Accepting the Single Lifestyle
An excerpt from The Abandonment Recovery Workbook by Susan Anderson
Psychotherapist Susan Anderson had been helping her clients overcome heartbreak and loss for over twenty years when her longtime partner told her he didn’t love her anymore and left their relationship out of the blue. As she struggled to cope with her own pain from that abandonment, she recognized the extent to which realistic, well-researched, and clinically tested steps are required in order to heal from such a deep emotional injury. That is what her The Abandonment Recovery Workbook: Guidance through the Five Stages of Healing from Abandonment, Heartbreak, and Loss (New World Library, August 17, 2016) is designed to provide. We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the book about learning to accept the single lifestyle.
A primary task of abandonment recovery is to strengthen your ability to be a separate person. This is a first step in accepting the reality of your aloneness. Whether you are emotionally or physically alone, it is where you are right now. As you’ve discovered, protesting it doesn’t make it go away and only keeps you stuck in Withdrawal. The idea is to accept that you are alone for now and decide what you can do to make the best of it.
This requires a huge leap—all the way from focusing your energy on what you wish you had to what you do have. And what is that? You have yourself and your determination to benefit from your abandonment experience.
“I admit I’m lonely,” says Patrick. “But I’m not in any hurry to go out and meet someone. I’m still processing my separation from my wife of twenty years. I find being alone too important, too precious, too enlivening. I want to make it productive for me and learn all there is to learn about myself—learn how to be with myself so that if I do meet someone later on, I can meet her as a whole person.”
Being alone allows you to face yourself. You open yourself to revelations en route to discovering your higher self.
“I’d never been alone before,” says Sophia. “After my divorce, I thought I’d die. I lost not only the love of my dreams but my financial security. Alone, dejected, abandoned, rejected, betrayed—could things get any worse? Don’t ask. I was forced to move to an apartment that wouldn’t take pets. I couldn’t find anyone to take my dog and two cats and had to put them down. As bad as that was, I slowly began to see what an opportunity being alone was turning into. I got to realize how precious it was to finally have me. I’m doing for me for the first time in my life and it feels good.”
Being along is existing in a very real way. The layers of security provided by your ex are stripped away. There is no relationship to medicate the feelings that have awaited your attention all along.
“All the static and interference coming from the relationship are gone,” says Patrick. “It took her moving out before I got clear reception. Now it’s just me. My own existence—it’s what I have. I get to turn inside and see what I’m really about—the pure me. It is a death and a birth.”
Alone, we face ourselves and the reality of our life with extraordinary clarity. According to psychotherapist Peter Yelton:
To find yourself alone not by choice is the only gateway you’ll ever have to really knowing yourself. Only when the deep pain is acknowledged can the truly transformative occur. The painful aloneness creating this transformation is conceptually similar to Bill Wilson’s writings of psychic displacement, which when it occurs, miraculously transforms the hard-core addict into a recovering person.
Affirm your strength as a separate person and take actions to prove to yourself that you can stand on your own two feet. Who are you impressing with this transformation? Yourself.
A primary task of abandonment recovery is to strengthen your ability to be a separate person. This is a first step in accepting the reality of your aloneness. Whether you are emotionally or physically alone, it is where you are right now. As you’ve discovered, protesting it doesn’t make it go away and only keeps you stuck in Withdrawal. The idea is to accept that you are alone for now and decide what you can do to make the best of it.
This requires a huge leap—all the way from focusing your energy on what you wish you had to what you do have. And what is that? You have yourself and your determination to benefit from your abandonment experience.
“I admit I’m lonely,” says Patrick. “But I’m not in any hurry to go out and meet someone. I’m still processing my separation from my wife of twenty years. I find being alone too important, too precious, too enlivening. I want to make it productive for me and learn all there is to learn about myself—learn how to be with myself so that if I do meet someone later on, I can meet her as a whole person.”
Being alone allows you to face yourself. You open yourself to revelations en route to discovering your higher self.
“I’d never been alone before,” says Sophia. “After my divorce, I thought I’d die. I lost not only the love of my dreams but my financial security. Alone, dejected, abandoned, rejected, betrayed—could things get any worse? Don’t ask. I was forced to move to an apartment that wouldn’t take pets. I couldn’t find anyone to take my dog and two cats and had to put them down. As bad as that was, I slowly began to see what an opportunity being alone was turning into. I got to realize how precious it was to finally have me. I’m doing for me for the first time in my life and it feels good.”
Being along is existing in a very real way. The layers of security provided by your ex are stripped away. There is no relationship to medicate the feelings that have awaited your attention all along.
“All the static and interference coming from the relationship are gone,” says Patrick. “It took her moving out before I got clear reception. Now it’s just me. My own existence—it’s what I have. I get to turn inside and see what I’m really about—the pure me. It is a death and a birth.”
Alone, we face ourselves and the reality of our life with extraordinary clarity. According to psychotherapist Peter Yelton:
To find yourself alone not by choice is the only gateway you’ll ever have to really knowing yourself. Only when the deep pain is acknowledged can the truly transformative occur. The painful aloneness creating this transformation is conceptually similar to Bill Wilson’s writings of psychic displacement, which when it occurs, miraculously transforms the hard-core addict into a recovering person.
Affirm your strength as a separate person and take actions to prove to yourself that you can stand on your own two feet. Who are you impressing with this transformation? Yourself.
Susan Anderson is the author of The Abandonment Recovery Workbook, as well as Taming Your Outer Child and The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. The founder of the Outer Child and Abandonment Recovery movements, she has devoted the past 30 years of clinical experience and research to helping people resolve abandonment and overcome self-sabotage. Visit her online at www.abandonment.net.
Excerpted from the book The Abandonment Recovery Workbook: Guidance through the 5 Stages of Healing from Abandonment, Heartbreak, and Loss. Copyright ©2003, 2016 by Susan Anderson. Printed with permission from New World Library.