Abandonment Wounds and Surrender
When Surrender Becomes Healing
Recently, I shared about a beautiful experience that helped me heal a very early abandonment wound.
It was not the kind of healing that came because I finally found the perfect explanation, solved the situation, or figured out how to make someone behave differently.
It came when I stopped trying to control what was never mine to control in the first place.
The Many Forms of Control
When we feel abandoned, it is natural to want relief. We may try to fix the relationship, reason our way out of the pain, become more useful, pull away first, stay busy, numb out, or convince ourselves we should not care.
These responses make sense. They are often intelligent, logical, and deeply protective.
But they can also become subtle forms of control: attempts to manage an experience created by someone else’s choices.
We do not control whether another person stays emotionally present, follows through, chooses honesty, offers repair, or walks away. Their actions may deeply affect us, but they remain outside our control.
And when someone’s actions create waves in our emotional world, we cannot simply decide not to feel them.
Imagine sitting in a still pool of water with someone. If they begin swimming, splashing, or moving forcefully through the water, the waves they create will reach you. You cannot stop the waves by pretending they are not there. You cannot make the other person stop moving simply by wishing it were so.
Abandonment can feel much the same. Someone else’s actions create waves of grief, anguish, fear, anger, and loss that wash over us. Those feelings are not evidence that we are weak. They are a human response to a rupture in connection.
Strong reactions after painful or traumatic experiences can include sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, intrusive thoughts, sleep disruption, and difficulty concentrating. Avoidance may bring temporary relief, but when it becomes the primary way we cope, it can prolong distress over time.
A Different Kind of Turning
For me, healing began in surrender.
Not resignation. Not pretending that the pain did not matter. Not spiritualizing something harmful or denying the reality of what had happened.
Surrender meant allowing the anguish to be as real as it was. It meant setting down my attempts to escape, fix, rationalize, or outrun the pain. It meant releasing the illusion that I could control another person’s choices—or control the emotional impact those choices had on me.
From that place, I turned to God.
Not in anger. Not in blame. Not with a demand that He immediately make everything right or do it my way.
I turned toward Him from a much simpler place:
Daddy, this hurts so much.
And in that moment, I saw and felt His presence in a new way.
Nothing about my circumstances had changed. The situation was not suddenly resolved. But when I stopped running from the pain and invited God into it with me, I was able to receive a truth that had been available all along: He was there. He was present. He was moving. He was available to me.
The shift reached deeper than insight. It was a felt sense of presence and safety in my body—something I had not realized was missing.
The Invitation Inside Relationship Pain
Our closest and most distressing relationships can be the places where old abandonment wounds become especially activated. A spouse, parent, child, or other beloved person may touch places in us that feel much older than the current moment.
That does not make relational pain good, deserved, or something we should tolerate without boundaries. It does mean that the pain can become an invitation: an opportunity to notice what has been awakened, bring compassion to it, and discover we are not alone inside it.
Healing is strengthened by safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, and meaningful choice. It happens in relationships where our experience is respected rather than dismissed or controlled.
For people of faith, this can also become a profound place of encounter with God. As we stop demanding that the pain disappear before we turn toward Him, we may discover a more intimate experience of divine comfort, companionship, and care—even while the circumstances remain unresolved.
Finding the Root
I reached this experience through my CASCADE framework.
CASCADE helped me understand the connection between the present moment and the deeper history it had activated. It helped me access the precise place where this traumatic experience had taken root, meet it with care, and invite God into the wound itself.
This is not about forcing yourself to relive traumatic experiences or pushing through alone. It is about approaching your story with gentleness, safety, and enough support to remain present with what arises. If your responses to trauma are persistent, overwhelming, interfering with daily life, or leaving you feeling unsafe, working with a qualified licensed mental-health professional can be an important part of your support system.
You can hear me share more about this experience on my podcast.
And if the CASCADE framework feels like it could help you better understand the patterns being activated in your life and relationships, I would love to work with you.
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