How Play Impacts Healing After Emotional Abandonment

Emotional abandonment can stem from a lack of attentiveness to an infant or child when the child is young, or it can play out in adolescence and even adulthood in other impactful relationships. At its core, this type of abandonment can be subtle. Its message is that the person who suffered isn’t valuable enough to have their emotional, mental, or physical needs met, or those needs are only worthy when they’re convenient for the caregiver or other person.

Because it tends to be overlooked, it’s vital for someone who has experienced emotional abandonment to identify some of the signs and how those early experiences can shape their relationships. If you experienced a lack of attentiveness from your primary caregivers, you may:

• Not be vulnerable in relationships with close friends or your spouse.
• Struggle with physical affection.
• Suffer from anxiety, depression, self-harm, or low self-esteem.
• Be fearful where others aren’t and in situations that shouldn’t cause fear.
• Struggle to maintain long-term friendships.
• Keep to yourself and rely too much on your own ability to do things, rarely asking for help.
• Fear disapproval from your co-workers, boss, and spouse if you make a mistake or don’t do things perfectly.
• Suffered in school from low grades.
• Have significant memory gaps.
• Struggle with connecting to your emotions.

Causes of Emotional Abandonment

Emotional abandonment can happen at any point in a person’s life, but it’s more destructive to a child who has experienced the neglect of a primary caregiver. This might be through one or more parents who suffered from mental or long-term physical illnesses and weren’t able to care for the child’s needs.

Another cause of emotional abandonment may be a home where divorce separated a husband and wife when the child was young, and one or both parents were preoccupied with personal problems and neglected the concerns of the child. Other causes may simply be that a parent worked long hours and didn’t make attempts to connect with the child after work, or provided physical needs but dismissed a child’s emotions.

Emotional abandonment can make a person doubt what they experienced, particularly if a parent or caregiver doesn’t see their neglect as harmful. Comments like “Man up” or “You’re too sensitive” when a child cries or is fearful are emotionally damaging for children, especially if they’re commonly held beliefs in the family unit.

Healing and Hope

In Mark 10, we see Jesus scolding the disciples for sending children away. Jesus invited them in, recognizing that their curiosity was valuable and important. “When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.’” (Mark 10:14, NIV)

Jesus displayed a high value for children’s needs throughout Scripture, and a parent’s lack of responsiveness to their child can be redeemed. If you’ve suffered from emotional abandonment as a child, an adolescent, or in an adult relationship, there is hope.

Research shows that play-based intervention can help children’s brains respond in a collected, calm way to stimuli outside their control. But what can play do for adolescents, teens, and adults who need to rewire neural connections lost to emotional abandonment trauma?

Why Play Makes a New Pathway in the Brain

Play-based outcomes can significantly improve adults’ lives if they’re exposed to safe, interactive play as children. This impact continues in adolescence, even if play is replaced by friendships pursuing shared interests, such as playing basketball, swimming, or crafting.

How does play impact a child’s healing from emotional abandonment?

• Attachment-based play therapy can help a child learn to interact with a safe attachment figure, such as the therapist, while exploring emotions through reenactment, art therapy, or other forms of play.
• They can replace old neural pathways that a child learned through abandonment wounds with new ones as they engage in play through safe interventions with a play therapist. These new neural pathways help a child grow into a healthier adult by navigating the world through a lens in which others can be trusted, healthy attachments in friendships and relationships can form, and social interactions are life-giving rather than neglectful.
• Play is relational in nature, as is emotional abandonment. As a person plays in safe, low-risk environments, they’re connecting new neural pathways that say they can try out new social interactions where they’re accepted and cared about.

What to Do If Play Therapy Wasn’t an Option for You as a Child

While your abandonment may have left wounds that feel insurmountable, you can overcome unhealthy relational patterns; it’s not too late.

Emotional abandonment may have made you far less of a risk-taker because you don’t feel safe, seen, and known. You can rebuild trusting relationships through play over time. How do adults play, and in which ways does it help?

One thing you can try is to play with your pet. Even when done alone, this can open you up to laughter and fun, something that children who lived in fear of abandonment didn’t learn how to do as kids. Pets are not the only option.

You can play games with friends, even when they have no point. Being willing to play a board game, frisbee, or take up a new dance class that makes for a few laughs together means you’re taking risks in a safe environment where everyone is new and learning.

This is why you see so many companies using play-based activities for their team-building retreats. They may attend a conference together to learn about their skills, but incorporating play into the trip also means co-workers get a chance to let down their guard a little and find out about each other in ways that their work doesn’t always allow.

Other ways to build play into your daily life are to be playful with your spouse, not at their expense, but with them. Recount a funny story you experienced together, try out a new hobby, or go on a double date with friends to an escape room, a golf simulation restaurant, or a pickleball court.

Practicing play is more intentional as adults, even when you didn’t suffer emotional abandonment as a child. We get busy, and life responsibilities tend to take priority in our everyday routines. It’s easy to forget that play is essential to rebuilding damaged neural pathways, reconnecting with those we love, and helping our kids see that play is healthy.

If Being Vulnerable Makes Play Too Challenging

It’s not uncommon to feel that taking time away from work and household chores seems frivolous, difficult, or pointless at first. If you’ve spent a long time as an adult taking care of things, or you had to grow up too quickly as a child whose needs weren’t met, it’s going to feel foreign.

Asking a friend or your spouse to do something out of character, particularly if you’re not viewed as the fun one, can feel unsafe. If you grew up with emotional abandonment, you are putting yourself out there, hoping to receive a warm, attentive response. So, start small.

Begin with a short activity that can fit into your day, such as asking a co-worker if they’d like to take a loop around the building during a lunch break. Or ask a neighbor if they’d like to attend a community fundraiser movie in the park. It’s a fun activity, but one where you know the conversation will be limited to just before the movie starts.

Another means toward healing is to see a counselor to talk through possible wounds that have made emotional vulnerability scary. Our offices are staffed with licensed therapists who understand how to help you rebuild what’s been broken. Contact us today to start the process.