Emotional abandonment is one of the silent killers of relationships. Its anthem is an ice cold, white noise that is ultimately impossible to compartmentalize. Its color is the darkness of a deep hole. Its smell one of a deserted coal mine.
A partner can provide money for rent/mortgage, gifts for Valentine’s, put you on their insurance, say the right words when you need them and you can still feel terribly abandoned. Nope. You are not crazy. Psychotic. Or needy! You just may be feeling emotionally abandoned. Alone in that space where there are no words.
Personally, I ended a lot of relationships due to that space that I didn’t have any words for. It took a lot of learning, processing, unlearning and reflection to see that I wasn’t crazy. To see that I was being emotionally abandoned. And, many times I was also emotionally abandoning my partners. 
Often when we or the other person resists looking within, being intimate with our own emotions, our own darkness, our flaws and our humanity, there is no way we can really see each other. Truly accept each other. Truly accept self. Not in a billion years.
Emotion is the thing gives love a bad rap. Because we don’t understand emotion. We hate emotions. Emotion makes us uncomfortable. We live in a society that fears, distrusts and misunderstands emotion because we inherited the notion of valuing the intellect over emotion from the Classical Greek era. But emotion doesn’t deserve to be put in opposition to emotion. Emotion explains that something important to our well-being is happening. Emotions automatically and instinctively sort through the storm, picking out what matters, and guides us to the proper action. If we buy into the cultural and social myths about emotions (being emotional is a sign of weakness), instead of emotion is who we are, we may not be able to accurately read crucial information about ourselves and others and be guided toward proper … appropriate action.
Feelings guide us in issues and challenges big and small. Our feelings tell us what we want, what we prefer, what we like and what we need. Emotion is the great motivator. We can numb our emotions; we can even, deny or rationalize them, but emotion comes whether we want them to or not, and its emotion that stirs and propels us to act. The word emotion comes from the Latin word movere, which means to move out. We can see the power of emotion most clearly when we suspect that we are in immediate physical danger. Click here to continue reading.
