Healing Your Emotional Self by Beverly Engel Read Free Book Online Page B

floating around. Most of the time she had her head stuck in a book, off in some fantasy world. In many ways I feel like I never had a mother.”
    Parents who are so tied up with their work or interests that they have no time for their children are, in effect, abandoning them. Often parents abandon their children because they are unable or unwilling to spend time with them. Parents who have professions that take them away from home, such as truck driving or traveling sales, are often unable to fulfill their responsibilities as a parent. Although this usually cannot be helped, the abandonment the child feels is no less poignant.
    Many fathers abandon their children when they get divorced from the children’s mother. They make all kinds of excuses for cutting off their ties with their children, including that their mother is demand- ing too much child support, or that the father needed to move out of the area for a job, but the fact is, the children feel abandoned.

    Psychological Abandonment: Rejection as Abandonment
    Some parents simply don’t want to bother with their children, which they make very clear by their actions. Whenever their child needs help with his homework, help making a decision, or someone to listen to his problems, the parent says something like, “Can’t you see I’m busy? Don’t bother me with these things,” or, “Go ask your father to help you,” or even, “I don’t want to deal with your problems.” When a par- ent puts the child off or passes the buck to the other parent, the child senses his parent’s lack of love and concern for him. Other parents communicate this same message more subtly by allowing their chil- dren to do whatever they want, but in their lenience they too are not taking an interest in their children’s activities.
    Parents can also show how they feel about a child by their sins of omission, such as forgetting a child’s birthday, neglecting to give him gifts, buying gifts that he clearly does not want, or failing to make pos- itive comments about him (particularly when he has done something outstanding).
    Although a great deal of parental abandonment is unintentional or a result of inadequacies or selfishness on their part, some abandon- ment is intentional. Downplaying a child’s success or saying something negative about him to someone who has just complimented him can be a way of intentionally hurting his feelings.
    Some parents routinely abandon their children as a form of disci- pline, such as when a parent gives a child the “silent treatment” when he disapproves of what the child is doing. Rejecting parents use their power and importance to their children to control them. Children are so attached to and dependent on their parents that the loss of the sup- port of a parent can be devastating.
    When my mother was upset with me, she would routinely stop talking to me. We lived in a very small apartment, so it was difficult for us not to cross each other’s path. Nevertheless, my mother would walk right past me or even sit in the same room without looking at me or saying a word. If I spoke to her she would ignore me. Sometimes she wouldn’t talk to me for days. I would have to beg for her forgiveness for whatever transgression I had committed, but she still would not talk to me until she was ready. This left me feeling utterly abandoned.
    My mother also used the threat of abandonment to control me. When I did something that upset her, she would say, “If you don’t start minding me I’m going to send you to a convent.” This is a common tactic by some abandoning, rejecting parents.
    In the heat of anger or frustration some parents tell their children things like “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have gotten mar- ried to your father and had you kids.” While parents can sometimes secretly think these things, these thoughts should definitely be kept private, because they are correctly interpreted by the child as outright rejections. Some