PARENTAL ABANDONMENT: Consequences and How to Overcome It

The environment that surrounds the child plays a fundamental role, since it is in the process of growth and psychic maturation, hence the importance of adults who fulfill the maternal and paternal. The importance of the maternal function is shown from the moment of gestation, of the early mother-baby interactions, providing the first experiences of pleasure and displeasure. As well as the role of the paternal function, which acts as a court, allowing the separation of the mother-child dyad, so that the child manages to establish itself as an independent other. From this it is thought, how the absence of one of the parents affects in this vulnerable stage, where the infantile psyche is being built. In this sense, the following Psychology-Online article raises some consequences of parental abandonment and how to overcome it.

Index

1. Psychological consequences of parental abandonment
2. Consequences of the absent father in men and women
3. How to get over a parent's abandonment
4. My father abandoned me and now he is looking for me, what do I do?

Arredondo (1998) said that parental abandonment represent psychological injuries non-accidental caused by those responsible for the development, which are emotional or sexual consequences, of commission or omission and that threaten the physical, psychological and emotional development considered normal for the boy.

Therefore, parental abandonment can become as described by Arredondo (1998), a child abuse where there is physical and emotional abandonment.

In children or adolescents that have been abandoned by one or both parents may present some of the following consequences:

• They are prone to dropouts or school instability, which is one of the reasons for school failure.
• It is very difficult for them to adapt to the world and to reality.
• Constant fear of abandonment.
• Aggressive behavior towards others.
• Uninhibited social relationships (for example, overly familiar verbal or physical behavior, Little or no recourse to the parent in charge or caretakers, willing to go with adults strangers.
• Reactive attachment (very seldom seeks comfort when feeling discomfort.
• Little or no emotional intelligence.

People who have experienced parental neglect and become adults often face the following consequences in adulthood:

1. Little or no emotional intelligence

That is, they are easily stressed, very rarely assertive (unable to set limits), not very empathetic, an emotional vocabulary limited (they do not know how to identify their emotions and define their mood as good or bad), predisposed to limbic assaults (on the edge of their emotions).

2. Adaptation difficulty

Difficulties in adapting to the changes that occur in your life (job changes, housing, city of residence), suffering a lot and for a long time when these occur. The changes generally make you very anxious.

3. Attachment to objects

Difficulties getting rid of material objects (vehicles, a mobile phone, books, documents or any other object with or without a special meaning for them). Generally these objects in psychoanalysis represent the suffering abandonment: they project their abandonment and attribute their own emotions to objects (for example, They say the vehicle will feel very sad when you have to sell it and leave it alone with a stranger). They even suffer a lot anxiety when they have to be temporarily separated from some object (a loan for example).

4. Vulnerability to addiction

They are people with a high susceptibility to becoming addicted to any of the following activities, objects or people: to love relationships, to the consumption of substances of use recreational and therapeutic, to work, to sex, to pornography, to people who give them a little attention, to anyone who represents their absent father figure, to couples and friends. In the following article you will find the different types of addictions and their consequences.

5. Passivity in relationships

They are people who frequently show themselves very accommodating or condescending to everyone (even people he doesn't know). Ignores or puts aside their priorities or interests in order to please others, people close friends describe him as a very good person (who listens and helps others without interest own). This behavior can be an obsessive attempt for making no one abandon him or be disinterested in it.

6. Psychological distress

They often report feeling empty or without a life purpose. The following article addresses in depth the issue of sense of life.

7. Vulnerability to psychopathology

Statistically they are people with much more probability than those who have not suffered a paternal abandonment of being diagnosed with some type of mental pathology. For example, a mood disorder, anxiety disorder, behavior, sleep, eating behavior, somatic symptoms, trauma or related to stress factors or a personality disorder.

We hear hundreds of references about people who find it difficult to establish a link healthy, that is, a relationship of mutual growth, of goals and behaviors accepted in a way preset. These people, feeling experts in the relationships that damage them, manifest behaviors that allow them to prolong and remain in them. This type of people frequently described are those who claim to have been abandoned by one or both parents and, Although this abandonment has occurred many years before (from childhood), it continues to affect their quality of lifetime. The relationships that these types of people maintain may match one of the following examples:

• With people (friends, marriages, courtships and relatives) who constantly annul their own existence, that is, It seems that they never listen to you or are almost never aware of your interests and put theirs as priority.
• With partners or friends with some type of addiction (substances and games).
• With couples who violate the rights of others without any restriction or awareness.
• With partners who abuse physically and emotionally. Here you can see the types of abusers and their characteristics.
• With couples who commit infidelity or subject them to a constant fear that they will leave and abandon the partner.
• With partners or friends who were also abandoned by some or both parents.
• They are often very possessive people.
• Frequently they are afraid of losing something.

Overcoming the abandonment of a parent will be a fairly relative job due to the circumstances in which the abandonment, for example, will not be the same perception of a father who physically and emotionally abused his father before abandoning family.

Maybe it's accurate approach it from acceptance and not from overcoming; overcoming something, implies in the professional treatment of some clinicians - to forget - and superimpose the present on past events without caring or avoiding the psychoanalytic premise about what everything that happens in our childhood will have an impact on our adult lifeTherefore, it requires a work of reworking the trauma caused by abandonment.

Here are some points that can help you if you have suffered or know someone who has suffered from parental abandonment:

1. Try to relate to yourself the moments you remember with that absent father

Take a few minutes when you can have privacy to listen to your thoughts. If there are memories of abuse (hitting or insults) where emotions may arise (anger, anger, sadness) it is important that you attend to them as well; If you have the feeling of crying, cursing or insulting, do so. In the same way, if there are memories appreciated by you and although they may seem contradictory to what you feel in your present.

2. Understand and normalize your emotions

After allowing yourself to listen to your emotions and give memories a space, it is time to understand them to humanize and humanize that father figure that you have reified so much. If you understand that you have emotions and you can name each one by the bodily sensations that they cause you, you will be able to empathize with them. Accept that a loss can cause so much pain It will prevent you from continuing to minimize or extrapolate it to all the other people or situations in your present life.

3. Empathize with your father

Other people also experience emotions, they also have some cognitive perception about them. We may have blamed ourselves or that absent parent all these years for neglect. For example, if we understand that mom or dad they may have experienced some emotion of fear of not knowing or not being able to take responsibility of this change in their life (children) and it is for this reason that they have moved away. Clearly, this is not a fact to justify an abandonment or any act of a parent, but it allows as well We understand the affective world in which we live and thus allow us to understand the mistakes of others and the own.

4. Do not pretend to forget, but to live with it

Remember that we do not suggest overcoming the loss, but living with it. You can get over the loss of a cell phone, even our favorite toy, but overcoming the loss of a parent is impossible. This point highlights that tendency to convince ourselves that the loss of our parents will not matter to us, and we will be structuring houses in the air. It is a falsehood to believe that something with such an emotional charge cannot get to bother us.

5. Learn to forgive

Elaborating the abandonment of a father requires individual and especially family forgiveness, although it is not something so simple to achieve. If the environment in which we live constantly punishes that figure of our father, if we observe a great pain in our mother or our brothers surely we will project that duel in our inside. In this article you will find tips to learn to forgive.

6. Become aware

Being aware of all these points represents a great advance, because we will be able to separate the pain of others and our own; the emotions of others and ours.

A father who has abandoned us and who reappears years later with the intention of establishing contact with us is sometimes a very prominent factor in emotional distress.

Accepting someone who possibly caused us a lot of harm back into our life is a decision transcendental, and by the same magnitude that it implies is not something that we should only ask the pillow. The emotional damage that one has does not disappear with the reappearance of its cause, this often exacerbates the discomfort. Indistinctly, the decision made on whether or not to allow the approach of the father who abandoned the psychological damage should be the priority in both cases: first attend to all the affective alteration that emerged to later discern and attend to the decision made.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Parental abandonment: consequences and how to overcome it, we recommend that you enter our category of Family problems.

• Valeria Arredondo. (1998). Child abuse: basic elements for its understanding. Viya del Mar. Paicabi.