Humans are not safe.

As I often say, humans are the trigger.

And the biggest wound about living in a state of a lack of trust, which at the core is the heart of living with a fear of abandonment, is that you can't safely relax and trust in your body as a child, that the parent will be there consistently.

It's high highs, it's low lows, they're there, they're gone, whatever it is.

And the heartbreaking piece is that in order to survive, the fear of abandonment by a parent, you are forced to abandon yourself.

And it starts in yourselves so early in your experience, that it often becomes your trauma personality, which is living in a state of fear of people not being safe.

And what happens in these childhoods is that you spend all of your time, your resources, your coping strategies, protecting yourself, and often scanning for threat and hypervigilance or complete collapse, let's say, and shut down for freeze mode, you spend it in trauma responses.

That takes away from your ability to develop a whole sense of self.

So you spend it abandoning yourself, who you are, your beliefs, your sense of unique humanness in the world, in order to serve preparing yourself to not be abandoned, right?

I must fall in over the parent this way, I must suppress my needs that way, I must live in hypervigilance over here, I must hide in my room over there, whatever it is.

And your effort to not be abandoned, because in childhood you sense that in some way, you are forced to abandon yourself.

And so you wake up in adulthood and you live with this fear of belief deep inside that people will leave you, that they're not safe and not trustworthy, and it's such a part of who you are that you don't even know where to begin.

And I'm going to tell you this right now, I fully believe that it plays out in this compulsiveness.

Because in our childhood, while we were protecting and scanning and all those things, like our reflex, we compulsively did these next 10 things.

And to me, if you really want to cure and heal as much as you can, these abandonment wounds and fears, which if you have a significant one, or even just whatever it is, it's probably always going to be there in some form.

But hopefully over time, you don't live in that, it doesn't pop up, when you're triggered at some point you're able to see it, and then you know what to do about it.

So let's talk about what that looks like.

This is how you abandon yourself in the service of not being abandoned in childhood, and this is what it plays out in, right?

Number one, compulsive shame.

So you compulsively go into situations believing that you're not enough, you're not worthy, you're bad, there's something wrong with you, you're unlovable.

And in some ways it acts to protect you against the even possibility of rejection, of abandonment.

So you sort of read the world through the lens of these glasses.

And if you want to work on healing this, you have to deal with your shame.

You have to look at your literal posture, internal and external, of this, which is literally trauma and shame living in the body, to come into a sense of openness and strength, and to really lean into the resilience that if you've made it this far, you already have.

So that's the first thing, you want to work on dealing with your shame.

And oftentimes that can come from identity work, boundary work, self-actualizing the things that you want to grow into and learn how to do, hobbies.

It's really a building up from the inside out of a sense of self that you didn't get the luxury of doing because you were so Number two, a compulsive caretaking.

So this is very common.

People-pleasing, fawning, compulsively focusing on others to therefore not have to feel the pain of your own self-abandonment.

If I am taking on your needs and your desires, A, I get a reward from that usually, I get something out of it from you.

B, I don't have to feel my own pain.

And C, it distracts me from ever having to deal with the fact that maybe I don't even know what my own needs are because I'm so good at abandoning myself and neglecting myself.

So you want to work on saying no and when you say yes, if you're focusing on caretaking.

You want to work on, am I actually enabling people by doing too much for them?

Even your own children as they grow.

I've talked about my difficulties with certain boundaries around like chores and things like that because I didn't want to be a yeller like my mom or dad.

I took too much sometimes, right?

So not all the time, but it's definitely a space I've had to work on probably always will.

But you know shifting the focus from what do they need to like what do I need or what do I need also.

Obviously if your kids are younger or certain roles in life, there's not a lot of space for us.

But the problem is you don't even know what the space for yourself looks like or how to ask for it or even demand it.

So you want to work on that.

Number three, compulsive self-reliance.

Really common with a more avoidant attachment pattern, but basically you're so good at just doing it on your own because you had to, that your self-abandonment is about not being able to hold other people in your life, right?

It's only safe when you're on your own.

You only feel peace in your body, safe in the world, or in control.

Like it's scary to ask for help, to reach out.

And so that's part of your work if you want to work on your self-reliance.

Celebrate that in yourself.

It's amazing.

It's why you take risks and why you can do things on your own.

But your challenge, if you want to heal, is to work on asking for help, communicating your emotions and feelings with others, and letting others into your life.

Number four, compulsively needing to nub.

Through addictions, through binge-watching, through distractions, whatever it is.

Because it was so painful in your childhood to be in your own skin that you don't know how to relax and calm your body without something to help you compulsively reach for things.

Maybe you can't stand the sound of quiet because it's too much in your head.

Or maybe it's like, if I didn't binge watch Netflix for 10 hours, I'd have to deal with my loneliness.

So looking at that, and then of course challenging how you're numbing and what you want to do to switch that.

Number five, compulsive perfectionism.

Extremely common for those of us with childhood trauma because we and this little child brain believe that but if I'm perfect and I get it right, this time I won't be abandoned.

This time I'll get my needs met.

And so what we do is we have this inner and outer critic like Pete Walker talks about right in the book on CPTSD.

And this little critic kind of pops up and tries to get in front of everything.

Be perfect, you're gonna make a mistake, you're gonna screw it up.

Because remember, if you're perfect you'll be loved, right?

We all know that that's a complete illusion.

There is no such thing as perfection.

And I have had this argument with more than a few clients who tell me that yes there is.

There's not.

There's just not.

And so you want to work on how you over focus on the bad or how you're wired for the negative, which we all are.

But how you're putting that on yourself.

That you're abandoning yourself every time you don't give yourself the love and compassion and the sort of support that you deserve.

And like let yourself be a human being.

You are a human being, right?

Not a human doing as they say.

The next one is compulsively choosing unavailable people.

You guys know about this.

This is how we go out in the world and we recreate the same story in childhood.

We tell ourself it's different but it's often not.

But if you sat down and you did a human inventory on who you've let in your life, your friendships, your bosses, your close neighbors, certainly your romantic partners, your crushes, all of it.

If you start to look for patterns you can probably find them.

What were the main issues and why or how did it end?

And so you want to look at that.

How often you're doing that and maybe not recognizing it.

Learning to slow down and pace yourself.

Not letting yourself be love bombed or love bombing others.

Like it really is about pacing yourself and letting people bit by bit share vulnerability and show you who they are.

And working on yourself too so that you're attracting healthier people as well.

Not perfectly healthy, just healthier.

The next one is compulsive dissociation and often compulsive maladaptive daydreaming.

So we're literally just going somewhere else.

We use this tactic and it lives in our body and our nervous system and in our mind and it works really well to go somewhere else.

And for many of us it helped us survive our childhoods, right?

Fantasizing or building creative worlds, which can be a great thing if you're a novelist maybe or a fiction writer.

But at some point it's another way to avoid and escape ourselves.

To abandon our hunger, our thirst for love, for companionship, for joy, for anger, whatever it is.

It removes us from that.

And then the fantasizing part can help us act out entire parts of our lives that we're only letting ourselves live with in our mind but not letting ourselves feel in our bodies.

And so you can just kind of create a whole other world that's not really grounded in reality.

So grounding techniques, mindfulness, things like that can be helpful.

Number eight, compulsively distrusting everyone.

And accepting that there's a very good chance that deep down inside you believe that nobody will ever fully be there for you.

And the truth is that at the end of the day we are all walking ourselves home alone on some level.

Now I know if you have a spiritual practice that maybe it helps that part of your belief system is that you're walking with this belief system that you have.

But even with that there's I would argue at some point you are still at least on some levels alone.

And so you are never going to be assured that nobody will ever hurt you or break your heart or lie to you.

Human beings are complicated.

But how we work on that is we start to let people in a little bit more.

We start to share vulnerabilities and see how that goes.

We take a little step forward and we just keep trying, right?

We want to not walk into every situation assuming the worst.

Which for many of us, going back to hypervigilance, made a lot of sense in childhood.

If I didn't skin for the worst, how was I going to survive?

So it can be very counterintuitive in general.

But you want to work on trusting that you yourself can handle whatever comes.

Because that's really the bottom line.

You maybe can't always trust everybody in the world.

But can you learn to trust and believe in yourself about who you are and what you need?

My sweet daughter is texting me, have you left yet for pickup?

And I'm almost done.

Okay let's keep going.

I had to remake this video because I made it and I just talked way too long.

And I was like everyone's gonna be bored.

Okay, compulsive self dysregulation.

So compulsive dysregulation.

This is a huge one.

For so many of us in childhood, we were so focused, like I said, on survival that it's like emotions were like guacamole.

They just popped up or come out in our body.

Like a headache would be, you know, a somatic response to something else in our life, to anger, whatever it is.

We don't know how to calmly in our bodies do things like polyvagal theory, nervous system regulation, how we're thinking about things, checking our distortions, our core wounds, our negative beliefs we hold deep inside.

And all of that makes it harder for us in addition to things like, of course, genetic difficulties and biological brain dynamics and neurological challenges.

But at the core we don't know how to feel contained and regulated.

And we don't even have the skills and tools.

So it doesn't work for everyone, but things like breathing and meditation.

Sometimes I literally feel so much anxiety for what seems like no reason.

And this happens to me a lot in the morning, probably because I'm having coffee.

I shouldn't.

Espresso.

But honestly it's not just that.

I've had it my whole life.

I will have to just stop and I will go lay on the floor for 15 minutes with my timer on my Insight Timer meditating practice.

Just listening to music.

Just saying you've got to literally stop your body because nothing I'm doing is helping.

But if I don't learn to recognize that, I can't go lay on the floor and calm down.

And I have an amazing meditation pillow.

Hold on, I want to show you really quickly.

Just really quickly.

I got these on Amazon.

They're so amazing to show you.

It's this big.

It's like a padded big floor pillow.

And then you can use this little thing to sit on, you know, to do like a meditation.

Or I use it for a like this one here and then the bottom one below it.

I am telling you when I feel myself on that mat, I know that I have to calm down.

So building a little corner in your house, a place to meditate, a little special, you know, area with flowers or a blanket, whatever.

Things like that.

So working on your regulation skills and googling things like DBT regulation skills, which is dialectical behavioral therapy, which was initially created for those who have borderline, which we know for that particular dynamic is often the core, is certainly trauma in most, not all, but in most cases, but not all.

And this idea of fear of abandonment is the core wound.

But this fear of abandonment can play out in anxiety disorders, and depression, and borderline, and lots of things.

So I don't want to pathologize this.

So I think that outside of the place where it collects into something like BPD, where we, you know, we need to understand what to do to help people who are struggling, is that so many of us are living with this on some spectrum of fear of abandonment.