my capacity for love and connection.
I know that to invite possibility into your life requires a leap of faith. Even as you feel yourself falling into an abyss, faith in your capacity for healing helps you grow wings on the way down. Eventually you lift to greater life and love than before.
This book is designed to help you take that leap of faith in yourself and the power that is within all of us to heal the deepest of wounds.
Take yourself by the hand and entertain the Power of Possibility. Consider the testimonies of others who have stood where you stand.
"If you'd told me that I'd find love again," says Sam, "I'd have punched you out. In fact people did try calming me down. 'You'll see, it'll be all right,' they'd say, 'you'll find somebody.' But I believed my life was over and I was infuriated that nobody believed me! Yet here I am today proving them right. I'm in a new relationship — the best I ever had."
"I was absolutely convinced that I was going to die of my wounds," reports Phyllis. "Being betrayed by the love of my life was a wound too great to heal. It was unbearable agony — like being burned alive very slowly over a barbecue pit — with my best friend and greatest love stoking the flames. Back then I couldn't possibly glimpse the fact that I was going to wind up with a whole new job, new career, new life, new me."
Take a moment to entertain the possibility that your abandonment is going to help your life in a profound way. Writing down your thoughts reinforces the impact of possibility.
Q
What would entertaining the Power of Possibility mean in your life?
One of the things that therapists know too well is that most people do not acknowledge the depths of their pain. They don't give themselves the opportunity to validate the strength it takes to go on. So many of us are in survival mode. To stop and truly celebrate our strength and courage is to begin living our lives more consciously, with recognition of life's greatness — as well as our own greatness to meet its challenges.
Q
How have you persevered through this difficult time? Give yourself credit for doing so.
"All of this crying and desperation! It makes me feel weak," says Jean, "as if it proves my abandoner right to have dumped me."
When we find that we can't regulate the intensity, we feel ashamed for succumbing to the emotional excess.
Why Do I Feel the Way I Do?
Understanding the biological level of heartbreak is an empowering tool for negotiating its treacherous waters. Let's begin by discussing the amygdala.
The amygdala is the seat of emotional memory. We are going to learn a lot about the amygdala, because it plays a lead role in your abandonment experience.
Your amygdala is an almond-shaped structure set deep within the mammalian brain (or "limbic system," as some call it). The amygdala plays a central role in the way you emotionally respond to any threatening situation. It functions as your body's central alarm, scanning your environment for signs of imminent danger, warning and empowering you with powerful stress hormones with which to protect yourself. The danger it perceives can be a stampeding herd of buffalo, an explosion in a nearby building, or the threat of your primary relationship breaking apart.
Imprinted in your amygdala are memories of how you responded to fearful events accumulated since childhood — events that conditioned you to respond automatically to future events. Its emotional memory is believed to contain traces of your birth experience as well. The amygdala reacts to abandonment as a threat. We experience this reaction as fear. Our first fear is abandonment — being left with no one to ensure our survival. Witness the infant who cries in terror when his mother's face disappears from his bedside.
Anything reminiscent of previous events is able to set off the amygdala's alarm and propel you into a state of neurobiological emergency. When the threat is an armed enemy, your body goes into the fight-or-flight response, physically preparing you to endure a battle. When the threat is loss of a relationship, your body reacts the same way, but you interpret the surge of neurohormones and other physiological signs of self-defense as "going to pieces."
The amygdala is like an overprotective watchdog during abandonment. It perceives losing your emotional attachment as a direct threat to your life and acts swiftly to alert your autonomic nervous system to go into red alert. Because heartbreak is an ongoing crisis, your ever-watchful amygdala keeps you in an action-ready state, as if you were sustaining an ongoing siege of violence.
Why Does It React That Way?
This small organ in your brain was conditioned to respond to abandonment when you were a small child forming attachments to your parents. Things were different then. As a child you couldn't have survived without someone taking care of you. Your amygdala is not equipped to know the difference between then and now. When you go through an adult breakup, it responds as if you were still a small child whose very existence is threatened, and it dispatches the self-defense artillery of your mammalian brain. The pounding of your heart and queasiness are signs of your body's defense mechanisms kicking in — your autonomic nervous system going into full sway. Autonomic means "automatic." You automatically go into survival mode, which, quoting from the annals of medical humor, include the Four Fs of Survival: fighting, fleeing, freezing, and sexual reproduction.
Shattering is the trauma stage of the S.W.I.R.L. Process; the unbearable vulnerability you feel is one of its primary symptoms. Abandonment constitutes a sustained emotional crisis. It's not like a train crash that happens once and then you set out to recover. The stress of abandonment is sustained day after day as the ramifications of your loss mount. Each new jolt of the reality that your relationship is threatened sends your amygdala into increasingly high alert. It deploys repeated volleys of stress hormones to keep you on edge and battle ready for the long haul.
Another of the amygdala's significant functions is that it triggers emotional memories from the past — memories that are often detached from the events that caused them. This floods you with old, unwelcome feelings that seem all out of proportion to the actual event.
It helps to become in tune with the power of the mind-body connection so that you understand why you feel out of control. Indeed, automatic responses are taking over.
IQ
Mind-Body Checklist
Check the symptoms that apply to you.
FOURTEEN SCIENTIFIC TIDBITS
[] I can't sleep because the steady secretions of stress hormones create a sustained nocturnal vigil.
[] I can't eat because my digestive energy is shunted to major muscle groups for battle strength.
[] Alternately, I am ravenously hungry because glucocorticoid stress hormones build up in my bloodstream and stimulate appetite to help sustain nutrients for ongoing self-defense.
[] My eyes feel weak; I experience changes in depth perception because my pupils dilate to pinpoint my enemy at a distance.
[] I have a tendency to sigh because respiration becomes shallow to enable me to detect sounds of danger above the sound of my own breathing.
[] I am preoccupied with old losses, rejections, and heartbreaks because my amygdala sent a relay to other brain stations to sort through related memory banks of earlier experiences to provide life-saving information.
[] I jump at the slightest noise; I can hear his car on faraway streets because the cochlear receptors in my inner ears increase their capacity to detect faraway sounds to aid in self-protection.
[] I feel enraged; I want to lash out because my amygdala activated a self-defense response and I am in the fight phase of the Four Fs of Survival.
[] I can't move forward, can't make decisions, feel stunned, dazed, immobilized because I'm in the freeze phase of the Four Fs of Survival.
[] I feel a frequent urge to masturbate because I am in the fourth phase of the Four Fs of Survival.
[] I have a strained, possibly higher pitched voice because my vocal cords tighten to emit distinctive sounds of fright to signal my allies that danger is present.
[] I have a high pulse rate and high blood pressure because more oxygen and blood nutrients are needed to fuel my battle performance.
[] I run to the bathroom because my body is voiding its waste products to make me lighter on my feet to better fight my enemy or sprint away from him.
[] I flinch easily because stress hormones surge to increase my response time, allowing me to dart out of the way of a hurled rock.
Most of these effects dissipate as you come out of the Shattering crisis, but some can last longer or become chronic. For instance, you might wake up with separation anxiety each morning or feel shock waves of despair during certain moments in your day for an ongoing period.
Q
Take a moment to consider your current mind-body state. Write a phrase or sentence that describes some of your current feelings and how they seem to manifest in your body.
How do these feelings interfere in your life?
Name a strength you use to cope with them.
Shame and Self-Blame
Many people have trouble accepting the intense fear and despair involved in loss. Faulting yourself for feeling miserable only makes the crisis worse because it creates shame — a destructive emotion. Shame is a major component of heartbreak, especially if you feel rejected. Losing someone's love can feel demoralizing and plunge you into self-doubt, causing you to feel unworthy, defective even. It is humiliating to feel that you've been thrown away by someone you love.
Shame is an insidious and destructive emotion. Unless you challenge its assumptions, it can go underground and become an internal saboteur, bent on using your most vulnerable feelings against you.
The antidote to shame is self-acceptance.
To assess your current level of shame, explore these questions.
Q
Are you able to accept the automatic (autonomic) nature of your response to your loss or do you fault yourself because your emotions are too out of control?
Describe what aspects of your current situation cause you to feel humiliated, guilty, or ashamed.
Do you blame yourself for your breakup? Does self-blame engender feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy?
Give yourself a message of self-acceptance for withstanding such difficult feelings.
What strengths do you use to prevent heartbreak from damaging your sense of self-worth?
Accepting the Pain of Loss
Learning to accept the pain of loss helps reduce shame. This is a critical step in healing. Until people learn this acceptance, they remain in protest. Protesting your current circumstances is an unrealistic attempt to ward off having to face your reality. Rather than divest your energy in defending yourself against rejection, faulting yourself, beating yourself up, or trying to fight the grief, take a moment to accept the simple fact that your turmoil is about loss. What you are feeling is the pain of losing someone's love. Indeed this is painful, and you have every right to feel devastating loss. Accepting the universal basis of this pain helps you inch toward accepting the reality of the loss and progress through the inevitable process of grief.
Take a moment to reassure yourself that you are truly not in a life-or-death battle. Tell yourself that no matter how dire it feels, you do not need to be in self-defense mode. The emotional crisis you're experiencing feels out of control because your overzealous amygdala — in its primitive, imprecise way — is reacting as if you were fighting for your life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Abandonment Recovery Workbook by Susan Anderson. Copyright © 2016 Susan Anderson. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword Donna Carson xi
What Is Abandonment? xiii
What Is Abandonment.net? xv
Introduction: Where the Healing Begins 1
1 Centering 15
2 Cleansing 39
3 Attending to the Moment 61
4 Separating 85
5 Beholding the Importance of Your Existence 107
6 Accepting the Unchangeable 145
7 Increasing Your Capacity for Love 171
8 Letting Go 197
9 Reaching Out 221
10 Integrating and Owning 243
11 Transcending 263
12 Connecting 285
Appendix A How to Set Up Abandonment Support Groups 303
Appendix B Topic Questions 327
Appendix C Akeru-to-Go Exercises, inspired by Celeste Carlin 335
Endnotes 343
Bibliography 359
Index 365
About the Author 379
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