Unresolved Abandonment

Footsteps of the Past Obstruct The Here and Now

A.J. Mahari — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 23:04:21 +0000

As a Life Coach, BPD Coach and Mental Health Coach, A.J. Mahari talks with clients every day who are in the on-going experience of having their footsteps from the past obstruct their here-and-now in ways that mean unidentified and unreached goals and dreams. Footsteps from the past do not have to continue to obstruct your here-and-now. Mahari knows first-hand that the first step in creating a here-and-now unfolding authenticity in your life journey – to reach your promise and potential and unleash your passion – is to awaken to the awareness that you are looking back more than you are living now and more than you can look ahead with any confidence.

The more you live with, in, from, and through unresolved past issues in your life, the more you are and will remain disconnected from who the Self in you really is today – from who you really are. Footsteps of unresolved emotions from the past cast a long shadow that effects people knowing who they really are and negatively impacts relationships.

Footsteps from the past obstruct, if not utterly obliterate the here-and-now. What is experienced repeatedly in the lives of those carrying the unresolved and unrelenting painful and negative experience of childhood (or parts of childhood) is the experience of a young and wounded child – not the experience of an emotionally mature adult.

How can you see where you are, let alone where you might be going, or want to go, if you are looking back. Back at the trail of footsteps that was a journey already taken? How can you know who you are when you are essentially still who you were?

If you are still living through unresolved childhood psychological and emotional woundedness you cannot fully experience the here-and-now as it is actually unfolding because you will be triggered back to re-experiencing what you have not yet worked through, accepted, and/or resolved.

In order for your authentic self to be fully known and lived through it is necessary to grieve losses of the past and to resolve any issues of abandonment, neglect, abuse, invalidation, and/or unmet needs from that past. It is necessary to not only identify what your past issues are, but also necessary to accept what was, and to choose to work to forgive those who hurt you and then to forgive yourself. Many may wonder, why the heck do I have to forgive myself for what someone else did to me or failed to do for me in my past?

Any young child significantly hurt or psychologically and emotionally wounded in childhood in ways that negatively impact his or her maturation process internalizes the pain of abandonment, abuse, neglect, and invalidation. This negative internalization of one’s experience creates shame. Shame that separates one from knowing who he or she really is, to one degree or another.

Even if your parents or caregivers meant the best for you, things can go awry in the process of attempting to bond and attach in the healthy ways necessary to develop a healthy and consistent sense of self. It isn’t always a case of malice or hatred or pre-meditated wrong-doing. For some failure or inability to securely attach and bond with (usually) mother is over-come to varying degrees. For others a common consequence of this is a personality disorder.

Due to the internalization of this negative experience in early childhood which usually involves feeling/being abandoned – emotionally/psychologically, or financially, and/or physically – toxic shame is created that often disconnects one from the burgeoning authentic self causing one to develop a pathological false self. A false self found at the core of personality disorder such as Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, to name just a couple of examples.

What happens then in the child’s experience is that what is felt about a parent that is negative and painful is set aside, eventually internalized, but initially cannot be left with the parent it belongs to because that parent usually also represents the child’s life-line to survival.

Children tend to blame themselves for what others did to them or didn’t do for them, or both. Growing up with that sense of toxic shame and often not knowing who one really is means that a false self persona develops. This false self persona exists to protect the child’s survival. Often children in this situation “act up” or “act out” in the eyes of others when really they are crying out for help in the only ways they know how to.

There is often a legacy of choices, actions, behaviors , and even patterns of thought, that lead one to need to forgive oneself for not being able to be who one really was. That is to say when one is focused on protecting from abandonment, abuse, neglect, invalidation, and the like, there is often a lot about the past that one regrets.

What parents or other adults did in your past may end up confused with what you did. You may not clearly understand why whatever happened in your childhood did happen. It can even be a struggle to believe what you know happened to you. All of this can lead to needing to forgive yourself as part of the process of healing past childhood trauma that has you looking back at your past footsteps as opposed to the footsteps that you need or want to take to move forward in your life.

Learning to trust your Self as you find yourself means needing to forgive yourself for all that you may blame yourself for. It is really never the child’s fault. Though most every wounded and damaged child will feel guilty, blame him/herself and suffer the pain of toxic shame.

You cannot truly forgive others until you forgive yourself.

Forgiveness is the road upon which you can create new footsteps moving forward and stop looking back to past footsteps. Forgiveness, which is a process, in its own right, is the soul-rain that can wash away the footprints of the past that stand in your way and that continue to obstruct your connection to authentic self and to looking forward instead of looking back.

Forgiveness is a gift that awaits you. A gift that you need to find and give to yourself. Forgiving others isn’t really about them, now. It’s about you. You knowing you and moving forward in your life. Forgiveness is not forgetting or even re-connecting, necessarily. Forgiveness is remembering and choosing to radically accept and mindfully let go.

Accepting The Pain of Transformation

Unresolved Abandonment and Negative Expectations – Break Free

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:02:29 +0000

Life Coach and author, A.J. Mahari, has many coaching clients who are dealing with varying degrees of consequences, in their own individual lives and life situations, that are all related to unresolved abandonment issues. Does everyone who has unresolved abandonment end up being diagnosed with a mental illness?

In a word, no. However, most people with unresolved abandonment issues, whether they are aware of these issues or not, will experience their manifestation in interpersonal relationships. Unresolved abandonment is a common-ground experience for many who have mental illness and many who end up in relationships with them. In an 8 session coaching course A.J. Mahari will help you become more aware of the effects of your unresolved abandonment issues in your own life. Issues that so many people have without realizing it. Issues that can be present and blocking you without causing you to have or be diagnosed with any mental illness.

What does unresolved abandonment have to do with common-ground between those with and without mental illness who have painful relationships?

In relationships and relating, generally, unresolved abandonment often plays itself out in what is a subconscious need for emotional chaos and/or drama. It may not feel as though this is what you want or need but due to your unresolved abandonment, a part of you, in fact, does seek chaos and drama in the sense that there and subconscious efforts being put forth to resolve past abandonment issues in the here-and-now. This manifests itself in relationships in varying degrees. When that manifestation is more severe it is often a case of someone having a mental illness. When it isn’t too extreme, but, continues to lead you into unhealthy relationships or painful and chaotic relationships there is more you need to know and understand about yourself and how unresolved abandonment is blocking you.

Gaining Awareness into Negative Expectations and Limiting Beliefs
Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life 19 Coaching Exercises - End Negative Thought Patterns

What about Negative Expectations?

When you are re-enacting elements of unresolved abandonment issues, to one degree or another, whether you are aware of this or not, yet, negative expectations – even negative secondary payoffs – are at the heart of so much painful and often toxic relational patterns.

These negative expectations are truly at the center of the many ways that unresolved abandonment issues creep into the here and now in everyday relational dynamics. Why? Because, on a subsconscious level you are seeking to replicate past experience that was negative, painful, and more than likely left you feeling somewhat, if not totally, victimized. Seeking to replicate it in subconscious ways that are your psyche trying to bring some resolution to what was very impacting and emotionally powerful experience when you were younger.

Negative expectations are often not conscious thoughts. Many people holding negative expectations aren’t even aware that they are doing this. You may relate to this. You may feel or believe you are surprised as ever whenever things in relationships or friendships or jobs turn out negatively, time and time again.

The negative expectations of unresolved abandonment that color how you relate to certain people, or people who get closest to you in interpersonal relationships, and for some work and friend relationships as well, have their origin in your wounded inner child. An inner child that still lives and experiences life through a victim mindset.

This part of you may be very different from who you believe yourself to be and/or who you experience yourself as. It may also be very different from how you would describe yourself to others.

Gaining Awareness into Negative Expectations and Limiting Beliefs
Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns

The victim mindset of unresolved abandonment, no matter how subconscious, does produce negative expectations that are then experienced and re-experienced in patterned ways that do not create happiness, or balance in your life.

Unresolved abandonment can have many layers to it. In its most extreme presentations it does involve mental illness often. However, less severe issues of unresolved abandonment can leave people living up to negative expectations that they aren’t aware that they have. Negative expectations that support limiting beliefs.

I offer a coaching program that addresses this specfically and that helps my clients tap into how unresolved abandonment issues in their lives are creating and supporting the negative expectations of a subconscious victim mindset that most are very unaware of.

If you find yourself in a series of unsuccessful, codependent and/or enmeshed relationships, or if you continue to feel as though you just can’t find comfortable closeness and an effective relational style that supports you in achieving your relationship/friendship/career goals, you could really benefit from booking some coaching session with me to bring to your conscious awareness your limiting beliefs and unlock them so that your negative expectations do not continue to compromise your happiness.

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Core Abandonment Issues

A.J. Mahari — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:56:58 +0000

Author and Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, works with many clients who have as central to many of their life challenges and need for change core abandonment issues. This is particularly evident in those who have Borderline Personality Disorder. However, many professionals believe that each and every single person has, to one degree or another, experience with core abandonment wounds or issues.

Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:52:11 +0000

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Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises To Help You Change Negative Thought Patterns by Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, is a 102 page Ebook chalk full of information and 19 coaching exercises to help you change negative thinking into positive thinking. This Ebook stresses how much you will benefit from focusing postively on the here-and-now so that the decisions you are making today will help you create a positive, successful and productive future. And this Ebook doesn’t just tell you that, it provides you with practical exercises that will show you how to create positive change and how to not only stop focusing on the negative, stop worrying, but also stop feeling so stressed and stop ruminating on intrusive, negative, and unwanted thoughts. Not everyone can afford Life Coaching. This Ebook gives you exercises to do that I use with many of my clients and now you too can get this help and at a fraction of the price.

Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life - End Negative Thought Patterns

Determination and belief are the starting points for the shift from negative thought patterns to positive thoughts that create success. Learning to lay down defenses and open your mind to new, positive, thoughts can and will help you create needed and wanted change.

Determination and belief will open you to new opportunities to get to know who you really are and/or more about who you authentically are. Thoughts are energy. Your energy effects all areas of your life.

You can quickly and easily learn how to plant the seeds of positive thoughts and positive energy in your life. How can you do this?

This Ebook is based on exercises that will help you to realize real answers that will help you shift your thoughts and energy from negative to positive by getting you in touch with questions that will teach you more about yourself, what you want and how to get what you want – what your goals are and how to achieve those goals.

Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life, will walk you through 19 exercises that will provide you with the steps to realizing real answers and teach you to start asking the right questions. By learning how the mind works, you can understand how to break the cycles that keep you on the outside looking in, instead of where you truly want to be. Learn to ask yourself questions that will shift your energy and help you to achieve your goals. What you feel comes from what you think. Are you aware of thoughts that lead you to feel bad?

By Changing Your Thoughts you can remove any illusions or feelings of what you think is lacking in your own life. You can remove the unnamed need that eats away at you day after day. By Changing Your Thoughts you can walk away from a life that is chaotic, codependent, or constantly needing repairs. You can learn to set boundaries, value yourself, and create healthier and happier relationships. You can re-shape your reality. Shift your focus. Create positive, healthy, and lasting change.

READ MORE …

Unresolved Abandonment Negatively Impacts Relating

A.J. Mahari — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:51:50 +0000

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In this video, Life Coach, A.J. Mahari talks about the reality that unresolved abandonment negatively impacts relating and relationships. Unresolved abandonment is a key ingredient in the mix in the making of toxic relationships.

A.J. Mahari's Video - Unresolved Abandonment

Abandonment Negatively Impacts Relating and Relationships – Unresolved abandonment causes untold emotional and psychological suffering. Both those diagnosed with a mental illness and those who are not can be blocked and stuck due to unresolved abandonment issues in their lives. The difference between having a personality disorder, for example, or not, and yet still having unresolved abandonment issues has a lot to do with the intensity of that abandonment in childhood and just how much sensitivity to the abandonment there was. This along with whether or not one had the resources to cope makes all the difference.

Abandonment is at the core of what drives toxic relationships whether one has a mental illness or not. What you attach to without conscious awareness is what seeks to teach you more about yourself.

A.J. Mahari talks about what abandonment is and how what all that abandonment encompasses is often not realize by people who are carrying unresolved abandonment issues from childhood into their adult lives. Abandoned pain – unattended to pain – is an emotional and psychological block that causes suffering.

Mahari talks about how unresolved abandonment in your life will often manifest itself. What to look for to know if you may well have unresolved abandonment issues that are at the heart of your being or having been in a toxic and painful relationship. There are so many choices that people with unresolved abandonment issues in their lives make that they are not consciously aware of. This is another important aspect of how A.J. can help you in her role as a life coach. She can help you to become more aware of choices that you have made and aren’t aware enough of. By becoming more aware of these choices that you have made A.J. can then help you to strategize new goals and plan to achieve them. New goals that will also help you to go forward with your life while you work to resolve what has been the unresolved abandonment that negatively impacts your relationships.

Emotional Competence – Part of Overcoming Codependency

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:58:46 +0000

Emotional Competence, specifically, to begin with, learning to observe your feelings without reacting to them, is a central beginning in over-coming, among other things, codependency. Author and Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, knows this from her own journey of recovery 15 years ago and from her work with hundreds of clients who have unresolved abandonment issues at the center of what is manifesting as codependency in their lives. Emotional mastery is the challenge when one has unresolved abandonment issues that feul codependent styles of relating. Codependent relating is often very painful and re-plays out unresolved abandonment wounds from one’s past in relationships.

A.J. Mahari, in her role and capacity as a life coach, coaches her clients, among other methods of coaching she practices, in what she calls, Emotional Mastery Coaching. Emotional mastery involves opening to an increasing awareness of the negative core beliefs and negative limiting beliefs and thoughts that lurk behind the many emotional triggers that dysregulate emotion. It is the triggered dysregulated emotions that people are not skilled at coping with that contribute to the fearing and avoidance of feelings. This in turn leaves people needing a great deal. Having needs that they do not know how to meet. People then often turn to others in attempts to have other’s meet their needs. This often isn’t a very conscious process. It is essentially what codependency is – needing someone else to meet needs you need to learn how to meet. Or trying to meet the needs of someone else who needs to learn how to meet their own needs.

Mastering your emotions, coping effectively in healthy ways with your own emotions is at the heart of learning how to cope with those feelings and the needs that they present in ways that support your taking personal responsibility for meeting your own needs so that you can learn how to relate to others from a secure trusting place of inter-dependence.

One of the main components of emotional mastery is emotional competence. In her latest video, Author and Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, outlines and examines three main building blocks of emotional competence. Three building blocks that will help you to understand the need to search for your authentic self – and/or the need to continue to grow more fully into your own authenticity. A.J. Mahari provides, among her life coaching services, emotional mastery coaching and courses that you can read more about at phoenixrisingpublications.ca designed to help you faciliate increasing your emotional competence, happiness, and goal achievement in your life.

Emotional competence is a journey, not a destination. No one wakes up one day 100 percent, perfectly competent. However, there is a middle-ground to achieve, find, and hold on to as a way of life when it comes to emotional competence. A middle-ground from which life can be lived in emotionally peaceful ways that are positive, life-affirming and mentally healthy. A middle-ground that supports inter-dependent living and relating versus codependent living and relating.

LIFE COACHING With A.J. Mahari

Too many people have become too used to being overly attached to their own pain and to the isolating negativity of that pain. And, the hopelessness that negativity perpetuates. Emotional suffering does become a bad habit over time. There is choice involved. You can learn to set yourself free. You really can. The search for a beginning connection or a deeper connection, depending where you are in your own life journey, to your authentic self, is the way to much more conscious awareness of that soul-filled self that awaits your compassionate nurture and stewardship.

Be your own best friend!

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Accepting The Pain of Transformation

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:55:44 +0000

Accepting the pain of transformation and engaging it fully is part of the process of beginning to resolve what has remained unresolved abandonment in your life. Transformation is a process of change. Chosen change. Change, by its very nature is often a painful process. Transformation is a process of change in nature or character. The type of transformation that unfolds in the process of personal growth, healing, and recovery. Transformation by its very nature produces pain and/or discomfort. This pain and discomfort has its roots in the unresolved abandonment of childhood, which for some, is more profound than for others and might involve intense fear of abandonment that arouses powerful aversion to connecting to this transformative pain.

Grief – A Process of Gaining Perspective and Coping

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:27:23 +0000

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Grief is what it is. Grief is a part of life. Grief is a process that unfolds whenever we suffer, experience, or feel loss. Some reasons for grief are obvious – the death of a loved one, loss of a job or relationship, for example. Reasons for grief can be subtle – unfinished emotional baggage (abandonment issues) from childhood interfering with goal identification and achievement in the here and now, for example. Life Coach, A.J. Mahari outlines 7 keys that help the grief process and 7 keys that hinder the process of grieving.

It is a paradox, but what we so ache at the loss of we also long to hold on to in ways that can prolong the pain and suffering of grief. Grief is a process that we must fully engage through radical acceptance from a thoughtful mindfulness that can sustain us through the pain that we need to feel in order to heal.

Grief is the process and expression of the pain of loss and sadness. It is a process that needs to be honored, sooner or later. Everyone does grieve in their own time and in their own ways. It is important to understand that grief, is natural, and necessary when you experience loss of any kind and that even though it may feel like it will last forever, it won’t.

Often when we’ve lost someone we’ve loved, person or pet, grief, as profound and distressing as it can feel, can be clung to at a point to avoid what will feel like an even greater loss. When we are actively grieving for someone or for a pet or a lost relationship the grief, while it hurts, is company. The grief keeps us connected to the person, pet, or relationship (or whatever the loss was) longer. It keeps us feeling close. It hurts, but it reminds us also of happier times, of what we’d hoped for rather than what we have come to have to feel, face, and live with.

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Suffering is a Choice Related to Unresolved Abandonment Issues

Core of Toxic Relationships – Codependence

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:15:50 +0000

Codependence is a mindset that is at the core of toxic relating and toxic, enmeshed, relationships. It is mindest that leads people, often without being aware of it, to try to get their needs met by and/or through others. Neediness permeates what are weak boundaries to begin with. On one side of the toxic, emeshed, codependent relationship is the needy person. On the other is the person who ends up trying to meet the insatiable needs of that person neglecting his or her own needs in the process. Unresolved abandonment issues manifested and expressed in different ways is the major common link between people in this relational dynamic.

Life Coaching for Codependence Concerns

Coping with Difficult Toxic and/or Abusive People

Codependent, toxic and enmeshed relating is a dynamic. It is an emotional and relational dance. A very painful one for either side of the toxic mix. It is a dynamic and dance that really does take two to tango. Each person in a codependent dynamic has to first become aware of the choices he or she is making. Secondly, then, each will benefit from examining his or her own choices. You can lose yourself to over-focusing on someone else and then end up feeling angry about it. The person who is being over-focused on likely has less idea about who he or she actually is.

At the core of this toxic reality is not owning one’s own choices – not taking personal responsibility – on both sides of the dance. You can’t be fixed by anyone else. You can’t fix anyone. You can, however, empower yourself to get healthier and “fix” yourself. You can create positive healthy change in your own life. That’s the awesome possibility and responsibility you are losing by continuing to choose the codependent mindset which is essentially the victim mindset. A mindset that stems from the foundation of unresolved abandonment issues, to one degree or another.

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Suffering is a Choice Related to Unresolved Abandonment Issues

A.J. Mahari — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:47:18 +0000

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Many people experience their emotional suffering as something that is outside of them. Something over which they have no control. The fact is that suffering is really a choice. Say what? Before you get angry or think I’m trying to say everything is your fault, please consider the difference between reacting to feelings related to the experience of events and/or circumstances – abandoning your emotional control versus empowering yourself by realizing and becoming more aware of the many choices that you can make. Choices that don’t have to involve you reacting to what you feel based upon events or circumstance.

You might be wondering how it is that suffering is a choice. You might be wondering how you could possibly choose to think differently and create new and more positive experience for yourself in the face of events or circumstances that have left you with intense feelings and negative thoughts in your life.

It is important to note that the root of suffering is abandonment – unresolved abandonment. I will be blogging much more about this and have a couple of audios that will be available soon too. I also work with people as a life coach and assist them in making this shift from what is essentially a perceived helplessness that has its roots in a victim mindset.

Most people actually have unresolved abandonment issues to one degree or another from the past. It can be very helpful to identify and become more aware of any such issues. For some these abandonment issues will mean mental illness and being diagnosed with anxiety disorders, depression, personality disorders, codependency, to name but a few of life’s challenges having to do with, among other things in some cases, unresolved abandonment.

A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching Services

Abandonment issues are the foundational touchstones of how people relate to each other. Relating to self and then to others can give you insight into the extent that unresolved abandonment is still a very active participant in your life and in relational breakdowns or break-ups. Relationships, even the most toxic and stressful are attempting to get your attention. Relationships, among other things, are teaching vehicles that will help you to learn how to create positive healthy change when you are ready and open to resolving abandonment issues. Unresolved abandonment keeps people stuck in patterns and often a series of toxic, dysfunctional, unfulfilling, and unsuccessful relationships. Relationships that while not providing what you may have wanted and needed from them, are teachers of lessons you may still need to learn. Lessons that can put you in touch with more enlightened awareness about the choices that you are making that are actually obstacles to personal growth and learning to meet you needs in more emotionally mature ways.

When someone is suffering emotionally and has been to one degree or another for some time the first indicator of unresoved abandonment often tends to be the way that one quickly abandons one’s own feelings. Are you someone who feels the need to escape and/or avoid your feelings? If you are, do you think there’s any relationship between this denial of your feelings and ways in which you are experiencing emotional suffering that you may have perceived as beyond your control?

Three facts to be more aware of:

You are choosing your own emotional suffering
What you think determines how you feel
Being afraid of or not knowing how to cope with feeling your emotions leads to a victim mindset

Are you empowering yourself? Do you take personal responsibility for your actions and their consequences? Are you stuck investing in whether or not things are fair? Is their an inhernet separation between what you think and what you feel? Are you aware of wanting someone else to rescue you? Do you feel like you are not making a choice?

A choice not consciously made is a choice in and of itself. Denying your pain is a choice. Defining your experience based upon what you feel is a mental trap that will keep you stuck in a victim mentality that will increase your feelings of helplessness or hopelessness which contributes to your emotional suffering. Choosing, in effect, to not make choices, is in and of itself a choice.

The reasons for your emotional suffering are coming from deep within and are tied to unresolved abandonment. The reasons for your suffering are not being controlled by anyone else but you. Suffering is a choice.

Suffering may seem a circumstance beyond your control when really suffering is a choice. We cannot control all events or circumstances in our lives. However, we can learn to exercise empowering control over choices made in response to circumstance. This involves getting in touch with unresolved abandonment.

What do you think? I hope you will share your comments on whether or not you believe that your suffering involves choices?