Skip to content

Abandonment Depression: Healing

Overview

The abandonment depression is the bedrock wound beneath CPTSD — a layer of deadness, despair, and inconsolable grief left over from childhood. Because our nervous systems learned to treat even a hint of depression as dangerous, we reflexively launch into fear, toxic shame, inner critic attacks, and 4F survival behaviors rather than feeling it. This note maps that cycle, explains why feeling the depression (rather than fleeing it) is the deepest recovery work, and walks through the somatic mindfulness tools for doing so.

Quick Reference

  • The cycle of reactivity: Depression triggers fear/shame, which fires the inner critic, which launches a 4F response — and it runs in both directions

  • Self-abandonment is learned: Parents who rejected our depression taught us to reject it too; recovery means unlearning that reflex

  • Depressed thinking vs. feeling depressed: Eliminate catastrophic thought-loops; allow the actual feeling

  • Somatic mindfulness (sensate focusing): Sit with physical sensations of fear first, then deeper depression sensations — focused attention metabolizes them

  • Hunger, tiredness, and emotional hunger can all be disguised abandonment depression — use HALT as a check-in prompt

  • The goal is necessary vs. unnecessary suffering: normal depression is tolerable; reflexive self-abandonment into the full cycle is what recovery dismantles

The Cycle of Reactivity

Understanding the layered structure of a flashback reveals why it can feel so relentless and self-sustaining.

1. The forward cycle

A flashback begins when something — often a minor frustration — stirs a sense of abandonment or depression. The nervous system, conditioned by childhood, interprets that depression as dangerous and immediately escalates it into fear and shame. The inner critic seizes on that fear, generating catastrophizing thoughts that amplify the panic. Finally, the body launches into whichever 4F survival mode is most habitual: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

  • The full sequence: Depression → Fear/Shame → Inner Critic → 4F Response
  • The process typically happens faster than conscious awareness can catch it

2. The reverse cycle

Recovery can temporarily make things worse when noticing a 4F behavior triggers a new wave of self-criticism, which amplifies fear and shame, which deepens the depression. This reverse loop explains the "spiraling down" sensation many survivors describe during intense flashbacks.

  • Catching the reverse loop early: Notice 4F behavior without immediately judging it; self-attack only re-enters the cycle

3. Layers of dissociation

Each layer in the cycle is also a defense against the layer beneath it. Acting out in a 4F response mutes awareness of the critic; the critic distracts from fear and shame; fear and shame keep the actual abandonment depression out of consciousness. This is dissociation in its everyday, functional form — it protected us as children but now perpetuates the cycle.

  • Recovery is progressive: awareness expands outward from the 4F behavior, eventually reaching the depression itself

  • Later-stage work means being able to stay present to the depression rather than fleeing it upward through the layers

Deconstructing Self-Abandonment

The original wound was parental abandonment. The ongoing wound is the habit of abandoning ourselves the moment depression arises.

1. How parental abandonment becomes self-abandonment

When depression appeared in childhood, caregivers responded not with comfort but with anger, disgust, or withdrawal. The child learned to preemptively reject her own depressed states before they could attract that punishment. In adulthood, the mildest low mood can instantly restimulate the full weight of the original abandonment.

  • Even culturally "normal" contempt for depression (productivity culture, "positive thinking" mandates) reinforces this dynamic

2. Depressed thinking vs. feeling depressed

These are fundamentally different experiences that recovery requires separating:

  • Depressed thinking (catastrophizing, critic loops, hopelessness narratives) — work to eliminate this

  • Feeling depressed (the actual somatic experience of listlessness, heaviness, emptiness) — allow and metabolize this

  • Depression can carry legitimate information: a signal to rest, or an honest read that a job or relationship has run its course

  • Overreacting to the feeling reinforces toxic shame and drives isolation, making the depression worse

3. Necessary vs. unnecessary suffering

The Buddhist distinction is useful here: normal, functional depression is necessary suffering — the honest cost of being alive. The full cycle of fear, shame, critic attacks, and 4F acting out on top of that depression is unnecessary suffering — the cost of unprocessed self-abandonment. Recovery narrows the gap between the two.

Somatic Mindfulness: The Core Tool

The deepest recovery work is learning to stay present to depression through the body rather than fleeing it through the cycle.

1. What somatic mindfulness is

Also called sensate focusing, this practice means turning attention toward the physical sensations of emotional states — staying with them without launching into reaction. It is not thinking about feelings; it is actually feeling them in the body.

  • Key resource: Steven Levine's Who Dies as an accessible, jargon-free guide to mindfulness practice

2. Working through fear first

Because depression in CPTSD almost instantly morphs into fear, the entry point for most people is the physical sensations of fearful hyperarousal:

  • Mild fear sensations: jaw tightness, throat constriction, chest tension, belly tension, diaphragm pressure

  • Intense fear sensations: nausea, jumpiness, feeling wired, shortness of breath, hyperventilation

  • The work is to notice when awareness flees the body into spacing out or worry — and gently return it to sensation

  • Persistent, non-reactive attention to fear sensations dissolves them — they become integrated rather than endlessly cycling

3. Reaching the depression layer

Once enough practice reduces the fear layer, subtler depression sensations become accessible. These are hypo-aroused states, quiet and easy to miss:

  • Heaviness, swollenness, exhaustion, emptiness, hunger, longing, soreness, a sense of deadness

  • The main obstacle: falling asleep. Sitting upright in a chair rather than lying down helps maintain awareness

  • With sufficient practice these sensations can soften into relaxation and ease, and occasionally into a felt sense of clarity and belonging

4. Somatic work can surface grief

Focusing somatically sometimes opens memories or unworked grief about specific childhood experiences. This is therapeutically useful — it provides opportunities to grieve losses more fully. If more comes up than feels manageable alone, bringing a trusted person or therapist into the process is appropriate.

Disguised Forms of the Abandonment Depression

The abandonment depression frequently masquerades as other physical states.

1. Emotional hunger vs. physical hunger

Attachment hunger — the longing for safe, nurturing connection — can feel indistinguishable from physical hunger, especially shortly after eating. Food cannot satisfy it; only loving support can.

  • Location clue: emotional hunger tends to register in the small intestine (lower abdomen); physical hunger in the stomach (higher up)

  • Meditating on that lower-abdomen sensation often reveals a low-level flashback underneath

2. Emotional tiredness and pseudo-cyclothymia

Emotional exhaustion from chronic self-abandonment can feel like physical fatigue. When this is misread as a physiological problem, no amount of diet, sleep, or supplement change resolves it — which typically piles on more shame.

  • The cyclothymic two-step: flight types self-medicate emotional tiredness with busyness and adrenaline, eventually crash into accumulated depression, then re-launch at the first sign of energy — creating cycles that can look like bipolar disorder

  • HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired) is a useful check-in: any of these states can signal a flashback into abandonment depression

The Swiss Army Knife Approach to a Flashback

A full flashback resolution integrates multiple tools across all layers of the cycle simultaneously, rather than working on one layer in isolation.

1. Name it first

The moment reactivity is noticed — a surge toward frantic activity, a tightening in the body — the first move is simply labeling it: "I am having a flashback." This activates the observing self and breaks the automatic escalation.

  • Corresponds to Flashback Management Step 1

2. Return to the body

Move to a safe seat, close eyes, and bring attention directly to wherever fear registers somatically — often the diaphragm or abdomen. Stay with the sensations rather than narrativizing them.

  • Corresponds to Step 7 ("ease back into the body")

  • Slow, deepened breathing while attending to belly muscle movement helps the cycle of tension begin to release

3. Interrupt the critic

When catastrophizing thoughts arrive, apply a thought-correction mantra that counters the sense of endangerment. Something grounding and realistic works better than forced positivity.

  • "I am safe; I am relaxing" is an example

  • Corresponds to Step 8 (cognitive counter-attack)

  • Disidentifying from the critic — recognizing it as an internalized voice rather than the truth — is distinct from arguing with it

4. Allow the depression layer

As fear loosens, the underlying depression sensations will appear: deadness, tiredness, swollenness. The trained impulse is to flee back into fear or activity. The recovery move is to surrender to those sensations and welcome them.

  • Welcoming the deadness is the key phrase: not fighting it, not performing wellness, just letting it be present

  • With practice this layer can shift into genuine relaxation

5. Use grief and anger appropriately

Anger directed at internalized parental figures — not at people in present life — can release stored fear and shame. Brief, authentic tears often follow and provide real physiological relief.

  • Corresponds to Step 9 (the angering part of grieving)

  • This is boundary-setting against the internalized critic, not venting at others

6. Reaffirm with self-compassion

Close the cycle with a realistic, kind reframe from what Walker calls the remothering or refathering self: the adult part that can actually provide what the inner child needed. The framing is practical: "This is small potatoes. You are not in danger."

  • The sense of triumph after successfully working through a flashback is real and worth marking — it reinforces that the cycle can be broken

Sources