The Trauma of Parental Abandonment

Helping Survivors Feel Safe, Minimize Shame, and Heal Old Wounds

The Trauma of Parental Abandonment

Q: One of the most entrenched types of trauma I’ve worked with is emotional or physical abandonment by a parent or caregiver. How can I best help my clients heal from it?

A: As a therapist who’s spent over a decade helping survivors of parental abandonment—and as a survivor myself—I’ve found that this kind of trauma is often misunderstood, largely due to a combination of cultural and social stigma, lack of awareness, and internalized shame that keeps many survivors silent about their experiences.

When a caregiver makes a conscious choice to remove themselves from their child’s life, no matter the reason or form their absence takes, the result will have long-term consequences. I’ve seen parental abandonment in the form of a parent rejecting a child who gets pregnant or comes out. I’ve seen it occur when a parent grows emotionally distant after a divorce or remarriage. It can occur when a child suffers abuse and a parent refuses to believe the abuse happened. And it can manifest when a parent believes their child’s disability, or even personality, is too burdensome to handle.

As with many traumas, abandonment traumas can deeply influence attachment patterns with friends and romantic partners. They have a profound impact on self-perception and sense of belonging. Survivors often internalize a message of unworthiness, and resort to reflexive self-blame, and as a result, may constantly seek new relationships or avoid intimacy altogether.

Understandably, people who’ve experienced parental abandonment often have issues with trust, including in the therapeutic relationship. Many also struggle with people in perceived positions of authority, meaning they may see us therapists as intimidating, no matter how hard we try to create a collaborative and welcoming space. Since these can be daunting clinical obstacles to overcome when working with survivors, I’ve developed a five-step process for working with survivors of parental abandonment that helps mitigate self-blame and build trust with the therapist.

Karalina’s Story

Karalina had experienced parental abandonment after getting pregnant when she was 17. Now in her 40s, she was finally realizing the severity of that trauma through our work.

“I always felt different from my siblings,” she told me in our first session. “My younger sisters were well-behaved and brought home perfect grades. But because of my anxiety and ADHD, I’d always struggled at school and often skipped class. At night, I could hear my parents arguing about what to do with me through the thin bedroom walls.”

When Karalina found out she was pregnant, she hid it for a few months before coming clean to her mother. “I’ll never forget the look on her face,” she told me. “Shock, shame, disappointment—all at once.”

“I have to call your father,” her mother had said flatly.

Instead of yelling at Karalina, her father had started working longer and longer hours. He’d go on weeks-long work trips, even though her due date was approaching. She was scared, plagued by her father’s absence and the idea that all of this was somehow her fault. After she gave birth to a healthy daughter, her mother helped out with the baby but with a distant expression on her face. Her father would come home occasionally, his loud boots echoing in the hallway, but he barely acknowledged her or his new granddaughter. Eventually, he moved out.

“Dad left because you shamed the family,” her sisters would hiss. Karalina didn’t want to believe it, but deep down, she believed it was true.

The first step in working with survivors of parental abandonment is to build trust by creating a safe environment. For clients who’ve been abandoned by someone who was in a protector or caregiver role, and supposed to love them above all else, it’s the most important thing you can do. When they’re in a relationship, survivors of abandonment often wonder things like, Are they mad at me? Do they dislike me? But these questions are actually asking something deeper: Is this person safe? Am I safe? Are they trustworthy? And if I trust them, will they hurt me?

Therapists working with survivors can begin creating trust and safety from the very first session by actively listening to the survivor’s story without judgment, validating their experiences and emotions, and emphasizing that what they say will remain confidential. The therapist can also create safety and trust—and convey empathy and compassion—by telling the client they believe them.

At first, Karalina’s inner defense mechanisms—denial, self-blame, and intellectualizing—were so entrenched that she’d often make comments like “Well, I was a bad kid” or “I wasn’t hit, so I guess that means I wasn’t really abused,” as well as other statements that minimized her experience of abandonment. Once I’d made it clear that I believed her story and didn’t blame her for being abandoned, Karalina began to trust me more and made fewer statements minimizing her experience.

The second stage of working with survivors of parental abandonment is helping them acknowledge their trauma. It’s a foundational step toward fostering self-awareness, understanding the impact of abandonment on their lives, and beginning to heal. It can be difficult work since coming to terms with past trauma often involves navigating complex and fluctuating emotions, confronting layers of denial or avoidance, and contending with the fragmented nature of memory and perception. Acknowledgment often comes in bits and pieces, rather than as an open declaration of what has occurred.

“I wonder what it would have looked like had your dad been there when you needed him,” I said to Karalina, trying to help her see how this had been, in fact, deeply traumatic. “Being 17 and pregnant must have been so scary.”

She paused for a moment. “It was,” she finally said, tears welling in her eyes. “I was terrified. I really needed him,” she said before pausing again. “But he wasn’t there.”

The third stage of working with survivors is helping them recognize how the abandonment shows up in their adult relationships. After the end of a romantic relationship, for instance, survivors often experience greater distress than those who’ve had secure caregiver relationships. They sometimes cling to unhealthy relationships or disregard red flags, desperate to avoid the anguish of being abandoned again.

Many of my clients who survived parental abandonment find themselves either cycling through relationships in an attempt to fill the void left by past losses or avoiding relationships altogether to shield themselves from further pain. The key is helping clients see these patterns by saying things like, “It sounds like you’ve developed certain coping mechanisms to protect yourself from feeling abandoned again” or “How might your life have been different had your parent never left?” Once you address the connection, the client can begin to see the “why” behind these distressing relationship patterns.

Despite recognizing that her latest romantic relationship hadn’t been healthy, Karalina struggled to shake off the desperation she continued to feel about it having ended. It was clear that this desperation was an indirect result of her father abandoning her when she was younger, but Karalina didn’t immediately make the connection.

“If your dad had never left,” I asked Karalina, “especially during a time when you needed him so much, do you think this breakup would feel different?”

“I think so,” she replied. “I’d probably feel more confident in myself and in my ability to be alone and recover.” Slowly, she was developing a newfound awareness that allowed her to stop second-guessing the breakup. She got better at reminding herself that the relationship had ended for the right reasons.

The fourth step in working with survivors is minimizing shame. Clients who’ve been abandoned tend to blame themselves for what happened to them, and by helping them realize they’re not to blame, the therapist can facilitate a crucial shift in perspective. Drawing on the IFS model, therapists can help clients see and acknowledge the part of them that amplifies their shame in order to protect them. Once they realize this, they can access more self-compassion. Usually, as they shift from blaming to self-compassion, tension, anxiety, and depressive symptoms begin to decrease.

Karalina was making progress in therapy, but she still sometimes reverted to her childhood belief that she’d been responsible for her father leaving. Like many survivors, her shame amplified the fear that there was something wrong with her. Nothing sends the message to a child that they’re unlovable quite like their primary caregiver leaving them. Together, Karalina and I worked to help her acknowledge—and even thank—the parts of her that were trying to protect her by blaming for what was actually her father’s failure as a parent.

“Your anxiety serves a purpose,” I told her. “It’s trying to keep you from being abandoned again. But just because a relationship ended in the past doesn’t mean your relationships now will end.”

“I worry that my needs are too much,” she said at one point. “I feel like a burden.”

“But you deserve kindness,” I said reassuringly.

Karalina nodded. “It’s easier to believe that when I think of my own daughter,” she replied. “I’ve never abandoned her, and she’s doing so well. I suppose I deserved to have from my father what she’s received from me. In my heart, I know I’ve been getting in my own way.”

Once you’ve minimized shame, you can move to the last stage of treatment: helping the client reparent their abandoned inner child. Though reparenting is more of an ongoing process than a one-and-done experience, over time, it helps clients heal old wounds, traumas, and unmet needs from childhood. It involves working creatively with the parts of the client that hold traumatic memories, experiences, and emotions related to abandonment, as well as showing consistent patience, consideration, and care. Importantly, it involves cultivating genuine curiosity about the inevitable moments, however small, when a client feels abandoned by you. Exploring and repairing ruptures in the therapeutic relationship can be deeply healing, and model healthy repairs in relationships beyond the therapy room.

Karalina and I brainstormed tools, like journaling, that she could use to reassure her inner child she was safe when worry arose that she might be abandoned again. When the shame and self-doubt crept in, she was able to remind herself that these feelings were not hers to own; they’d been given to her by her father. Now, with greater self-awareness, she began to see she deserved and was capable of healthier relationships based on trust, respect, and shared accountability.

Kaytee Gillis

Kaytee Gillis, LCSW-BACS, is a psychotherapist, writer, and author with a passion for working with survivors of family trauma and IPV. Her work focuses on assisting survivors of psychological abuse, stalking, and other non-physical forms of domestic violence and family trauma. Her recent book, Invisible Bruises: How a Better Understanding of the Patterns of Domestic Violence Can Help Survivors Navigate the Legal System, sheds light on the ways that the legal system perpetuates the cycle of domestic violence by failing to recognize patterns that hold perpetrators accountable.