Emotional abandonment in some ways is self-explanatory in the sense that the words describe precisely what I am trying to convey, which is: being completely on your own to experience your emotional life without any support.

The reason why this is worth talking about is because not having support with this part of life as a young child is actually traumatic.

I understand that for many people that is a statement that they would roll their eyes at, but there is mountains of research to support the idea that one of the key tasks of early childhood development is learning how to manage emotions and to learn what it means to exist in a social world.

While some people might read the words “emotional abandonment” and be like, yes, that is spot on how I felt as a child and for many others they might be confused and wondering if this applies to them. Here are some common experiences that you might have if you were emotionally abandoned as a child:

As parents, it’s obvious to us that our state of mind affects our children. If we’re angry with our kids, chances are they aren’t responding with their sweetest selves, either. And when we are overwhelmed and anxious, our kids pick up on it and in some cases, they too might become overwhelmed and anxious.

The sheer act of reading that last sentence could be a moment to judge yourself. You could be saying to yourself: “Ugh, yes one more thing to worry about, could this anxiety have a negative effect on my kid? Yeah, I get it, I suck and am ruining my kids' life.” This is an opportunity for self-compassion right here. Instead of self-judgment you could say to yourself: “I’m anxious. The world is pretty frantic right now, my job is hard and it’s really scary at times that I am raising a little one in a world full of so many unknowns and terrible things. AND I don’t have any control of it. It makes sense that I’m anxious. The whole world is anxious right now.”

When we think about abused children, we often have visions of spanking, hitting and even sexual abuse. We think of withholding food, cruel punishments or physical neglect. We have visions of kids in emergency rooms with broken arms.

While this kind of abuse is still too frequent, what is more chronic and quite honestly, common, is emotional trauma. It’s emotional abandonment. It's leaving a child to emotionally fend for themselves. It's not helping them manage their emotions. It's expecting them to have the factory settings of a fully grown adult in terms of emotional regulation. It's the lack of attuning to them. Therapists will often call this “relational” trauma. While I do too, I find that is often hard to connect to as an average, non-therapist person. But think of your emotional life as a child? For many of us, it does not take much to start to admit that it was not ideal.

Setting unrealistic expectations for yourself exists in contradiction to self-compassion.

What does this mean? If you strive to be self-compassionate, setting unrealistic expectations or demands on yourself is leading yourself towards a negative, no-win, scenario.

When I say unrealistic expectations, imagine this scenario: you are behind on a particular area of work. Like, really, really behind. Perhas this is a task that is intended to be done daily and you have put it off for six weeks. So, here you are, several weeks behind with a metaphoric ton of work weighing you down. How do you feel? First, I imagine you feel regret: “Why didn’t I do this? How did I let myself get so behind? You’re a real piece of sh*# that you let it get this out of hand.” Mixed in with that regret, you also likely feel some fear: “If my boss finds out that I’m this behind, I’m definitely not going to live this down. They must already know…how can they not know? I’m definitely getting fired. At , minimum I’m going to have to talk about it and I really don’t want to talk about it. What do I even say? Is there any good reason for getting this behind?!”

Self-compassion was a mindblowingly transformative concept to me when I first learned about it in 2014.

Being nice to myself sounded different when put into the framework of compassion. Compassion was something that I felt in my bones for others, so trying to muster even a smidge of that for myself sounded, reasonable? That being said, the thing that struck me as most provactive about self-compassion was that it suggested that being hard on yourself actually made you less productive and typically achieve less.