Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.
Interpretation
Abandonment causes deep emotional pain and suffering, similar to a physical injury.
In this quote, Tayari Jones powerfully captures the emotional impact of abandonment by comparing it to physical pain. Instead of a quick, sharp pain that fades, abandonment feels like a profound injury that is both physical and emotional, leaving lasting bruises and a struggle to breathe. This metaphor illustrates how deeply feelings of abandonment can affect one's life and psyche, emphasizing that the pain is often more than just a momentary wound; it can linger and reshape one's existence.
In practice
In a therapy session discussing the long-term effects of abandonment on relationships.
And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.
Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.
The fact that 98 percent of women in [the U.S.] who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives.
Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.
The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.
She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.
When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness. Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other.
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