Welcome to the Unfuck Your Relationships podcast, the show
where we are no longer just unfucking your love life, we are
unfucking your entire life. Because around here, we raise
standards, we break patterns, we do the shadow work, we upgrade
yourself concept, your boundaries, your confidence,
your relationships, your health, your Bunny, all of it.
There is no fluff here. If there's no pretending,
there's no performing. Just radical, sometimes brutal
honesty, truth telling, and the kind of big sister best friend
energy that calls you the fuck forward.
So if you are ready to stop settling for the bare minimum
and you are finally ready to become the woman that you are so
proud to wake up as in the morning, you are in the right
place. So let's unfuck your life one
episode at a time. All right, now let's get into
today's episode. Hello, my loves.
Welcome back to the Unfuck Your Relationships podcast.
I'm your host, Michelle Panning, and this is episode 235.
Let's talk about abandonment wounds.
And before you switch this off because you're like, yeah, yeah,
yeah. I know.
I've done therapy. I know my attachment style.
Stay with me for a second, OK? Most women with abandonment
wounds, which there's a lot of you are not actually healing
them. You're just managing them
better, right? You're self aware, you can
explain your patterns, you know why they are like why you are
the way that you are. But the wound is still running
the show and it shows up as obsessing when someone slightly
pulls away or there's a little bit of space or distance in the
relationship or connection. It could be panic when
communication changes even slightly.
Could be over giving, over explaining, staying in
relationships that feel like fucking shit because being alone
feels worse. And the real kicker is that most
women with abandonment wounds are not actually scared of being
alone. What they're actually afraid of
is being emotionally left while still in the relationship.
I don't know if you've ever felt that before, but it's like I
could feel I've felt lonelier sitting next to, you know, a
partner or a friend or whoever in the past than I did being on
my own, right. So you can absolutely feel it's
like that, that age-old tale of like I'm surrounded by people,
but I feel completely alone. And that is what their deepest
fear is, right? So let's get something straight.
An abandonment wound is not you being dramatic, you being needy,
you being too much, whatever it is.
It's think of it as like a nervous system injury, right?
It forms when connection was inconsistent, when love was
unpredictable, when care came and went and was kind of hot and
cold and you never knew if someone would be there
emotionally, physically, whatever it is.
So your nervous system at some point learned I have to stay
alert, I have to attach harder. I have to keep the connection
alive at all costs. Not because you're weak, but
because at one point in your life, connection equaled
survival. And that information doesn't
just leave your body because you grow up.
And here's the part that most people miss, right?
The core wound isn't people leave me.
Listen to this one. The core wound isn't people
leave me. The core wound is I leave myself
to keep people. I'm going to say that again, the
core wound isn't people leave me.
The core wound is I leave myself to keep people.
And this is the part that stings because women with abandonment
wounds are often incredible partners.
You probably feel very, very deeply or maybe highly
intuitive. You're emotionally intelligent,
but you pay for connection with self betrayal.
If you're listening to this thinking, why does it sound like
she's literally in my head, then it is time that you joined the
connected woman. This is the work that completely
rewires how you show up in your love life.
If you're in a relationship, this is how you stop repeating
the same patterns over and over again.
You stop lashing out, you stop shutting down, and you turn
things around to the point where your partner actually falls in
love with you all over again. And if you're single, this is
how you stop choosing the same person in a different body and
actually attract someone who is emotionally available, ready, is
obsessed with you, and can meet you from the very beginning.
This is the end of I know better, but I don't do better.
This is the point where these patterns are stopped for good.
If you know you're ready for this work, you know what to do.
The link will be in the description.
Join the Connected woman today. Let's get back to the episode.
I've seen this so many times and I've coached at this point
thousands of women through this exact same thing.
And they're like, I'm just so afraid of being left.
I'm so afraid of being left. And I'm like, but the very thing
that you are afraid of you do to yourself on a daily basis.
You are so afraid of this man or this woman leaving you, but you
leave yourself to keep said man or woman.
So your deepest fear of abandonment is happening on a
fucking daily basis. So these women who were like,
like I said, like deep feelers, like emotionally intelligent,
all these things, they say yes when they mean no.
You stay quiet when when something hurts, you'll soften
your needs to avoid being too much and center everybody else's
feelings over your own. That's the wound, not the
anxiety, not the panic, not the attachment.
It's the self abandoned men. Let's talk about triggers for a
second, right? Because these go hand in hand
when someone doesn't text back or when you notice a tone
change, like a change in someone's tone when plans aren't
fully confirmed, when someone pulls away and there's a little
bit of distance in the relationship and suddenly you're
like, I'm not OK. I feel sick.
My chest is tight. I feel like I'm about to be
rejected. That reaction is not about now.
And this is something I go into very deeply inside the connector
woman, we have an entire module on triggers, right?
It's an old emotion being activated in the present.
So your nervous system isn't responding to someone hasn't
replied, right? It's responding to this feels
like I'm about to be left and I'm not going to survive that.
And yeah, I get it. That sounds dramatic.
But biologically, that fear was once real.
As a child, abandonment did equal danger, right?
If you got abandoned when you were two months old, you're
going to die. And so that nervous system that
fight or flight still lives in our primal brain.
It lives in our nervous system. So your nervous system hasn't
quite caught up to the fact that you are grown now that actually,
and this is the catch 22 about an abandonment wound, you can't
actually be abandoned by another human being as an adult.
You actually can't. You can, you can be left.
You cannot, but you cannot be abandoned, right?
So your nervous system hasn't quite caught up to the fact that
you're, you're grown up now. And this is foundational because
every time the abandonment wound activates, you need to make this
distinction. I'm triggered, but I am not
unsafe or I am triggered and I am safe.
This is not about survival. This is about connection.
Your nervous system doesn't know the difference until you teach
it the difference. And you don't teach it by
forcing yourself to calm down or gaslighting yourself or telling
yourself don't be so anxious. You teach it through repetition
and emotional proof, right? Repetition and emotional proof.
So what does this mean? Let's get practical for a
second, right? Because I will say this over and
over and over again, healing doesn't happen just by
understanding. It's all well and good that you
can tell me your triggers and where they came from and why
they're there in the childhood wound that they're associated
to. And this thing that happened
when you were seven years old and your mom and your dad.
Great, right? But healing doesn't happen by
understanding. It happens by doing something
different when the trigger hits. So first, name the feeling,
don't suppress it, right? Not I shouldn't feel this way,
but OK. I feel anxious, I feel scared, I
feel rejected, I feel abandoned. Right when you name it, you stop
being so inside of it, if you will, right?
Second clock the story that your mind is telling you so ask
yourself what meaning am I giving this right now?
Usually it's like I'm not important, I don't matter, I'm
about to be left, I'm not enough, they don't care.
Whatever it is, put it on paper if you want to get it the fuck
out of your head, right? So put it on paper, voice note
yourself, say it out loud, whatever you need to do, just
get it out. All of these stories of what
you're making it mean and then 3rd question the fuck out of it,
right? Not let me think positively, but
can I actually know that this is true, right?
So for instance, I'm not important.
Can you actually know that that is true, right?
Because most abandonment stories are just recycled bullshit from
your childhood. Feelings are not facts, right?
So these stories that we create, they're not factuals.
So then, sorry, factuals is not a word.
They're not factual. They are not facts, right?
4th, find proof, real proof that you are not alone.
I want you to look at who shows up for you, who has stayed, who
has proven consistency. Our brain often needs evidence,
not necessarily affirmations. The combination of those two.
Chef's kiss, right? And then fifth, meet the need
yourself first. So this is where the wound
actually heals. Ask yourself, what do I need
right now? Is it reassurance, safety,
comfort, grounding? And instead of outsourcing that
to someone else, you give it to yourself.
And this is how you stop emotionally abandoning yourself.
Here's the uncomfortable truth. Abandonment wounds don't heal
just because someone stays. They heal because you do, right?
Abandonment wounds don't heal because someone stays.
They heal because you do. There's this misconception of
like, oh, if I could just get someone and they never leave me,
then I'll never feel this again. That's not true.
Because as I said, you can be in a conversation with someone and
still feel emotionally abandoned, right?
But The thing is, you don't leave yourself.
Because every time you choose yourself, every time you soothe
your own system, every time you choose to not chase or beg or
overexlain or collapse, you send a new message to your nervous
system. I'm here.
I won't leave you. You're safe with me.
That's the reprogramming. Not intellectually, but
somatically, right? Somatically meaning like of the
body, emotionally and repeatedly until this wound is healed.
And then, you know, inconsistency, like until this
wound is healed, inconsistency. It feels familiar, right?
Emotional unavailability. It feels magnetic.
That push pull feels like intensity and chemistry and all
of the things, right? Not because you consciously want
chaos. I don't know, maybe you do, who
knows, Maybe you're a glutton for punishment, but because your
nervous system is trying to resolve that old injury, right?
It's like, imagine you had this, like right now, I've got this
fucking massive bruise. I, I fell or like walked into
something the other day and I've got this massive bruise on my
thigh. And every time that I just
lightly touch it, it hurts, right?
So you can imagine if I touch my other leg, I can squeeze my leg
and that doesn't hurt. But having an abandonment wound
is like having a massive fucking bruise that anytime someone
doesn't have to punch you in the bruise for it to hurt, they just
have to lightly graze over it. And it's like, Ouch, ah, and
it's triggered, right? And so that's your nervous
system trying to resolve that old injury.
And that's exactly why knowing better isn't enough.
You have to become someone. You have to become the woman who
no longer abandons herself. And This is why the connected
woman exists, right? My signature program.
Not to make you secure on the surface, but to heal the root of
why connection feels so fucking unsafe in your body in the first
place. So inside the connector wound,
we heal abandonment wounds properly.
We stop self abandonment patterns, We rewire anxious
attachment responses and avoid an attachment stuff.
Yeah. We build self trust, emotional
safety and secure relating. So you don't have to white
knuckle your way through dating or lose yourself in
relationships or panic every time there's a little bit of
space in your relationships. So the Connected Woman starts in
February. And if this episode felt
personal, it's because it is. I have designed them that way.
All right, guys, thank you for hanging out with me today.
I love you and I will see you next week.
All right, my love, let what landed today actually land
because this podcast is not just here to inspire you.
It is here to change you, your standards, your patterns, your
life. And if you are done living on
autopilot, you're done shrinking.
You're done repeating the same fucking shit over and over.
Let this be your reminder. You are built for more.
Unfucking your life is a choice you make every single day.
And if you want to go deeper, come hang out with me on
Instagram at Michelle Panning because that is where I share
all of the raw stuff, the real time shifts that I'm having in
my life and everything that I am doing to raise my own standards
to in life and in love. I love you.
I believe in your next level. Go and fuck your life, babe.