The environment that surrounds the boy or girl plays a fundamental role, since he or she is in the process of growth and psychological maturation, hence the importance of adults who fulfill the maternal and paternal function. The importance of the maternal function is shown from pregnancy, of 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 can establish himself as an independent other. From this we think about how the absence of one of the parents affects this vulnerable stage, where the child’s psyche is being built. In this sense, the following article from raises some consequences of parental abandonment and how to overcome it.
Psychological consequences of parental abandonment
Arredondo (1998) said that paternal abandonment represents psychological injuries non-accidental events caused by those responsible for development, which are emotional or sexual consequences of commission or omission and which threaten the physical, psychological and emotional development considered normal for the child.
Therefore, paternal abandonment can become as described by Arredondo (1998), where there is physical and emotional abandonment.
In children or adolescents who have been abandoned by one or both parents, some of the following consequences may occur:
- They are prone to abandonment or school instability, it is one of the reasons for .
- It is very difficult for them to adapt to the world and reality.
- Constant fear of abandonment.
- Aggressive behavior towards others.
- Uninhibited social relationships (e.g., overly familiar verbal or physical behavior, little or no recourse to caring parent or guardians, willingness to leave with strange adults.
- Reactive attachment (very rarely seeks comfort when feeling upset.
- Little or no emotional intelligence.
People who have experienced parental abandonment and become adults often endure the following consequences: in adulthood:
1. Little or no emotional intelligence
That is, they get stressed easily, they are very rarely assertive (they are unable to establish limits), they are not very empathetic, they have a limited emotional vocabulary (they do not know how to identify their emotions and they define their mood as good or bad), predisposed to limbic assaults. (on the verge of his emotions).
2. Difficulty of adaptation
Difficulties in adapting to the changes that arise in your life (job changes, housing, city of residence), suffering a lot and for a long time when these occur. Changes usually make you very anxious.
3. Attachment to objects
Difficulty getting rid of material objects (vehicles, a mobile phone, books, documents or any other object with or without special meaning for them). Generally these objects in psychoanalysis represent the suffering of abandonment: they project their abandonment and attribute their own emotions to the objects (for example, they say that the vehicle will feel very sad when they have to sell it and leave it alone with a stranger). They even suffer a lot anxiety when they have to temporarily separate themselves 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 romantic relationships, to the consumption of substances for recreational and therapeutic use, to work, to sex, to pornography, to people who provide them with little attention, to anyone who represents their absent father figure, to partners and friends. In the following article you will find the different ones.
5. Passivity in relationships
They are people who frequently show themselves very accommodating or condescending to everyone (even people you don’t know). He ignores or sets aside his priorities or interests in order to please others; close people describe him as a very good person (who listens and helps others without his own interests). This behavior may be an obsessive attempt to make sure no person abandons him or become disinterested in it.
6. Psychological discomfort
They frequently report feeling empty or without a purpose in life. The following article addresses the topic of .
7. Vulnerability to psychopathology
Statistically, these are people who are much more likely than those who have not suffered parental abandonment to be diagnosed with some type of mental pathology. For example, a , , of behavior, sleep, eating behavior, somatic symptoms, trauma or related to stress factors or a personality disorder.
Consequences of an absent father in men and women
We hear hundreds of references about people who find it difficult to establish a healthy bond, that is, a relationship of mutual growth, of objectives and behaviors accepted in a pre-established manner. These people, feeling like experts in the relationships that harm them, manifest behaviors that allow them to prolong and remain in them. These types of people frequently described are those who state that they have been abandoned by one or both parents and, although this abandonment has occurred many years before (since childhood), it continues to impact their quality of life. The relationships that these types of people maintain may match any of the following examples:
- With people (friends, marriages, courtships and family members) who constantly nullify your own existence, that is, they never seem to listen to you or are almost never aware of your interests and put theirs as a priority.
- With partners or friends with some type of addiction (substances and games).
- With couples who violate the rights of others without any type of restriction or awareness.
- With partners who abuse physically and emotionally. Here you can see the .
- With couples who commit infidelity or subject them to constant fear that they will leave and abandon the partner.
- With partners or friends who were also abandoned by one or both parents.
- They are frequently very possessive people.
- Frequently They are afraid of losing something.
How to overcome a father’s abandonment
Overcoming the abandonment of a father will be a fairly relative task due to the circumstances in which the abandonment occurred, for example, it will not be the same perception of a father who, before abandoning, physically and emotionally abused his family.
Maybe it’s necessary approach it from acceptance and not from improvement; In the professional treatment of some clinicians, overcoming something implies – achieving forgetting – and superimposing the present on past events without being interested in or avoiding the psychoanalytic premise that Everything that happens in our childhood will have an impact on our adult life.therefore requires work to rework the trauma caused by abandonment.
Below we share some points that may help you if you have suffered or know someone who has suffered from parental abandonment:
1. Try to tell yourself the moments you remember with that absent father
Take a few minutes where you can have privacy to listen to your thoughts. If there are memories of abuse (hits or insults) where emotions (anger, rage, sadness) may arise, it is important that you address them as well; If you feel like crying, cursing or insulting, do it. Likewise, if there are memories that are cherished by you and even though 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 space to memories, it is time to understand them to humanize yourself and that father figure that you have so reified. If you understand that you have emotions and can name each one by the bodily sensations they provoke in 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 it or extrapolate it with 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. Possibly we have blamed ourselves or that father absent all these years for the abandonment. For example, if we understand that dad or mom They may have experienced some emotion of fear of not knowing or being able to take responsibility. of this change in their life (children) and it is for this reason that they have distanced themselves. Clearly, this is not a fact to justify abandonment or any act of a parent, but it allows us to understand the emotional world in which we live and thus allow us to understand the mistakes of others and our own.
4. Don’t try to forget, but live with it
Let us remember that we do not suggest overcoming the loss, but rather living with it. It is possible to overcome 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 so much emotional charge cannot bother us.
5. Learn to forgive
Processing the abandonment of a parent requires individual and, above all, family forgiveness, although it is not something that is so easy to achieve. If the environment in which we live constantly punishes that figure of our father, if we observe great pain in our mother or our siblings, we will surely project that grief within ourselves. In this article you will find.
6. Become aware
Being aware of all these points represents a great advance, since we will be able to separate the pain of others and our own; the emotions of others and ours.
My father abandoned me and now he is looking for me, what do I do?
A father who has abandoned us and who reappears years later with the intention of establishing contact with us sometimes constitutes a very important factor in emotional discomfort.
Accepting someone back into our lives who possibly caused us a lot of harm is a transcendental decision, and due to the same magnitude that it implies, it is not something that we should only ask the pillow. The emotional damage one has does not disappear with the reappearance of its cause, this often exacerbates the discomfort. Regardless, the decision made about whether or not to allow the approach of the father who abandoned the psychological damage must be the priority in both cases: first address all the emotional disturbance that arose to later discern and address the decision made.
This article is merely informative, at 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 Paternal abandonment: consequences and how to overcome itwe recommend that you enter our category.
Bibliography
- Valeria Arredondo. (1998). Child abuse: basic elements for your…