Recovering Your True Self

Earlier, I wrote about a mysterious phenomenon - "bonding to abuse" - experienced by victims of parental abuse or dysfunction. Therapists also use the term "enmeshment" to refer to it. It's based on the fantasy of bond permanence set up, fixated, or frozen by unresolved abandonment trauma.

If you are a victim with unhealed abandonment trauma, the only relationship you know anything about is with your abuser or persecutor. You only have this one relationship. Once enmeshed or fantasy bonded, you lose your true self and you repeat the enslaving relationship over and over again in your life.

Where is the way out of this? It is through legitimate suffering that original pain/inner child healing/grief work demands. To do this, you have to give up the false self and finally leave home. That is a therapeutic way to recover your true self.