TD Jakes - How to Push Past the Pain of Abandonment
You know, when we think of abandonment, let me just talk about abandonment for a few minutes. Let us suppose that he was, in fact, abandoned. But let us talk about abandonment. If you have a house and don’t do anything to demolish, destroy, or in any way devalue the house itself, except abandon it, then abandonment alone will lead to the deterioration of the house. With no water running through the pipes, no toilets being flushed, and no lights being turned on, it doesn’t sound like it would be abusive. However, the isolation of leaving the house to itself causes it to deteriorate at a far more rapid rate than it would if you used it. Abandonment has an effect on a house; it also has an effect on a car.
If you put your car in the garage and don’t drive it for a couple of years, when you try to start it, you’ll find that it doesn’t start: the battery has gone down, and little things have gone wrong with it. There’s something about using it, about moving in it; something about it being used for its intended purpose that is helpful to its survival. But if you stop using it for its intended purpose, it begins to deteriorate due to the absence of your attention, and it suffers from abandonment. Now, if a house or a car suffers from abandonment, let’s talk about people. The one thing that God said was not good, out of all the things that He created, was that it is not good for man to be alone.
When we are left alone, there is a feeling of abandonment that overwhelms us, and that is dangerous; it can shorten our lifespan—not because of heart disease or lung disease, but simply because we are isolated and confined. We begin to deteriorate much like the house or the car. It is so important that you don’t even need a person to be with you. It is a statistical fact that if you have a pet, something living in your house that you have to take care of, something that you have to feed, laugh, and play with, it begins to build a certain amount of resilience and strength in your life. It is not good to be alone. That feeling of abandonment can affect all of your life—not just the elderly, but the young as well.
To be abandoned by your mother is something that stays with you for all of your life. There may be a good reason for it, but it stays with you nonetheless. To be abandoned by your father affects you for all of your life. It influences how you see things, how you need people, how far you will go to get their attention and keep it, and how you want to please them because, in fact, you have been abandoned. It affects your approach to life itself. Some of the symptoms are that you always want to please others; you become a people-pleaser or give too much in your relationships—anything to get them to stay with you. There is an inability to trust others; some people lose their ability to trust other people.
I’m not talking about you specifically; I’m talking about those who push others away to avoid rejection. You won’t let anybody in because you don’t want to go through that kind of disappointment again, so you find excuses to push them away. They weren’t even there for the abandonment, but they receive the punishment for it because you won’t let them in. You may feel insecure in romantic partnerships and friendships, creating codependent relationships—all a result of being abandoned. It’s a scary feeling; it affects every other feeling you have for the rest of your life.
The good news is that there is healing for it. There’s help available; there are things that you can do to fill the absent spaces and finally bring yourself to a place of healing. Therapy and theology, in concert, can help you to understand that you were never alone—you just thought you were—that God had a plan for your life, which may have included going through a period of abandonment to create a thirst for Him that you might not have experienced otherwise. You have to be able to translate the bad into good, the oil into fire, the pain into purpose. You have to be able to translate it. However, some people get stuck in the pain of it and never reach the power and purpose of it, and they can’t translate it.