the paradox of abandonment
How trauma gave rise to the lone wolf—and what it takes to come home to connection.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt alone, oscillating between feeling like an empowered lone wolf and an abandoned young girl. And to be honest, both are true. The empowered lone wolf identity was molded from my abandonment trauma. In Internal Family Systems (IFS), we refer to this as the Manager—a proactive protector identity that is created to please, produce, and perform to prevent pain.
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The Manager is one of two Protector parts in IFS, the other being the Firefighter (more on that in a future article). These parts protect the Exile—the younger and most vulnerable part of us that experiences pain and holds emotional wounds such as shame, rejection, grief, and fear.
I’ve also yearned for genuine connection—to feel seen, held, loved, acknowledged, and understood by those around me. As hard as I tried to achieve this sense of connection in my life, I continued to feel abandoned by those around me, which only strengthened my lone wolf identity—the version of myself that craved independence, relying on my strength and resilience with pride.
Those with abandonment wounds will attempt to avoid the pain of abandonment at all costs, walking away from, avoiding, and perhaps even sabotaging their relationships.
There’s also a high probability of engaging in the same relational dynamics that led to the initial abandonment event, resulting in you repeatedly experiencing the same abandonment cycle with people who embody similar personalities to those in your past, while still yearning for genuine connection.
It’s quite the paradox, or as I prefer saying… it’s a mindfuck.
Many seek meaningful relationships, yet our behaviors often prevent us from experiencing them. The only way to shift this is through radical acknowledgment of our abandonment wounds and all of our parts—the Exiles and the Protectors. When we don’t, we will continue to experience abandonment and feel abandoned. I say that intentionally because, in addition to feeling abandoned, the actual experience of being abandoned will repeat itself. Unlike what many preach, it isn’t all in your head. This goes far deeper than mindset.
Your experience of being abandoned is not a limiting belief—it was a lived experience that is important to acknowledge.
My lived experience of abandonment involved being abandoned by many in my immediate and extended family system. From being gaslit, dismissed, blamed, and shamed… I learned early on that my feelings didn’t matter, leading me to believe I didn’t matter. Family members walked away, and those who were meant to be my protectors ended up being my aggressors.
Although I’ve been in “the work” for decades, it’s taken me years to acknowledge this trauma. I’ve been aware of it and worked through many layers of it. Still, so much of the work that I had done was through the lens of personal and spiritual development, which, in my opinion, had me bypassing the impact of this trauma in exchange for forgiveness and a false sense of enlightenment. I was dismissing my pain while overextending compassion to others, ultimately placing myself on a pedestal, as this appeased my ego.
This form of healing offers immediate relief, albeit at the expense of longevity in one’s healing journey, as it focuses on external sources of pain. And while that can be an essential step in one’s healing process, true healing can only be achieved when we focus on the internal aspects of the self, while addressing the imprint of trauma stuck within our bodies.
To heal trauma, we must unpack our beliefs, explore our family systems, get curious about our generational trauma, disentangle from the web of narratives that we’ve been told (and those that we’ve told ourselves), and work through the incomplete trauma responses in our physical bodies that continue to operate at an unconscious level.
Talk therapy serves a purpose and often plays a crucial part in one’s healing, as it provides a space where someone can feel seen, heard, and acknowledged without being gaslit, shamed, or blamed. But as I discovered, at some point, you’ll need to address the trauma patterns in your body. Otherwise, you’ll continue to unconsciously repeat the same cycles and relational dynamics in your life.
My first experience of therapy was with a psychologist in 2006, shortly after separating from my first husband. As much as I appreciated being seen, heard, and acknowledged by someone after years of being gaslit, shamed, and blamed, it became evident that she wasn’t the right fit for me when she started advising me to cut ties with my family and go my separate way. She would state this as if it were an easy thing to do, completely dismissing the larger and more devastating impact this would have due to my Indian culture. After months of working with her, I decided to stop and explore other avenues.
I tried hypnotherapy, but it ended up being only a single session. I don’t remember much, but I do remember being in a state of hypnosis and screaming in absolute terror and immediately being brought out of it. My hypnotherapist seemed shocked yet deeply compassionate, and I left that session with a blue crystal that she had gifted me from her collection.
Throughout this period of my life, I was an addict, drinking heavily and partaking in an obscene amount of recreational drugs, doing everything and anything to numb the pain within my body and quiet the voice in my head. And unbeknownst to me, I had surrounded myself with people who portrayed aspects of my aggressors and persecutors, as well as people who enabled my victimhood.
I was stuck in a cycle of trauma, perpetuating my pain, oscillating between feeling like a lone wolf and an abandoned young girl while desperately seeking help by all means necessary, which included falling victim to the hands of those who took advantage of my pain.
By 2012, I discovered the world of personal development. I had hit rock bottom and found myself at a choice point: do I want to live? Or do I want to die?
I chose to live and began exploring avenues of personal and spiritual growth which included the work of Esther and Abraham Hicks, Gabby Bernstein, Jack Canfield, and Dr. Wayne Dyer. This appealed to me because rather than continuing to dig into my past (which felt far too painful to do), I became focused on where I wanted to go and who I wanted to be. For the first time in what felt like forever, I started creating goals and had a vision for my life that excited me.
Despite my reservations about the personal and spiritual development industries today, I do believe they serve a purpose. For those who genuinely struggle to connect with their pain or envision a better future, exploring personal and spiritual development can offer a path forward, inviting them into something more fulfilling than what they’ve experienced. And this was precisely what I needed to create a sense of purpose—to bring myself into sobriety and toward a version of myself that craved meaning, not chaos.
For many years thereafter, I felt great. My positive experience with personal development led me to become a Certified Life Coach in 2014. Shortly after launching my coaching business, I gained recognition for my strength, resilience, and confidence. I exuded a potency that eventually became my brand image. But what I didn’t realize back then was that this was simply another iteration of my hyper-independence, which was rooted in trauma.
Resilience is built through trauma. It’s a process of being moved to and beyond the edges of our comfort zone, or as we refer to it in Somatic Experiencing®, our Window of Tolerance. Through this process, our nervous system learns to stretch its capacity, building resilience and elasticity as we travel in and out of a normal range of healthy activation.
Given the extent of my trauma, my sense of resilience was high. It seemed like I could easily bounce in and out of regulated states, when in reality, I was living more in a dysregulated state, characterized by extreme fluctuations between high highs and low lows, shifting between parasympathetic and sympathetic states.
What people saw was my stage presence and my ability to capture an audience—they felt the potency and directness of my voice, as well as the fierceness of my presence. But what I didn’t know at the time was that off-stage and behind the cameras, I would ride the waves of the stuck trauma responses within my body. Perhaps my stage presence was also a trauma response—a version of myself that was desperately seeking to feel like I mattered in this world. This is something I’m currently exploring in therapy.
I loved hosting and facilitating events, specifically my three-day event in L.A., Amplified Soul Live. I’m deeply passionate about helping people find their community and cultivate meaningful connections with others. This is one of my greatest gifts, yet I still struggled with this. I would instruct my event managers to pull me backstage between speaking blocks at my events, as I needed to recuperate away from the energy of others. Yet now, when I look back, I realize that when I was on stage, I was riding a high sympathetic state, and immediately afterwards, I would crash back into a parasympathetic state.
This pattern of moving to and beyond the edges of my Window of Tolerance proved to be too much for my system to handle, and eventually, my health began to suffer. From gut issues to adrenal fatigue to an abrupt decline in hormonal health and so much more, it became clear that my body was overwhelmed. But, I continued to override my system, pushing myself even more, forcing my mind and body to move beyond my capacity, which was a habit I prided myself on. It’s also a mental habit that's highly regarded within the personal development ecosystem.
There’s only so much our nervous systems can handle, and when you’re constantly riding these high sympathetic states, you will eventually crash.
And that’s what happened to me in 2022, after losing my dog Leia in a horrific incident that triggered every single one of my core wounds. Once again, I found myself in a situation where I was gaslit, blamed, and had the tables turned on me. My nervous system was in an extreme state of fight and rightfully so, because my family was in danger (due to the legal nature of this ongoing case, I cannot share too many details, but you can keep up with Leia’s story here.)
A few months later, my body gave out, and I reached a catatonic state.
I was extremely withdrawn and unable to engage with anyone or anything socially. I was a shut-in, and it often took immense effort to get out of my bed. My voice and affect were flat, my eyes glazed over, and my body had collapsed upon itself.
This is when I started working with a psychotherapist who was also a trained Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) and specialized in IFS.
At this time, I had already begun my journey into studying the impact of trauma on the body. I started with an exceptional program called “Trauma and Somatics,” which ultimately led to my certification as a Trauma-Informed Practitioner.
From there, I chose to deepen my studies by enrolling in Dr. Peter Levine’s three-year Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Training program. It was why I specifically chose this therapist to work with—I understood that it was time for me to go beyond traditional talk therapy and dive deeper than I ever could with personal development.
It was time to face the impact that my trauma had on me while acknowledging all parts of myself that were victimized—the parts of me that were desperately seeking to be seen, heard, understood, and witnessed.
The lone wolf within me was dying a slow, painful death. I had no strength left to hold myself up and felt compelled to let go, surrender, and lean in. The version of myself that had to keep myself safe could barely function, and the version of myself that feared abandonment was pushed to a place where I needed to trust others to survive.
And I don’t mean this as a metaphor—I was teetering on the verge of death, spending way too much time obsessing over my exit from this world, exploring ways to leave this physical realm as a way to end the torturous nature that had become my life.
It was time for me to heal the trauma that led me to create the lone wolf identity, and to do so, I needed to begin acknowledging the stuck trauma responses within my body. My abandonment trauma and belief of “I don’t matter” is one that is generational. It’s something that I believe my paternal grandmother experienced, and it has also been my own lived experience.
This trauma healing journey led to the complete dissolution of all identities that I still carried: the lone wolf, confident speaker, strong and resilient woman, successful entrepreneur, social and outgoing friend, podcaster, and so much more. I had nothing left to hide behind and nothing left to give, which also led to the inquiry, “Who am I if I’m not this?”
The deeper I went into my healing process, the more I surrendered and allowed myself to be. Due to the overwhelm within my system, my therapist titrated our sessions, allowing me a safe space to build up my Window of Tolerance slowly. I’ve moved at lightning speed my entire life, pushing, forcing, and overriding my system. It felt foreign and unsafe to move this slowly, yet the slow pace is exactly what my body needed to heal.
When it comes to healing trauma, we must move slowly, allowing our bodies to feel every sensation. When we move too quickly, we bypass sensations that need to be processed to complete stuck trauma responses.
The very nature of this slow pace can lead to extreme discomfort, which is why most people tend to move quickly, bypassing the discomfort in exchange for a more pleasant feeling. But those pleasantries are fleeting, which is why we end up repeating the same trauma cycles and relational patterns.
As much as I love the personal and spiritual industries, I’ve learned that they have limitations when it comes to trauma healing. While my lone wolf identity could be rationalized and even praised within the world of personal and spiritual development, the trauma healing space recognizes this identity as a trauma response.
I’m working through my Manager—the proactive protector identity created to please, produce, and perform to prevent pain, while also offering deep acknowledgement to my Exile—the younger and most vulnerable part of me that has experienced pain and holds shame, rejection, grief, and fear. I’m uncovering the dissonance found between what my mind thinks and what my body holds. And throughout this healing journey, I’m beginning to recognize and love who I am, beyond my trauma.
The part of me that yearns for meaningful connection now understands that I can seek this out in healthy ways, with boundaries. And the part of me that once felt like I had to take care of myself and be in control is now learning to trust others, allow, and surrender.
The beauty of true somatic healing is that it helps us dissolve the identities that have held us hostage to narratives that no longer serve us, breaking free from unhealthy relational dynamics and trauma cycles. It brings us back to our truth while offering our bodies a new way to move through life. It provides us with a sense of freedom.
Have I healed my abandonment wound?
Not yet, but I’m getting close.
Have I fully released the lone wolf within me?
Not yet, but I no longer feel a desire to maintain that identity.
Am I ready to engage fully with the world around me?
Not yet, but I’m beginning to explore the edges of socially engaging with people that I feel safe around.
The point being… I am healing, and I am trusting the process of moving slowly to allow my body to feel, experience, and process every single sensation so I can heal.
#PotentTruth:
The lone wolf within you
was born through trauma,
and eventually, it will become
far too heavy a burden to carry.
Healing this trauma requires
you to acknowledge the parts
of you that desire connection—
the parts of you that are seeking
to be seen, heard, witnessed,
and acknowledged.
As challenging as this trauma healing journey has been, I have never felt more alive or more human, nor have I ever felt this vulnerable or humble. I have nothing left to hide behind, and I am no longer oscillating between feeling like an empowered lone wolf and an abandoned young girl. Instead, I am exploring the grey areas between, and finding myself in the process.
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