Many people think that being rejected and being abandoned are one and the same thing. In the past, before I started reading more about these two phenomena, I used to think almost the same when it came to a tragic outcome in a relationship. When I was asked to write about it from my own personal experience, it had me thinking quite a lot.

I believe that when a person comes out of their denial phase and start distinguishing between the two (rejection and abandonment), they become more enlightened, the victimization drops tenfold and they rediscover themselves anew, on the inside, as it should be.

First of all, being left or abandoned does not equal to the idea of being rejected. They are two things that intertwine and complement each other very well, and rightfully so. I think these two go together hand in hand, however they can also survive individually, one apart from the other. Nonetheless, the rejection comes on the maternal line, the abandonment on the paternal. You can live with someone and constantly reject them, but you can leave/abandon someone you love and not reject them at all. For some reason, though, you just have to go away and leave them, sometimes against your own will. And these are absolutely weird but viable case scenarios!

In my case, there were both the rejection and the abandonment, on both parental lines, both maternal and paternal. My mother constantly rejected me and sent me to my grandparents, and my father used to disappear from home for days in a row, leaving us – my brother and I - with the impression that he didn't want us and that he was constantly leaving us behind.

This is why, during the early years of my youth, I had developed an anxious-avoidant attachment style, exactly according to the environment I had at home. It was a constant table-tennis-like scenario, played like in the great world championships. Yes and no. Hot and cold. An absolutely exceptional bipolarity and a perfect emotional schizophrenia! It´s useless then to ask myself repeatedly why I ended up marrying a bipolar guy with narcissistic personality disorder, who was the son of a schizophrenic father. The answer lies in the past, in my childhood and adolescence. I did it subconsciously, to reproduce, from a false fidelity to my own past patterns, the same environment I had grown accustomed to and which I had known by heart. It was, after all, what I knew best to do or, if you like, not to do...

I started becoming the most servile person on planet earth. I had become an expert in brushing people with compliments and making up lines and stories only to "tickle" the ears and please the hearts of others. I did all kinds of favors, I let everyone steal from me at all times so that someone would like and accept me. I changed my attitude, my ways of thinking – if I had ever had any of my own, given my state at the time –, my character, I molded my whole being according to the will, desire and longing of those around me just so that they could learn to like me or at least to inspire in them an ounce of pity for me, so that I could belong to someone, anyone. Seeing pity in someone else´s eyes for me meant that they loved me. Unconditionally. And pity was my drug, which I most often mistook for love, true, pure and honest love.

Being an orphan was the most horrible and frightening thing that could have happened to me. I feared the idea of becoming an orphan more than anything else. And still the mere idea of being rejected and then left, only to end up as an orphan, meant that, inevitably, my state would draw upon me the desired pity, which might have secured my safety (emotional and not only) and my future.

Not being wanted and desired, that is, being rejected, meant being an orphan, that's what I thought at the time. Because only an unwanted child grew up in an orphanage. A wanted child was with the parents, didn't grow up at the grandmother's breast, with an alcoholic grandfather, taking the place of the mother, right?

And as for the abandonment, well, it never happened if I was cautious enough to leave a person before they left me because, by leaving them first, I was sparing myself so much extra suffering. Of the two, the rejection was crueler and bitterer for me than the abandonment itself. I had learned to be by myself, even though, at the time, I didn't like it at all, but it had become a necessity, bearable to a certain degree, obviously. But being among people who can´t stand you or who constantly show you that you are never what they imagined you would be... That was a thing I could not learn to accept.

I experienced the peak of my rejection and abandonment in my former marriage. My ex-husband's rejection, which was so overt, towards me, the woman he had courted and desired so strongly before marrying, was hard to swallow. And so, when the person you love most or imagine you love so dearly rejects you, your emotional safety crumbles and you start being creative. Creative in fear.

I had been married for almost two years. My ex-husband didn't want me, didn't touch me, was disgusted by me, a fact he would constantly repeat, lest I should forget, whenever he had the chance. He would make sure I never forgot that I had never been what he had dreamed of. Besides being accused of being the assassin of his life and destroyer of his destiny, a monster, a fool and a liar, that I was the killer of his soul and the ruiner of his happiness, I was also the most boring being on this planet, and I never managed to satisfy or please him.

He was already leading a double life. Then I thought – and it was the biggest madness of my life, apart from the marriage itself, obviously – to find him a prostitute from the red light district of the city where we lived at the time. Seeing my ex-husband satisfied was my only goal in life back then. It was my barometer, the certainty and guarantee that I would not be abandoned by him, and maybe thus his rejecting me would have decreased in intensity. He didn't love me, he had never really loved me. But I had never understood or accepted that. In my own naivete I was truly convinced that my love had been enough to make him want me. That my obedience was sufficient to change his opinion of me. But how can you love someone and make them understand you love them, unless you love yourself first, with that human dignity given to you by God? And at that time I didn't love myself at all. Or I loved myself to the point of contempt and self-hatred and for the purpose of manipulating others.

It was in my nature to be servile and to serve, to lie down like a rug before the one I adored and idolized, knowing that I would count for that person, that I would be everything to the ones I wanted around me. I was capable of procuring him anything or even anyone just to satisfy his desires. This meant that, if he didn't touch me, at least he would touch a woman, hired, given or sent by ME, who would satisfy him, and thus I would have fed on his pseudo-happiness. The smile on his lips when he was aroused or when he ejaculated was a true pleasure for me. It was my only joy. The only there was at the time. I may sound very obscene but I cannot lie about it.

When I thought about how to hire him a prostitute and procure him other obscene things, I heard a gentle but firm voice in my soul: "What are you doing? Are you going to sell your soul for a man? Where is the dignity I gave you?"

I stopped immediately. I started crying. I knelt down. I understood that what I was about to do would have become the road paved with good intentions to an even greater inner hell.

"I can't let him go!" I screamed.

"Let him go, surrender him to me”, the voice replied.

"I can't, I just can't!"

"You can! I'll help you!"

"Nobody wants me, nobody wants me, he too is throwing me into the trash! I'm an orphan", I shouted.

"I'm with you, let him go, surrender him to me", the voice said.

With a heavy effort that I felt in every fiber of my being I let go of the being to whom I had attached myself and who was holding me a prisoner.

"He´s yours, you made him, I surrender him to you. Help me, I'm addicted to him."

I think I had been crouched on the bedroom floor for quite some time when I woke up. I had fallen asleep there, completely flat like a rag. I felt like a rag because I had made myself a rag for someone else, for the sake of not being rejected and abandoned.

After I let go of him and surrendered him to the Higher Power, His Creator, I repeated this exercise of "letting go" of the leash from my hand daily, several times a day even, especially when I was seized by jealousy that was stronger than death and more burning than the Olympic flame, consuming all my limbs. And I truly experienced the release of that overload on my shoulders, that obsession of doing everything, absolutely anything, just to stir a glimpse of pity, if love was impossible to awaken, just to not feel rejected (as I had been by my mother) and abandoned (as I had been by my father).

My way or the wrong way

People who feel rejected and/or abandoned from early on develop all sorts of creative manipulative techniques to not feel insecure. The fear of being rejected and/or abandoned is so strong that a need to control things, their whole environment, arises. And this need for control stems from a true need of feeling safe and at ease. Basically what these people think without actually thinking sounds more or less like this: “I want to control everything and everyone within the environment I live in because this is the surest way to feeling secure and safe.”

People who have this need for controlling never felt safe or physically and/or emotionally secure when they were children. And the first ones to provide them with this safety were, certainly, the parents, their first tutors, guardians and providers. Their first idols. Their first gods.

If somebody truly believes in a higher power, in a god, in an entity that is above and beyond what our human but limited powers can produce, knows that this god or entity is almighty and provides safety. If he didn´t, there would be no point in believing in a higher power, right?

But believing is not necessarily trusting. Unfortunately, much of the apostasy today originates from a deep sense of mistrust or distrust in everyone and even in this higher power we choose to believe in (yet not fully trust).

People with a strong need for controlling and manipulating, when they are unable to keep their things in order – according to their old patterns developed in childhood – or keep their shit together, feel as if they are threatened. The moment they feel threatened they feel as if their whole life is falling apart, which is why, immediately, the brain goes into “survival” mode. A lack of safety equals death. It is so lethal that these people will do anything to keep themselves alive. This form of threat is very subtle and not easily recognizable. In fact, these people will almost always deny that they go into the defense mode, trying to defend whatever it is they think they are losing.

Control in general requires a sustained effort from us because, most of the times, we face so much resistance from others. Nobody likes being controlled or manipulated. When we face this resistance, we become creative and start seeking solutions to be able to control and manipulate. Yes, controlling is manipulating, even if you thought otherwise.

The solutions we resort to are not always the most kosher. Sometimes they imply blackmailing or conditions that are being imposed to other people, only to determine them to accept our controlling and manipulating them. Certainly, according to the degree of the resistance we face, we can become more or less creative. And what we do or not do to control, to persuade, to manipulate others… Our attempts at controlling other people or life situations will manifest without us realizing what we are doing, without us understanding that what we are doing turns into a habit as old as time itself.

The better I control, the safer I feel. The less I have control over something or someone, the less secure I feel. Simple, right? The ongoing effort of controlling drains us because of our habit of thinking in schemes that are meant for simply manipulating. And, in the end, control and manipulation leaves us without solutions, energy and always so insecure, and that´s only because – and this is a fact – we cannot manipulate until the end of times. Just as we hate being manipulated, at a certain point we refuse to accept and allow no one to control our behavior. Like other people who resist us when we try to manipulate them. We always end up feeling insecure, at the expense of the need for control.

You might ask: “What does this have to do with what you were writing above?” Well, it has a lot to do with it. Have you ever imagined that victims can control and manipulate? I can see how outraged you are right now, thinking: “That is absurd!” Is it now?

Well, let me start by saying that a victim remains a victim because she can never get out of her schemes of trying to control everything and everyone. Her permanent state of the art is… INSECURITY. Yes, don´t roll your eyes! It´s a fact. We become and remain victims because we choose to end up and remain in an insecure environment. This is what makes us victims: insecurity and lack of physical, emotional, religious, financial and ethnical safety.

When we feel unsafe, we are afraid of change, of the unknown. Remember, the lack of safety was first and foremost felt at home! You become a victim because you are afraid of being rejected and/or abandoned and end up being creative in putting on masks and deceiving so well, that the abuser “has no other choice but to stay around and suck the life out of you”. Yup!

Every slave remains a slave because he chooses to stay with his master. Otherwise he would have fled long ago. I, too, was a slave and chose to remain a slave, for the sake of slavery itself, because that was my only way of feeling safe. Like the Jews under the Egyptian pharaoh with the hardened heart, a story depicted in the Old Testament. If life is so hard and evil, why do we not choose to leave it behind and flee? This is a good question we can all reflect upon…

Under the Pharaoh with a hardened heart

I am thinking of all my pretenses during my marriage. How I hid and how many masks I wore: when I was at home with my ex-husband I was the meekest lamb, the minute I left home I turned into a bee, at work I was an ant, then at the school where I taught I was in my own skin. Basically, whenever I left home I felt at ease. I used to hide the shoes and clothes I bought, so that he wouldn't see them, so that he wouldn't reprimand me for spending money, which was my money. After I bought them, I used to keep them hidden in the closets for several months in a row, then I would take them out, try them on and wear them when he wasn't at home to see me. When I got home, I used to leave my shoes on the doorstep, hidden either under the stairs or in the basement, so he did not have the chance to discover them and then I would go upstairs barefoot. I would hide my money, the cosmetics, the medicine, the underwear I bought, even the sweets I craved and bought for my own pleasure or my favorite food. In a nutshell, I hid…

I would watch movies or read a book in secret, I would recite my prayers in secret. Sometimes I would wake up so he would see me awake, lest he should reprimand me for being lazy, but after he left home, I would go back to bed because I was anemic and always so exhausted, especially during my convalescence. I would meet up with my friends secretly, on the run. Sometimes they would come over to my place, yet only when my ex-husband was at work and I was home alone. I would never talk on the phone while he was present, out of shame and sometimes out of fear. I would talk to my family when he was absent, so he would not say anything against me or them. I would hide the number of hours I worked so I could put money aside for whatever need or necessity I had. I used to whisper a lot. I was hunched and walked around so rigidly, always on eggshells. I would put on some makeup when I was alone, and when he was at home I would take my makeup off and dress like a puritan. I was ashamed of my body altogether.

I was always in the defense mode. I would flinch when he popped up. I almost always had a forced smile on my face, so as to not upset or provoke him. I only talked about certain topics so that he wouldn't scold or criticize me. I was afraid of him at every step. I did sports because he wanted me to. It was a huge effort on my part, when we used to go on trips, cycling and visiting other cities. But I did all of that, only to please him.

I cooked what he liked and he always had a warm meal right when he walked in the door in the evening. I never badmouthed anyone. I never complained about anything. Everything was OK. I swallowed. Until my thyroid swelled. Then I ended up choking. I had insomnia. I felt like he was watching me and keeping me under a magnifying glass almost all the time. I was constantly under scrutiny. How I talked, ate, reacted, prayed, dressed, behaved, thought, sighed or mumbled... I lived like a slave. Like a robot. A lifeless creature. I can't forget these moments. Maybe I shouldn't. I allowed my personality to be completely censored, until I disappeared altogether, exactly like the colors I was wearing at the time, i.e. gray, beige, greige, black, dirty white that I was wearing for fear I should be noticed...

I existed but in fact I did not exist at all. I had no voice, no profile, no power, no humanity. I was truly robotic. An automatism had set in that I had a hard time getting out of. It was so toxic, so sick, but I couldn't imagine myself without it. It was what I knew best, it was home. An example: my father suffered from chronic insomnia throughout his life. He was an authoritarian, rigid, tyrannical, dictatorial, hermetic character, sometimes very strict. Out of fear of him and lest I should disturb his precious sleep, we never left the attic to go downstairs to the bathroom after bedtime. So we used to relieve ourselves on the roof, sticking our butts out in the air, even in wintertime. When we were kids, until we lived in the attic, where we each had our own room, my brother and I would hide and, to protect ourselves from our father and his severity, we would urinate under the rugs in the bedroom where we both slept. Years in a row.

More so, when I was young, I used to hide a lot. Myself, my things, my wishes, my personality. Basically, what I did under my ex-husband´s scrutiny I had done it already at home. It was a perfect copy paste. My ex-husband personified my father impeccably.

From Egypt into the promised land

It almost cost me my life to stand up for myself and speak my mind, allowing myself to listen to my needs and fulfill them. And they were existential needs, namely food, medication, hospitalization, clothing and footwear, free time, social life, religion, beliefs and convictions, finances, the right to myself and the right to life.

The right to a minimum of emotional comfort in which to feel safe and grow, to flourish, and not disappear. It was a real lesson for me. For me. So that I could learn the meaning of life, the value of so many things, what a human being is and its integrity, what and who God is and what is His relationship with man. But most of all, what I learned was that I had a very strong need for controlling. Of having things my own way. And which way was that? The way it had been at home, back in the days. Talk about patterns…

I learned to take off my daily masks and walk around naked, without fear that someone might attack my inner vulnerability, my psycho-emotional body. The antidote to control is VULNERABILITY. To be vulnerable means to NOT be in a state of safety. In fact, it makes you all naked in front of others. And when you are naked you feel the need to cover yourself, to protect and shield yourself. But the minute you raise your hands to do so, you basically end up taking the leash into your own bare hands and you start all over again. I´m sorry to say this but we, victims, excel in this.

If you are with someone who fights harder to censor you, run away as fast as you can. But if you are with someone who accepts you for who you are, with all your nuances, with your good and bad side, then you are at home, you are free, you are whole, you are HUMAN. Not a robot, not a god, not a statue, not a slave. You are God's creation. The crown of His creation. I have learned and am still learning, I am still retaking certain lessons. I constantly rebuild my inventory so that I can live constantly, not sequentially. Not just today, not just tomorrow, but daily, to be authentic, to be me. Unadulterated. It is the highest feeling for me. When I am me, without masks, without pretenses and tricks, then I have nothing to fear. My heart is not crooked but straight. It is free and light-weighted because it is not burdened by my need for control.

The conclusion: I sold myself short for a man who trampled my personality, my soul, my being. For my pseudo love for him. I would have been capable to surrender to my enemy, just to wet my lips with a drop of the nectar of true love that I was searching for, like a madwoman, to find out what it is and how it manifests itself. I had been searching for it my whole life. I was willing to eat like a stray dog even just a crumb that would have fallen from the table of my earthly masters. That's how I was. Today I'm not like that anymore. I'm not afraid of being rejected because I do not rely on the opinions of others. Moreover, I am not afraid of being abandoned because I don't look for characters just to populate my world, like I did in the past, only to get drunk with the idea that someone wants me, desires me, loves me and takes me home, takes me upstairs, from where my parents used to send me to my grandparents. Fear disappeared and a feeling of great inner security set in, even when someone walks their own path, which is completely different than mine. It was a lesson for me to gain my own freedom when I was a servant of the Pharaoh.

Crossing the desert into Canaan

I have asked myself way too many times, what the antidote to manipulation was. You might be surprised and scandalized to find out that it's the one thing that society today hates more than anything and runs from it like the devil before frankincense. It's one thing that we despise and are disgusted by, because, when we resort to it, it makes us look weak, frail, fragile, puny, helpless, incapable, humiliated, easily hurt. Like the word itself, VULNERA, the meaning shows what happens when we are like that: we show, expose our frailty, our impotence, our wounds, our emotional and physical nakedness. We are vulnerable.

But then, if you think about it, when you are bare naked in front of everyone, there is nothing more to be taken from you. It's like a dead-end of the situation. If we knew this trick, we would cut short the number of abuses and perpetrators of abuse in today's society. Because there is no abuser without a victim, a person who, try as they might, always seem to succeed in inviting the devil into their homes. 

What I did during my marriage years was one of the worst techniques of manipulating my background into what I had experienced at home. I tried to copy it by the letter. From a false loyalty to my old patterns. I nourished the fear even more, every single day, to have a subconscious assurance that I was on the right path, because I was doing exactly what I had been doing at home, when I used to be a child. And what exactly did I do? I hid and lied and pretended, to make sure I was not reprimanded, punished, criticized, rejected and, eventually, left for good.

Being in a state of vulnerability takes a lot of courage because it's like going to war, in the front line, without shield or weapon. And you just stand there waiting to be shot, pierced, wounded in so many ways and then killed... But it's also the ONLY thing that disarms your enemy. God Himself took upon Himself a vulnerable nature to block many ways of manipulation and to stop the hunger for power. In fact, by His meek vulnerability He disarmed and contradicted an entire construct of the time, the mentality of the epoch and many hardened and rigid hearts.

The question remains: If I had been upfront with my ex-partner, would I have cut the ties sooner? Maybe, but then maybe not. I just know for a fact that I would have been honest with myself and I would have, most probably, ended up deciding to leave him sooner than later. I needed about three years to understand what game I was in and gather the courage to leave the marital home.

Vulnerability is, in my humble opinion, the first state our parents, Adam and Eve, were in, when they were running around, naked, in the Garden of Eden.

The Scripture says it, they were naked and were not ashamed of that. It was probably one of the most beautiful states in which they lived, free and unhindered, light, worthy, trusting, like small children who play with their butts in the sand, completely in their parent. What more could we want?

The paradoxical freedom that vulnerability gives us reminds us that we are called to return to that very first state of innocence, right after man was created by the Hands of the Almighty. It's hard to enter the Garden of delights that our proto-parents were cast out of and punished with a constant need to cover themselves. This covering ourselves is an image for us putting masks and adopting skins and roles, which are against our nature. And we cover and embellish ourselves because we are desperate to cover the most intimate part, our essence. We are desperate to appear strong, not frail, to appear capable, not mad, to remove a primordial shame as old as time. We are ashamed and afraid to show ourselves with our good and bad sides. We feel humiliated when we have to get undressed, emotionally, before someone. Because by doing so you invite them to wound you.

Yes, vulnerability remains a sought for attribute and grace that is so hard to resort to. And yet it becomes one of the greatest weapons of a human being. It makes him helpless and uncapable only to invite the Father of all Might to bow down and raise our human and so very limited nature to a dignified rank only truly free people get a glimpse and taste of.

Less than half a year later after the incident with the prostitute I left the marital home. I was the one leaving the one I had feared would leave me. And yes – surprise, surprise! – I also began to reject all his false and manipulative advances to "win me back". I was closing a chapter, leaving behind a toxic past, leaving behind my Egypt ruled by a pharaoh with a hardened heart and now I was heading towards the Land where milk and honey flow, towards my Canaan, but not before entering the wilderness, not before crossing the desert of my soul. I do not feel the need to control and manipulate my environment anymore. I´d rather show myself as vulnerable as I am, instead of putting in that much amount of effort on my behalf, only to have it my way. So, what´s it gonna be: your way or the right way?