Abandonment

A parent keeping one sibling while giving another away

A parent or the adults responsible for you deciding to keep one sibling and give another away, to adoption, to foster care, to another relative, or somewhere else entirely. You may have been the one kept, the one given away, or somewhere in between if there were more than two of you. Including growing up wondering what made the difference between staying and going.

Somebody decided which of you stayed and which of you did not, and that decision was never yours to make or explain. It gets treated as one story, the family that split up, when really it is as many stories as there were children in that decision. Whether you were kept, sent away, or both happened around you to different siblings, the question of why tends to follow a person for the rest of their life. You do not need to have answered that question to be here.

What can follow an experience like this

No two people carry the same experience the same way. These are some of the effects that people with this experience often describe. Having some of them, all of them, or none of them says nothing about how real what happened to you was.

Shame Not guilt about something you did. Fear of being abandoned Not just not wanting people to leave. Self-abandonment When you grew up learning that your needs were inconvenient, dangerous, or simply irrelevant, you stopped tracking them. Anxious attachment Holding on hard. Trust issues Trust that was broken, repeatedly, by people who were supposed to be safe. Depression Not just sadness. Anxiety The background hum of dread that is always there. Identity disturbance Not being able to answer simple questions about yourself.

Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and nothing here decides what is wrong with you, because nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. This page exists so that when you are ready, you can find people who understand it from the inside.

You do not have to carry this alone.

Bridge of Hope Recovery is a free, anonymous, peer-led fellowship for trauma survivors. Meetings run throughout the week by phone, by video, and in person. No cost, no waitlist, no one asking for your real name.

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