The abandonment / shame spiral
Understanding the way the abandonment/shame spiral affects you when in a relationship is a key way to avoid conflict and enable you both to have a longer, more deeply connected life together.
The abandonment/shame spiral begins when the most common female emotional wound - ‘the fear of abandonment’ is triggered by the most common male emotional wound - ‘the fear of not measuring up’ (shame wound).
Women are evolutionarily programmed to be attuned to signs of potential abandonment, the female brain is hardwired to not want to be with a male partner who will make her pregnant and abandon her to raise the babies alone. Studies have shown that this programming starts very early, when female babies feel threatened their ‘tend and befriend’ survival response is fully activated which means their first instinct is to make eye contact with someone and feel connected.
Men are societally, and evolutionarily programmed to believe that it is their duty to ‘provide and protect’ meaning they are often predisposed to feeling extra shame when it comes to not ‘measuring up’ to what is expected of them.
When a woman feels like her partner is not showing up as fully as she needs or wants him to, even if it is something as simple as him forgetting to pick up a pint of milk on the way home from work, her abandonment wound is immediately activated, when relaying this to him from ‘the wounded place’ he tends to hear it as criticism which then immediately activates his shame wound… He feels like he has failed to provide for her and that everything he has done before has been overlooked, which leads him to feel he needs to defend and withdraw, making the woman feel even more abandoned and hurt…. which then makes him feel even more of a failure, making him retreat even more…. and so the cycle continues.
Regardless of who '‘started it’, once this spiral starts it usually just adds to more and more of a disconnection…
but how to get out of this spiral?!….
This is the hardest part! The only way out is for you to empathise with your partner’s emotional wound, it can feel impossibly hard to relate to because it is not the emotional wound that YOU carry yourself, it really takes a lot of practice and vulnerability to get into the habit, but undoubtedly when we stop focussing on the ‘what’ of the argument and instead focus on the ‘why’ (the why being the abandonment/shame spiral) you can together create a united front and heal your collective wounds.
If you catch this spiral as it is about to happen… NAME IT! Call it out, hold each other, take a breath together and then try to speak FOR your wounded part rather than FROM it, while trying your best to comfort the wounded part of your partner too.
It is important also to remember that it is not exclusively the female who can feel abandoned and the male who can feel shame, the roles can be the other way around, the main point is that you both recognise this in each other and work together to get the best outcome.
These practices are even harder to implement when one or both partners have been raised by a family in which shame and abandonment have been prevalent, working through the emotions caused by such old wounds using CBT is a great way to get into a mindset which allows you to feel more able to voice your vulnerabilities both together and seperately.
