Abandonment Isn’t Just a Feeling... It’s a Shock to the Soul

I stumbled into Susan Anderson’s work while trying to survive the silence he left me with.

I wasn’t just sad. I wasn’t just angry. I was shattered.

And nothing made sense. Not even the grief. I kept asking myself, “Why is this hitting so hard? Why can’t I move on?”
I had been through heartbreak before. But this? This was something else entirely. It felt like death.

Susan Anderson calls it abandonment grief. And reading her words felt like someone finally turned the lights on inside my nervous system.

Because what I’ve been going through is not just emotional pain. It’s biological.
It’s the kind of grief that mimics death in the brain, the loss of connection, of meaning, of identity. A total rupture of safety.

She breaks it into five stages:

  1. Shattering: The panic, the devastation, the loss of self-worth. That was my entire first month.

  2. Withdrawal: The unbearable longing. Wanting him to come back even while knowing he shouldn’t. Waking up every morning hoping for a message.

  3. Internalizing: This one hurt most. Believing it must’ve been my fault. That I was too much. Not enough. The shame spiral.

  4. Rage: I touched this one too. The anger that he didn’t even give me a goodbye. That he got to move on like nothing. That he left me when I needed him most.

  5. Lifting: I don’t think I’m there yet. But maybe glimpses. In the temazcales. In writing this blog. In telling the truth.

What helped most about Susan’s work was the idea of the outer child — the part of us that acts out the pain of abandonment. She says your outer child is the one who begs for a message, checks your phone obsessively, rewrites unsent letters, imagines conversations over and over.

That hit hard.

Because I kept thinking “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stop?”
But Susan gave it a name and once you name it, you can meet it with compassion.

I realized: I’m not crazy. I’m not weak. I’m just a person whose deepest wounds were ripped open by someone who didn’t have the tools to stay.


Still figuring out what it means to hold myself when I’m spiraling.
Still trying to forgive.. not just him, but myself.

S...