When I’m not seeing therapy clients or writing, I go around the country promoting abandonment recovery. Next year, I’ll be giving an in-person Abandonment Workshop at two places: The Art of Living Retreat Center and Kripalu.

I often feel like my participants are going to “shoot the messenger” when I’m imparting my message of abandonment recovery. I know what I have to say is different from what people expect.

Many people come to the workshop in unbearable abandonment pain, grief, and conflict. When I tell them that there are no magic bullets, that recovery involves not “3 easy steps” but a great deal of hard work and an ongoing commitment of time, they feel frustrated.

Most attendees have understandably high expectations. They’ve been hoping that one more book, one more tape, one more workshop will finally free them from the infernal festering of the abandonment wound.

But when it comes to abandonment, there are no easy answers. Instead, there are tools that you must use on a daily basis to get the desired results. And, if you use these tools consistently for a period of months, you can experience a complete transformation.

Abandonment recovery works with your primal feelings. Most people try to talk themselves out of these feelings. Or they try to squelch them. Or they deny them. Or they try to distract themselves from them. Or they try to stop the feelings through sheer willpower. Or they might try to use meditative techniques in hopes of becoming a “spirit body” so they can lift above them.

Bottom line: they want the feelings to go away.

In fact, those meditative exercises are highly beneficial to abandonment recovery, but their results are hampered by any part of the abandonment wound that remains unresolved. This is because abandonment is in the body – that’s where its primal feelings are “felt” – and its wound keeps pulling you down into its quicksand.

So what to do? The key is to learn how to work with your most primal feelings – the oldest and truest part of yourself. Rather than fight these feelings, you administer to them. In fact, if you’re still fighting your abandonment feelings, you’re not really in abandonment recovery.

Let me clarify:

Adults really can’t be abandoned because they are capable of taking care of themselves. They can certainly FEEL abandoned and those feelings are powerful, but adults can only abandon themselves.

Adult abandonment is really self-abandonment.

When someone leaves us or doesn’t love us enough, we take the anger we feel about the rejection against ourselves and beat ourselves up for not being worthy (i.e., too short, too fat, too stupid, too un-sexy, too needy), for not being loveable enough. In blaming ourselves, we inculcate self-doubt and injure our self-esteem. The effects are cumulative over many hurts, disappointments, heartbreaks, and losses.

To begin the journey of recovery, you have to cherish the painful feelings as important parts of yourself. In self-abandonment, you have put your “self” up for adoption, and now you must turn around and adopt that “self.”

This does not happen by osmosis. This is not one of those easier-than-said platitudes, like “love yourself.” It involves very specific tools (which I teach in the workshops and books), hard work, commitment to a daily regimen, etc.

Wish me luck. Mine is a hard message to sell without people wanting to “shoot the messenger.”

PS: I have created a series of videos that take you step-by-step through the 5 Akēru exercises and other life-changing insights of the Abandonment Recovery Program.

Whether you’re experiencing a recent break-up, a lingering wound from childhood, or struggling to form a lasting relationship, the program will enlighten you, restore your sense of self, and increase your capacity for love and connection.