Abandonment Trauma Deep Dive: Shame, Relationship Triggers & 5 Stages of Healing w/ Susan Anderson
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if the pain you’re feeling today isn’t about the breakup, but about every wound that came before it? When abandonment gets triggered, it pulls you straight back into the shame and fear of childhood.
Susan Anderson is a psychotherapist and author known as the leading expert on abandonment and healing attachment wounds. Her groundbreaking work comes not only from clinical expertise, but from living through the pain of being suddenly abandoned after nearly two decades of marriage.
- The Invisible Drain on Self-Esteem – Why abandonment trauma creates a chronic leak in self-worth that no achievement or relationship can fully patch until the wound itself is addressed.
- The 5 Stages of Abandonment – Shattering, withdrawal, internalizing, rage, and lifting — the swirl every survivor cycles through, and why knowing the stages helps normalize the chaos.
- How Childhood Shame Echoes in Adult Love – The rejection, neglect, or humiliation we experienced as kids resurfaces in relationships, fueling self-blame and emotional panic when faced with loss.
- Why We Choose Abandoning Partners – The unconscious pull toward people who can’t meet us emotionally, and how that cycle reenacts our earliest wounds.
- The Role of the Inner Child – How creating a “Big Me/Little Me” relationship gives us a way to reparent ourselves and redirect attachment energy inward.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Being abandoned is awful, but saying don't leave me is even worse. |
| 0:07.7 | My name is Andrea, and this is an old child. |
| 0:11.8 | Yeah, hey, now. Welcome back to Let it all go |
| 0:21.9 | What's making you slow now |
| 0:24.7 | Let it all go |
| 0:26.5 | Welcome back to adult child |
| 0:28.3 | Where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family |
| 0:32.9 | So basically I'm talking to like every damn person out there |
| 0:36.2 | Just not everybody has figured this out yet, okay? |
| 0:39.1 | Ahoy, my dear shit shows. |
| 0:40.8 | For any new listeners, my name is Andrea. |
| 0:42.9 | I am a total and complete shit show. |
| 0:44.7 | I'm the captain of this hot mess of a ship. |
| 0:47.0 | I'm an acquired taste. |
| 0:48.5 | We curse here. |
| 0:49.3 | You've been warned. |
| 0:50.4 | This is where we talk about all things. |
| 0:53.1 | Dysfunctional families, complex trauma, healing in a raw, vulnerable, and at times self-deprecating |
| 1:00.9 | humorous way. |
| 1:02.6 | It's like an uplifting, self-deprecating humorous way, right? |
| 1:06.7 | Because this shit is no joke and we got to be able to, you know, laugh when we can, okay? |
| 1:12.0 | The only way to survive this. |
... |
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