Calm vs. Numb: Understanding Nervous System Regulation and Trauma Dissociation

Many individuals working through unresolved trauma struggle to recognize the profound difference between true emotional calmness and psychological numbness. 

It is incredibly common for individuals who practice meditation or mindfulness to believe they have achieved a state of serene tranquility when, in reality, their nervous system has entered an unconscious, protective state of dissociation.

Abstract vector line art depicting the complex neurological pathways of emotional regulation—illustrating the contrast between defensive trauma-induced numbness and true somatic calmness. A core focus of the mind-body oriented trauma therapy provided by Greenwich Village, NYC psychotherapist Josephine Ferraro, LCSW (10011).

Understanding how to differentiate these two internal states is essential for authentic emotional regulation, trauma recovery, and building secure relational intimacy.

The Neurobiological Difference: Calmness vs. Emotional Numbness

While both states may superficially present as quiet or still, their underlying physiological baselines and impacts on your well-being are entirely opposite.

True Emotional Calmness (Ventral Vagal Regulation)

Calmness is an active, conscious state of psychological grounding and nervous system regulation. It is characterized by:

• Somatic Presence: Feeling physically centered, safe, and connected to your body in the present moment.
• Emotional Flexibility: The capacity to fully recognize, tolerate, and navigate both positive and negative emotions without becoming flooded.
• Relational Openness: A baseline of internal peace that allows you to remain curious, engaged, and available to connect with the people around you.

Emotional Numbness (Dorsal Vagal Hypoarousal)

Emotional numbness is an involuntary, defensive shutdown mechanism designed to shield the psyche from overwhelming emotional distress. It is characterized by:

• Somatic Dissociation: An internal experience of physical or emotional flatness, emptiness, and "zoning out."
• Affect Blockage: An inability to feel any emotions at all, effectively blunting both painful feelings and experiences of joy, pleasure, or love.
• Relational Withdrawal: A instinctual preference for isolation due to a decreased interest in social activities and an underlying fear of emotional proximity.

The Root Causes of Emotional Shutdown

Emotional numbing typically develops as an adaptive survival strategy during overwhelming experiences. When a child is trapped in a chaotic, neglectful, or abusive environment, their threat-response system recognizes that they cannot fight or flee. To survive the chronic stress, the brain activates the freeze response—a primitive biological brake that dampens sensory input.

While this unconscious defense mechanism successfully protects a child's developing psyche from shattering, it acts as a significant barrier in adulthood. As adults, individuals who rely on emotional numbing often find themselves entirely disconnected from their internal guidance systems. They struggle to identify their own needs, feel chronically alienated from others, and navigate a painful internal conflict between their deep desire for intimacy and their somatic dread of emotional exposure.

Clinical Vignette: Processing Intimacy Blocks and Somatic Freeze

The following case study is an anonymized composite built from real-world clinical themes to protect client confidentiality.

Alexa's Story: The Mirror of Emotional Intimacy

During the initial stage of Alexa’s relationship with Jim, she felt safe, engaged, and highly connected. She was fully aware of her feelings and thoroughly enjoyed their shared physical intimacy. However, as the relationship naturally progressed past the "honeymoon phase" and demanded deeper emotional vulnerability, her nervous system shifted. Alexa suddenly felt emotionally flat, physically detached, and deeply disconnected from Jim during moments of closeness.

Seeking specialized trauma therapy at my practice in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, Alexa began to uncover the historical roots of her sudden somatic shutdown. Her family of origin had been chronically distant and emotionally neglectful. More critically, between the ages of 10 and 13, Alexa had been repeatedly subjected to sexual abuse by a relative who watched her in the evenings.

During those historical boundary violations, Alexa's only viable survival strategy was to freeze and dissociate. Her brain learned to become entirely emotionally numb to protect her from the terror of the abuse. Because her parents were intimidated by this relative, they failed to confront him or protect Alexa when she courageously disclosed the abuse, compounding her trauma with severe relational neglect.

Decades later, the escalating emotional intimacy with Jim inadvertently mirrored the vulnerability of her childhood, triggering an automated, defensive emotional flashback. Her body was treating Jim's closeness as an impending threat, deploying her historic freeze response to keep her safe.

To resolve these deep-seated patterns, Alexa engaged in a comprehensive, mind-body oriented treatment plan. At my NYC (10011) office, we integrated EMDR Therapy to desensitize the traumatic memories of the abuse, Somatic Experiencing to safely discharge the freeze energy trapped in her body, and IFS Parts Work Therapy to unburden the hyper-vigilant internal parts that equated intimacy with danger.

Because the trauma had deeply impacted her somatic availability, Alexa and Jim also utilized specialized Sex Therapy. This collaborative approach allowed them to slowly dismantle her physical defense loops, rebuild a secure attachment baseline, and safely experience physical pleasure without triggering a defensive emotional shutdown

Reclaiming Your Vitality Through Specialized Therapy

Healing from chronic emotional numbness is a delicate, non-linear process that depends heavily on the complexity of your history, your internal resources, and the strength of the therapeutic alliance. Because traumatic freeze states are hardwired into the subcortical brain, traditional cognitive talk therapy alone is rarely enough to restore emotional elasticity.

If you are tired of living your life behind an emotional pane of glass, working alongside an experienced mental health professional can help you safely process your history. Releasing your body from its historical defense scripts allows you to step out of survival mode and reclaim an authentic, deeply fulfilling capacity for calm presence and relational joy.

👤 Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist & Trauma Specialist
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist and trauma specialist with 25+ years of experience.

I see clients in person in my private practice in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, NYC (10011).

I also see clients online throughout New York State.

I am an advanced practitioner in EMDR, AEDP, IFS, Somatic Experiencing, EFT for Couples and Certified Sex Therapist.

🌐 Website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist

✉️ Email: josephineferraro@iCloud.com

📞 Phone: (917) 742-2624 (during regular business hours)

How Can Unresolved Trauma Affect Your Ability to Know Whether You Feel Emotionally Safe?

This article was updated on October 4, 2026.

As a trauma therapist in Greenwich Village, NYC (10011), I often witness how past trauma distorts a patient's capacity for neuroception—the body's unconscious ability to detect safety. If your survival required you to adapt to an unsafe environment as a child, your adult brain may develop two primary defensive configurations that impair your judgment. 

Unresolved trauma acts like thick fog over our nervous system's internal safety radar. Advanced modalities like EMDR and IFS Parts Work serve as a guiding beacon, clearing the haze so you can accurately evaluate relational boundaries and rediscover genuine emotional safety.

1. Chronic Hypervigilance (The Over-Active Internal Radar)

When your nervous system is trapped in a perpetual fight-or-flight state, every minor stressor feels like a life-or-death emergency. Because your brain is working overtime to protect you, it frequently misinterprets completely safe interpersonal situations as highly dangerous. You might view a partner's quiet mood as an imminent abandonment threat or misread constructive feedback as a hostile attack.

2. Emotional Dissociation (The Turned-Off Radar)

Conversely, if escaping a childhood threat was impossible, your brain may have relied on dissociation—mentally numbing out to survive overwhelming distress. While dissociation is a brilliant childhood survival mechanism, as an adult it leaves you completely disconnected from your gut instincts. When you are emotionally numb, you are unable to sense red flags, often causing you to interpret unsafe situations or toxic people as completely safe.

How Trauma Shifts Your Relational Boundaries into Extremes

Trauma prevents your nervous system from finding a healthy, balanced middle ground. This manifests as two entirely different ways of navigating relationships:

• A Healthy Nervous System accurately identifies safe people and allows you to naturally relax. It reliably detects threats, establishes firm boundaries, and helps you navigate minor relational conflicts in a constructive, collaborative way.
• A Trauma-Impacted Nervous System operates in damaging extremes. It can stay on high alert, causing you to misinterpret completely safe situations as highly dangerous. Alternatively, it can go completely numb, failing to register clear red flags and causing you to mistake genuine danger for safety. When conflict arises, it often forces you to resort to extreme fawning or people-pleasing just to feel secure.

Clinical Vignette: Reclaiming Discernment in Trauma Therapy

The following clinical vignette is a composite case designed to protect client confidentiality. It demonstrates how advanced trauma processing restores the body's natural capacity to sense emotional safety.

Anna's Story

Anna grew up in a profoundly unstable household marked by severe emotional neglect and prolonged childhood sexual abuse by her father, which began when she was ten years old. During long periods when her mother was hospitalized for a chronic illness, her father would enter her bedroom late at night while under the influence of alcohol.

Terrified and confused, Anna’s natural survival response was to freeze. Her father weaponized her fear, threatening that if she ever spoke up, the local Child Welfare agency would take her away to live with harsh strangers in foster care. To protect herself, Anna hid the truth from her teachers and internalized the terror. Over time, she learned to pretend to be asleep, completely numbing and dissociating from her physical body while the abuse occurred.

While these numbing strategies kept her psychologically intact as a child, they severely fractured her adult internal relational radar when she began dating in college.

Because she was disconnected from her somatic warning signs, Anna lacked basic relational discernment. She frequently placed herself at extreme risk, such as entering vehicles with strange men she falsely assumed she could trust. In one terrifying instance, she was nearly assaulted, escaping only because her nearby friends heard her cries and intervened.

Conversely, when a genuinely safe, kind young man named John showed interest in her, Anna’s hypervigilance flared. She was too terrified to go for a simple walk with him because her system screamed that he could not be trusted, despite her friends validating his good character.

Gradually, Anna allowed herself to build a relationship with John. However, when the topic of physical intimacy arose, Anna was hit with a wave of paralyzing, inexplicable fear. Recognizing that her past was locking her out of a fulfilling present, she sought out specialized trauma therapy.

The Path to Healing with EMDR and IFS Parts Work Therapy

During our initial sessions, we mapped out her comprehensive family history, marking the first time Anna had ever spoken her childhood secret aloud. I helped her connect the dots between her history of abuse, her numbness around dangerous men, and her profound fear of safe intimacy with John.

We utilized an integrated approach combining EMDR Therapy and IFS Parts Work (Internal Family Systems):

• EMDR allowed her brain to reprocess the frozen, late-night childhood memories, lowering the somatic charge trapped in her nervous system.
• IFS Parts Work helped her connect with the protective, terrified ten-year-old "part" of herself, unburdening that inner child from the long-held shame and fear of isolation.

The therapeutic process was a gradual journey, but over time, Anna’s nervous system returned to a baseline of calm. She learned to track subtle internal and external cues to accurately distinguish genuine relational safety from historical danger. Ultimately, Anna was able to enjoy a safe, deeply fulfilling, and pleasurable physical and emotional relationship with John, free from the shadows of her past.

Finding Path Forward Through Specialized Trauma Therapy

If you find yourself repeatedly misreading relationships, trapped in people-pleasing loops, or completely numb to your own boundaries, self-help articles aren't enough to fix the issue. 

Because trauma compromises the physical nervous system, true healing requires an experiential, mind-body-centered approach.

Advanced evidence-based modalities like Somatic Experiencing (SE), EMDR, AEDP, and IFS Parts Work are specifically designed to safely recalibrate your internal compass so you can build healthy, authentic connections.

About Josephine Ferraro, LCSW

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, advanced Trauma Specialist, and Certified Sex Therapist with over 25 years of experience helping adults step out of survival mode and build lasting emotional resilience.

I have helped many individual adults and couples over the years.

My private practice integrates cutting-edge somatic, experiential, and parts-work psychotherapies designed to help you process and regulate your emotional inner world. I specialize in:

• Somatic Experiencing (SE)
• EMDR Therapy
• Internal Family Systems (IFS) Parts Work
• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)
• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples
• Sex Therapy for Individuals and people in relationships

• Clinical Hypnosis (Hypnotherapy)

I see clients in person at my private practice office in Greenwich Village, New York, NY 10011, and online via telehealth throughout New York State.

• Website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist
• Email: josephineferraro@iCloud.com
• Phone: (917) 742-2624

What is Trauma-Related Dissociation?

Daydreaming and dissociation are related to each other, but they differ in terms of their duration, severity and underlying mechanisms.

What is the Difference Between Daydreaming and Dissociation?

Daydreaming is usually a harmless activity where an individual imagines certain people, places or events. 

Daydreaming is Pleasant and Relaxing

Daydreaming is often a pleasant and relaxing experience (unless someone spends an excessive amount of time engaged in it to the detriment of other things in their life). 

Daydreaming, getting absorbed in a book and forgetting the miles driven on a familiar road are all light forms of dissociation.

Dissociation involves a detachment or interruption from either thoughts, feelings, current surroundings, memories or an experience of oneself.  Under ordinary circumstances, light dissociation is a temporary detachment or interruption.

Dissociation is a common response to stress.

Dissociation is also a common response to trauma and, under severe conditions, it's a response to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) which was formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.

Dissociation is on a continuum. Mild dissociation can last up to a few minutes minutes and, on the other end of the continuum, severe dissociation can last days or longer.

Comparing daydreaming to more serious dissociation: Ordinary daydreaming is usually not disruptive to one's life, but severe dissociation can be a distressing experience.

What is the Connection Between Trauma and Dissociation?

Dissociation is an unconscious defense mechanism.

During a traumatic event, the fight or flight response can get activated.

Trauma-Related Dissociation

If an individual is unable to fight or flee, the freeze response gets activated as a way to protect the individual through dissociation.  

One example of the freeze response is the "deer in the headlights" reaction. 

So, for instance, if someone is walking down a deserted street and someone suddenly jumps out to attack them, the person who was walking alone might freeze as part of being shocked.  

The freeze response is an unconscious defense mechanism. As part of the freeze response, the person who is shocked might be unable to speak, run or fight because they are immobilized by the traumatic shock of the attack.

What Are the Signs of Dissociation?

Signs and symptoms of dissociation include (but are not limited to):

• Feeling disconnected from your body, also known as an "out of body experience" (depersonalization)

• Feeling separate from the environment around you. The world around you might feel unreal or distorted (derealization)

• Experiencing lightheadedness, dizziness or a racing heart

• Feeling emotionally numb or disconnected

• Having difficulty feeling emotions

• Feeling unsure of who you are

• Forgetting significant events or times in your life or personal information which could include big gaps in your memories, including memory gaps in your family history

• Feeling disconnected from your body so that you don't feel pain when you would normally expect to feel pain

• Experiencing flashbacks including emotional flashbacks

What Are Some Ways to Cope With Dissociation? (non-DID dissociation)

Some of the following activities might be helpful:

• Writing in a journal
  

• Practicing mindfulness
  

Mindfulness and Square Breathing to Cope With Dissociation

• Practicing Square Breathing
  

• Making self care a priority
  

Getting Help in Trauma Therapy

The suggestions above for coping with dissociation can be good strategies to manage your dissociation, but if you want to overcome trauma-related dissociation, you need to seek help in trauma therapy (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

Getting Help in Trauma Therapy

Regular talk therapy often has limited success for working through unresolved trauma, which is why certain forms of trauma therapy, like EMDR, AEDP, Somatic Experiencing, IFS, Ego States Therapy and clinical hypnosis, were developed.

All of the above modalities are Experiential Therapies (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma).

Unresolved trauma can linger for months, years or even a lifetime, so getting help in trauma therapy sooner rather than later is important.

Once you have worked through unresolved trauma, you can lead a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, Somatic Experiencing, IFS, Ego States and Sex Therapist.

With over 20 years of experience as a trauma therapist, I have helped many individual adults and couples work through trauma.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Clients' Fears of Being Abandoned By Their Psychotherapist

In prior articles, I've discussed fear of abandonment in relationships as well as psychotherapy clients' fear of being a disappointment to their therapist (see my articles:  Fear of Being a Disappointment to Your Therapist, Fear of Abandonment: Leaving Your Relationship Because You're Afraid of Being Abandoned, The Connection Between Fear of Abandonment and Codependency Issues, Fear of Abandonment Can Occur Even in a Healthy, Stable Relationship, and How Psychotherapy Can Help You to Overcome Fear of Abandonment).  In this article, I'm focusing specifically on clients who have a general fear of abandonment because of their early traumatic history and the clinical implications of that fear in relation to their fear of being abandoned by their psychotherapist.

Clients' Fear of Being Abandoned By Their Psychotherapist 

There are many ways that clients, who have a fear of being abandoned, could perceive the therapist  as abandoning them.   Clients who have this fear are often hypervigilant for any possible signs that the therapist is not fully present in the therapy hour.

Most psychotherapists, who are trained in psychoanalysis or psychodynamic psychotherapy, have the ability to be emotionally engaged in the therapy session to the client's therapeutic process, including subtle shifts in the client's self states (see my article: Your Shifting Self States Can Affect You For Better or Worse).

Experienced contemporary psychoanalytic and psychodynamically trained psychotherapists are trained to intuitively pick up on what is going on in the intersubjective space between the client and the therapist even during times of silence.

But this doesn't mean that every psychodynamic psychotherapist is perfectly attuned during every moment of the therapy session.  There might be times when the therapist's mind momentarily wonders.  This is often related to the client's process even when it doesn't, at first, appear to be related.

For instance, if a psychotherapist is working with a highly dissociated client who is fairly disconnected from what he is talking about to the therapist, the therapist might find that her mind wonders momentarily as if both client and therapist are caught in the client's "cloud" of dissociation.

For an experienced psychotherapist, who is knowledgeable about dissociation, this momentary joining with the client in the dissociative "cloud" is important clinical information about what's going on with the client as well as what's going on between the client and the therapist.

For example, if, for a moment, the therapist "hears" a song in her mind, she asks herself inwardly whether this song has come into her thoughts unconsciously and how it may or may not be related to the client (see my article: The Psychotherapist's Empathic Attunement to Unconscious Process in the Therapy Session).

Psychotherapists who are comfortable disclosing their thoughts to the client might explore with the client if the client thinks it is related.

So, for instance, the therapist might say, "You know, you were just talking about your relationship and the song, "I Can't Make You Love Me" by Bonnie Raitt just popped into my head.  I'm wondering if I'm picking up something unconsciously about what's going on with you and your spouse."

More often than not, in this type of situation, even if the client wasn't talking about his feeling that his  wife no longer loves him, he might suddenly realize that the therapist picked up on a dissociated part of him that, until now, he was unaware of.  It's often a disavowed part of himself (or a disavowed self state) that he was unaware of but which was in the intersubjective "air" between the therapist and the client on an unconscious level.

When this happens, this phenomenon allows this disavowed self state to come "online" for the client. It might have been a part of himself that was just below the surface, so to speak, and was being unconsciously communicated to the therapist.

Although the client might not be happy to realize that he's really worried about his wife not loving him any more, he and his therapist now have a deeper understanding of a part of himself that was dissociated, and this part can now be worked with in therapy.

So, this is an example of what seems like a lapse in the psychotherapist's attention, but it's actually the client's unconscious material becoming conscious and furthering the work.

But a client, who is not ready to deal with his fear of not being loved by his spouse--even if he expressed this fear in prior therapy sessions--and who generally fears being abandoned, including by his therapist, will deny that the song that popped into the therapist's head is relevant.

Not only will the client deny it, he will also perceive the therapist's momentary thought about the song as being intrusive and a form of abandonment, "Why are you thinking about songs when you should be paying attention to me?"

The client sees this as "evidence" that the therapist really isn't interested in him because the therapist's mind wandered for a second.

Months later, when the client becomes ready to own his fear about his wife, he might tell the therapist that it was prescient of her to pick up on this dissociated fear a few months back in the form of the song.

But before the client is ready to allow that disavowed part of himself (the part that has this fear about his wife) to fully emerge, he will only see this phenomenon as a disruption to the therapy session and proof that the therapist abandoned him--even if it was just for a second.

What the client is unaware of is that the abandonment which he fears will happen already happened with his primary caregivers and this is now the template through which he sees his relationships, including his relationship with his therapist (see my article: Developmental Trauma: Living in the Present As If It Were the Past and Overcoming Trauma: When the Past is in the Present).

Let's take a look at a fictional clinical vignette which illustrates these dynamics:

Sandy
Sandy started therapy because she wanted to be in a relationship, but whenever she got close to anyone in a romantic relationship, she would become too afraid to remain in the relationship and she would find a way to consciously sabotage it (see my article: An Emotional Dilemma: Wanting and Dreading Love).

In hindsight, Sandy would see how she sabotaged the relationship but, no matter how many times this happened, she was unable to see it while it was happening.

Clients' Fears of Being Abandoned By Their Psychotherapist

This part of her that unconsciously destroyed her relationships was so dissociated that it operated as if it were not a part of her at all.  She would tell her therapist, "It's as if it's 'not me' acting in the relationship--as if I'm in a dream and I only wake up after I've damaged the relationship beyond repair."

Sandy talked to her therapist about her fear that if her friends or a potential boyfriend ever really got to know the "real me," they wouldn't like her and they wouldn't want to be around her (see my article: Overcoming the Fear That People Won't Like You If They Knew the "Real You").

Her therapist was aware that, most likely, if Sandy had this fear with others, she probably had this fear with the therapist as well because this is a common experience with clients who have this fear.

When her therapist attempted to explore whether Sandy had this same fear with her, Sandy denied it.  But her therapist sensed that this fear was out of Sandy's current awareness and Sandy wasn't ready to recognize it.

A few weeks later, when her therapist told Sandy that she would be going on vacation in a couple of months for three weeks, Sandy became highly anxious.  She struggled with her internal conflict of  wanting to suppress this fear and wanting to talk about it.

A week later, when Sandy came for her next session, she told her therapist that she was having nightmares about being a young child who was being accompanied by a woman in a subway station.  Sandy didn't recognize this woman, but in the dream this woman seemed to be a nanny or some sort of caregiver.  Suddenly, in the dream, the woman, who was accompanying her, disappeared and Sandy was lost and confused in the crowded subway station.  She didn't know where to go or what to do and she began to panic.

Each time that she had this dream, Sandy told her therapist, she woke up startled and couldn't go back to sleep.  Her heart was pounding and her thoughts were racing.  Even hours after she woke up, she still felt a sense of dread that was residue from her dream.

Sandy and her therapist explored the meaning of the dream, especially as these dreams began right after her therapist told Sandy that she would be going on vacation in a couple of months for three weeks.

Sandy's first reaction was that she felt ashamed.  On the one hand, she knew, logically, that her therapist deserved to go on vacation, as everyone does.  But, on the other hand, a part of her feared that her therapist wouldn't come back or that if she came back, she would decide that Sandy was "just too much" for her and end the therapy.  Then, Sandy would be left on her own, feeling abandoned and not knowing what to do.

Given Sandy's childhood history of her father disappearing one night (never to return) and her mother's major depression where she was barely able to function, it was understandable that Sandy would have a fear of abandonment because she had been traumatized by each of her parent's abandonment--the physical abandonment by her father and the emotional abandonment by her mother.

This fear of abandonment was what was getting in the way of Sandy having a lasting relationship.  She unconsciously sabotaged the relationship to end it because she wanted a sense of control of the end rather than waiting for her boyfriend at the time to abandon her.

Sandy's fear of being abandoned by her therapist was now out in the open for her and her therapist to work on.  Sandy knew that she didn't completely believe that her therapist would abandon her--it was only a part of her that felt this way, but it was a powerful part (see my article: Reclaiming a Lost Part of Yourself).

As Sandy and her therapist talked more about her fear, she felt the fear somewhat subside.  She was aware that her fear was based on her childhood trauma of real abandonment (not just fear of abandonment).  So, over time, Sandy and her therapist were able to process her early trauma, which was the origin of her fear (see my article: Psychotherapy to Overcome Your Unresolved Childhood Trauma) and, gradually, the fear of being abandoned as an adult began to subside.

Conclusion
People who have a childhood history of emotional or physical abandonment often have a fear that important people in their life, including their psychotherapist, will abandon them.

At first, the fear might not be explicit.  It might be just under the surface and come to light through dreams or other unconscious material.

Before clients realize that they have this fear, the fear can get played out in other ways, like missed appointments, or in some cases by the client aborting therapy altogether rather than, from their point of view, risk being abandoned by the therapist (see my article: When Clients Leave Therapy Prematurely).

Once the fear is out in the open, clients often recognize that there is a part of them that has this fear.  In other words, they're not completely convinced that the therapist will abandon them--it's more like a disavowed part (or self state) contains this fear.

Becoming aware that what they fear has already happened in their childhood and that this has created a relational lens through which their fear is projected onto current relationships is helpful.

Even more helpful is the processing of the original trauma so that the fear of being abandoned doesn't get triggered in current close relationships.

Getting Help in Therapy
Fear of being abandoned is one of the major reasons why clients come to therapy, especially if this fear is being enacted in important adult relationships.

Clients often don't recognize that they have this fear about their therapists until there is an upcoming separation, like the therapist's vacation.

When the fear comes to light in therapy, there is an opportunity to work on this issue because it's alive in the therapy.

Just knowing logically that the fear of abandonment is from a prior trauma, although helpful, isn't enough to overcome this fear.  The client and therapist need to do trauma-informed therapy to process the original trauma so that the fear no longer gets enacted in current relationships.

If you're struggling with fear of abandonment in your close relationships, you could benefit from working with a licensed trauma-informed mental health professional who can help you to overcome this fear (see my articles: The Benefits of Therapy and How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

Once you no longer fear being abandoned, you can live your life with a greater sense of ease and well-being.  You can also live a more fulfilling life.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples (see my article: The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy).

I have helped many clients overcome a history of trauma, including a fear of being abandoned.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.












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