Healing the Psychological Effects of Abandonment

This absence of confidence, which causes them to oppose everyone who tries to help them improve their circumstances, especially in adolescence, will lead to confrontation and rejection by adults and peers.

Even if their loved ones/surroundings try to help them, they will face “a wall” that has disconnected itself from their sentiments, notably their desire for others and empathy for them.

They will usually get children or adolescents to perform the opposite of what is good for their social adaption, confirming their own expectations: "I don't need anyone" and "I can't trust because in the end they will leave me".

Over-independence leads them to face numerous educational measures proposed in university courses that are usual in secondary education because, most often, the learning and methodologies are neither inclusive nor compensating for inequalities, but basically promise the marginalisation of students or their lack of integration into society because when they do not meet academic and social requirements they suspend or generate ongoing conflict.

These adolescents find high school particularly difficult because "my need for the other" and the natural processes of development (growing autonomy and decreasing dependence on adults) deteriorate during puberty.

There is another group, always with different personal nuances that we simplify here: those who have not gone through early childhood safely due to separations or rejections by figures who represent them and lack fundamental self-confidence. This group includes youngsters and teenagers who conceal and act quietly to avoid being spotted.

Given that they will not be accepted, they will avoid action and dedication in communication and social connections, becoming watchers, nervous, and distracted rather than participants. socially active.

However, they are more humble and obedient of social conventions, and they can even be "hyperadapted" to avoid our attention. Their lack of self-confidence causes them to discover what they transmit in social relationships. Like the most suspicious group, they believe "I cannot trust others" and "they will not love me enough, and that they will end up by leaving me."

Unlike those who are openly suspicious and go to conflicts, their activity is more limited, they do not attract attention because they are apparently more adapted, and they do not act strangely or differently. It is as if they disappeared in the group, so they are barely taken into account.

Therefore, they are passive and avoid all dangers, especially those that involve emotional reliance. Like confrontational people, if one expects rejection from the world, they will receive it.

The saying "you gather what you sow" is also true because our expectations or internal images, feared and desired at the same time, become our internal keys of orientation and the most common models of behaviour we adopt, making this fantasy a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The image drives our behaviour, and the social environment confirms our suspicions.

However, new neuroscience discoveries confirm that Gestalt therapy and other psychotherapies that work with the whole person recognise real brain plasticity, that our neurons, or neural circuits, can change and reconnect thanks to new structuring experiences that can be learned and repeated.

Adoptive or foster parents must have enough personal resources to withstand a process of personality reconstruction that may demand patience, constancy, and the ability to grasp meaningful situations and behaviours. Which warrants exploring the child's past to comprehend them.

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