If you've been following my adventures in trauma clearance, you'll know that I'm feeling very called to clear my traumas at the moment. If you missed it, I dive into that in my blog: Traumas & Yetis: 2 things they have in common. One theme of emotional pain that has come up a lot for me in my life is around abandonment and rejection so this has been on y Healing-To-Do-List for a while. That's not to say I haven't tried to heal this pain in me because i have. But I know that I'm not fully healed of it. There's clearly more to do. So now that I've diving into traumas, this is an obvious one for me to address. As I've been prepping myself mentally to clear the traumas I'm carrying around abandonment, I've been giving it a lot of thought. I think it's important to be super clear what abandonment really means. What do we mean by abandonment, and feeling abandoned? When we carry hurt around abandonment, we often feel like we've rejected, dumped or left behind, and that this has been done to us deliberately or consciously. Perhaps there are some situations where that is the case. But, I bet many of those times that's not the case. More often than not, the abandonment is an emotional feeling rather than an actual state of being. Of course, it can be both, but I'm interested in the feeling aspect here. If you got lost in the supermarket or park as a child, you might have felt abandoned in that moment. But, I bet your parents didn't actually abandon you. They were probably desperately looking for you. But in that moment, the child in you FELT abandoned. Very different from the time your mates thought it would be funny to leave you in nothing but your underwear in the middle of town after a drinking session. My parents divorced when I was four, so I don't have to look much further to figure out where some of my abandonment issues come from. I remember thinking as a child that I thought it was my fault my dad left us, even though my mum assured me that wasn't the case. But that's how I felt and as far as my emotional self was concerned, that's all that mattered. As with most divorces, the parents don't separate because of one of the kids. It's their relationship that's broken down. And, when they eventually part ways, it's unlikely that the parent who leaves the family home is abandoning the children in a deliberate fashion. They might be desperate to stay. But things just aren't workable and it breaks their heart to leave. No matter how the leaving parent feels, the kids will most likely FEEL abandoned by them. Their sheer absence will do that. I think it's important to get clear on this stuff because we sometimes start throwing some blame into the mix which just adds emotional weight to our abandonment. This doesn't help things at all and can make it all much more painful, and therefore more difficult to face and resolve. Abandonment is not always inflicted deliberately Let's take my mum for example. Years ago, when I did the Hoffman Process, I prepared myself for the slew of Daddy Issues that would come up from the divorce situation. What I was not prepared for were the Mummy Issues I had, and a lot of those came from her abandoning me by dying suddenly to cancer when I was 30. Now, I'm pretty sure she didn't die deliberately to abandon me. But the fact is I had abandonment pain that I felt as a result of her dying so early in my life. Being 30 without a mum is a tough gig. Being a mum without a mother is even more so... as I would later discover. The family pattern of abandonment The more I thought about abandonment, the more I realised how strong this theme has been experienced by my family and predecessors. My grandmother was abandoned by her community when she fell pregnant out of wedlock.My mum was abandoned by her mum when she was put into an orphanage during WW2 for her safety, to be retrieved once the war was over.My mum was later abandoned by my dad which led to their divorce.My dad's parents divorced when he was young, so he was abandoned by a parent too.Then me. I was abandoned by my dad as part of my parents' divorce, and later by my mum when she died when I was 30. This was a pattern I was carrying inside me. It's in my DNA. The memories of abandonment are in my cells. Time to expand the scope of the trauma clearance As I fully took all this on board, I realised that my approach to clearing my trauma this time around needed to be different to how I'd done it before. I needed to cast the net wider than my own life and my life in utero. I also needed to deal with these cellular memories of trauma. So that meant including ancestral trauma that I've acquired from previous generations. And while I was at it, I might as well throw past life trauma in there too! Phew! How many traumatic experiences was I carrying? Now as I'm a numbers person, I was curious as how many of these traumas I was carrying around. You want to know? I bet you do! Current life: 121In utero: 5Past life traumas: 11,800 ish!Ancestral...
