What You Can Learn About Yourself From How You Say Goodbye
Saying goodbye is something you do usually a minimum of 5 times a day. Likely, you don’t give it much thought unless the departure is sudden, unexpected, or painful. How do you feel about significant goodbyes? Do you avoid them at all costs? Do you feel unfazed by the goodbyes in your life? Do you feel a sense of peace and confidence when it is time to say goodbye? You may wonder what it means about you and the story of your life with how you approach and manage your goodbyes. Goodbyes follow a steadfast pattern, and they don’t change unless you understand why your goodbyes are the way they are.
The Delayed Goodbye
Are you someone who finds yourself in mostly long term relationships that tend to have blurry and difficult endings? You have always been longing for the stability of a long term, loving relationship, yet you keep finding yourself at stuck points in relationships where the person that you love also becomes the person that might not be best suited for you. When your gut is alerted to something not feeling quite right, you question that feeling and attribute your uncertainty to a defect in your character instead of a reaction to something in the external world. You don’t know what this feeling is, but it drives you to instigate circular conversations where often your goal is lost and there is usually a less than satisfying resolution.
This push/pull is a dance you have always done. You have always desired a close, connected, calm relationship, yet you keep finding your way back to a state of uncertainty, feeling lost, and not knowing what to do or how to proceed. With that uncertainty, you usually keep pushing forward with a hope that clarity will find you and make itself known, but as time goes on, you find yourself just as uncertain as the first moment you knew you were unsure. You tend to wait until your anger arises during arguments to have the courage to think about saying goodbye. The angrier you are, the more certain you feel, but when the rage dissappates, you become afraid. When you get close to saying goodbye, you doubt yourself, and you retreat. You avoid the goodbye, for reasons you still don’t understand, but you have decided that not being able to say goodbye when you wish that you could means that you are weak, cowardly, incapable, inadequate, and not strong enough to handle it.
The ending is usually the same kind of corner you find yourself backed into where the agency of choice is removed. Either you do something irreversible, or they do something irreversible; the ambiguity is gone, and goodbye no longer feels like a debate you can have with yourself. It is stormy and loud, and there is no way it can feel good for you or your significant other. You say goodbye. And afterwards you question if you made the right decision. Goodbyes for you have always been hard. And therefore, you prolong them, avoid them, anything to not have to tolerate all the feelings that come with them.
The Serial Goodbye
Are you someone who finds yourself in relationship after relationship? You love the thrill of the beginning and the possibility of connection. You find yourself drawn to a particular kind of person. Some might say, “you have a type.” You chase feeling states: being in love, feeling admired, chasing or being chased, fully consumed in the newness of merging with someone, and the excitement of learning someone new. Each time you enter into a relationship, you bring with you the wish that this time will be different than the last; this time will be the good, certain space you have been searching for, but somehow you find your way back to a familiar ambivalence that you know all too well: disinterest, boredom, skepticism, disillusionment; you know nothing else other than it’s time to go. You are seasoned at saying goodbye, so much so that it doesn’t elicit much emotion, and you come to the worried conclusion that maybe you will never feel settled. During the departure, maybe the person on the other end is terribly distraught, where as you count the minutes for the interaction to be over. On to the next. You step away, mostly unscathed, neutralized, somewhat relieved, and ready to find the next potential suitor.
The Ideal Goodbye
Are you someone who would describe yourself as lucky in love? Was your first courtship one you look back on with nostalgia? Were you someone who selected partners who often began as friends? Would you have described your early relationships as learning experiences that you reflect on with tenderness? As you navigate relationships throughout your life, sometimes you find that you and your significant other are evolving in different directions, and over time you learn that you aren’t as compatible as you had hoped. You trust the feeling inside of you that there might be someone better suited for you out there in the big world. You believe in yourself that this feeling aligns with the sensations inside your body, and elect to express your feelings with your partner. Even through pain and sadness, you have always trusted your intuition and followed your gut. After you say goodbye, there is grief and mourning, but a relief in feeling assured that moving forward feels in line with everything your body was speaking to you. After you say goodbye, you then go on to negotiate more relationships and friendships in the world using your conscience as your guide- growing closer to those who you feel more in sync with, and continuing to step away from those you don’t.
How You Learned to Say Goodbye
Knowing how and when to say goodbye is a learned experience. You learn how to say goodbye from how you were said goodbye to. And yes, you have been saying goodbye long before you had language to say the word, “goodbye.” You were saying goodbye before you even knew how to wave. Goodbyes are about separation, and your first negotiation with separation began the moment you entered the world and left your mother’s body; you are no longer one, but two. Goodbyes happen every time you close your eyes to dream. Goodbyes happen every time your mother left the room. Goodbyes happened sometimes with her standing right next you (when you desperately wanted her attention but she was emotionally gone.)
As you grew, the separations changed shape: being with a babysitter, going to school, being with friends, forging new, more complex relationships. They required more tolerance of you to sustain and manage your disappointments and longings. They required you to trust yourself and your intuition. They required you to have confidence in yourself. And if mastered, the separations would feel exhilarating, freeing, successful, and propelling; giving you the verification that yes, you can trust your gut, and yes, you can do it, and yes, you can rely on yourself and move forward in life. Goodbyes are about your relationship with your conscience, about loving and knowing yourself, and about knowing that you are your own separate person, and your parent is their own separate person, and both can exist separately together in time and space and hold each other in their minds. Goodbyes are a departure, a necessary one.
In adult relationships, intimacy and romance are beautiful recapitulations of your earliest, most connected times. The times when you were held and cuddled and loved, when every time you awoke there was a pair of adoring eyes so happy to see you. When every time you went to sleep, you were able to drift off in the soft, familiar arms of a warmth you could count on and trust. This was a time when you were fed and changed and doted on for every need, when you were entangled and connected to while simply eating and drinking, when eyes were locked lovingly into yours from doing simple, developmental tasks like smiling, laughing, cooing, talking, waving; a time when everything you did was celebrated, and you could look into someone’s eyes and know they were falling deeply in love with you. What a beautiful, magical, incomparable time of life.
Intimacy for adults, celebrates these early times. And when they go well, you see glorious courtships and declarations of the purest, most honest connections.
Why You Have Delayed Goodbyes
Delayed Goodbyes often arise when there is a developmental disruption, leaving these transitional times to be wrought with complication. Often, the moments of separation with the primary caregiver are either intrusive or highly misattuned. You can be sure that if your goodbyes are stormy as an adult, it is because they were stormy as a child. If goodbyes rely on your ability to tune into yourself to trust what you are feeling inside, and then confirm that what you are feeling inside matches with what is going on in the world around you, then you would have been able master this task by this task being modeled for you and with you. If you grew up where reality was not confirmed, or it was outright denied, that would have greatly affected your ability to trust yourself and what you were seeing, and therefore makes decision making very complicated.
Goodbyes are reliant on the ability to make a confident decision based on your intuition, and that can only happen if you know what is real, and you can only assuredly know what is real now, if you knew what was real back then.
With delayed goodbyes, when you sense something isn’t right, you often have difficulty knowing locating where the feeling is coming from, so you draw from the conclusion you made as a child, which is assuming the feeling is about something bad inside of you, disallowing for you to carefully examine your outside world with accuracy. This thought process lures you into a dance of self doubt and fear that you can’t stop doing, because it is the only dance you have ever known.
If you were a baby who wasn’t met with loving eyes, or when you were crying for your mom when you were in need of soothing but were over stuffed with a bottle instead, or when you were reaching for your mom in need of connection but you could see in her eyes she was somewhere else, or when it was time to go to sleep and you cried and cried but nobody came to get you, and after long you gave up trying in defeat, or when each time you cried someone was always hurriedly there rocking you back to sleep, feeding you bottles, grasping at anything to stop you from crying when you were much too old to be rocked or soothed in this way. You didn’t learn to trust what you felt inside because you didn’t know how to trust what was happening outside. Goodbyes, for delayed goodbyes, was not about a departure; it was about a painful, nonsensical, gruesome death. You learned to avoid them at all costs.
Why You Have Serial Goodbyes
For the serial goodbye, these kinds of experiences also come from experiences of early misattunement and disconnected caregiving. If your goodbyes are wrought with apathy, your goodbyes are repeating the absence of strong feelings in places they were meant to reside from long ago. They are showing you that these separations that are intended to be filled with emotion were as unremarkable as the connectedness surrounding it. Possibly your earliest times felt lacking in parental adoration and pleasure in those formative intimate moments. Therefore, instead of knowing how devastating your unrequited outpouring of love and yearning was as a child, your adult relationships defended against it. What this looks like is you rarely getting close enough to anyone for a long enough period of time to have to remember how deeply in love you were as a child and were met with an ambivalent caregiver. In your adult life, you often end up drawn to romantic relationships that demonstrate fast, hurried intimacy and playing house, but ultimately reveal themselves as lackluster, superficial, and repetitive. When it becomes clear to you that it is time to say goodbye, these transitions don’t cause you many waves, because you weren’t emotionally invested enough to begin with. You protect yourself from remembering the pain that love was for you as a child, but in doing this, you also restrict your access to the experience of a deeper, more meaningful love that comes from a longer term, intimate connection.
Why You Have Good Goodbyes
For the good goodbye, it is likely that you have memories of more neutral separations from your earliest times. As a child, you were given the opportunity to know yourself well. When sensations arose in your body, whether it was fear, anger, uncertainty, worry, bliss, love, or connection, there was a trusted caregiver present to witness and authenticate these internal experiences with objectivity and kindness. When this happens, you are able to move through separations from your loved ones with a confidence and certainty that your infrastructure stays intact, and you will prevail (which you most assuredly do.). When you have this bolstered sense of self, decisions are much easier to make. Having a caregiver foster your separateness and independence with love and impartiality allows for you the chance of living in a safe world, because the world around you is a place you know you can carry yourself through, even amongst challenges and adversity. You have been given the opportunity to build a steadiness in yourself. After that gets laid down over and over again, you really begin to trust it. And when you can trust yourself, your feelings, and what is happening internally, then you can assess what is happening externally with accuracy. You then can confidently navigate relationships better, and better attune to your experience of when it is time to say goodbye. You can approach a goodbye with the intrinsic knowing that you borrow from your earlier self. It doesn’t mean that the separation isn’t painful or sad, it just means that you are able to identify what goes where, and place the associated feelings in their rightful place. Ultimately, you are able to tolerate this period of mourning. This is a beautiful gift that a caregiver can impart on their child: the gift of seeing your child, witnessing their presence in the world, asking them about it often, and pronouncing that what is happening is real. Goodbyes, for this type, isn’t a fear or something to be avoided, but a necessary part of life and love.
How Trauma Impacts Saying Goodbye
If smooth farewells require a history of a success through transitional times as a child, what does that mean for a child who experienced trauma during formative periods of life?
Some examples of childhood trauma include:
Complications while in the foster care system
Experiencing a childhood major surgery or medical trauma
Having a mentally ill parent or a parent with a terminal disease
Death of a parent or sibling
Growing up in a home with domestic violence
Being physically or sexually abused
Being physically or sexually abused by a parent or sibling or loved one
Growing up in poverty
Growing up with food instability
Living in an unsafe neighborhood
Experiencing a burglary or a house fire
Not having adequate supervision
Being bullied
Being in a car accident
Having parents going through a high conflict divorce
Being entrenched in a custody battle
Living through a natural disaster like a hurricane, tornado, flood, or tsunami
Growing up in a war zone
Having an alcoholic or drug addicted parent (s)
Having a parent that is highly volatile, who loses control verbally or physically
Having a parent who is emotionally disconnected
Being a victim of a violent crime
Bearing witness to a violent crime
Being witness to a loved one being victimized
Being unnecessarily sedated or medicated
Issues surrounding complicated adoption
Because trauma is subjective, no two human beings process the same experience alike. It isn’t accurate to assume that because a child experiences something deemed universally traumatic that it elicited a traumatic response in the mind and body. What gets experienced as a trauma is entirely unique to you, your body, and your history. The way in which you move through separations and transitions in your adult life are solely dependent on your experiences moving through them as a child. If you grew up in poverty, and being poor was something that impacted your every moment, but you had a kind and engaged caregiver, you might have still found that separations were something you could manage well. But if your looked otherwise good on the outside, but you were being harmed by one of your parents, and the other parent was not able to protect you or validate that what was happening was abusive, then this would undoubtedly impact your ability to achieve smooth transitions and separations in your young adult and adult life. Why? Because goodbyes rely on your ability to integrate what is happening internally to what is happening externally, and if that was not done for you during these times, it is likely you grew up having challenges making sense of it all.
Trauma has the largest impact on saying goodbye. You can only feel assured when leaving a situation if you know that where you are headed is somewhere safe. You can only feel safe saying goodbye if you can trust yourself that saying goodbye is what is best for you. You can only know if it best for you if you can identify what is real and actually happening. And you can only identify what is real and actually happening if you can trust what your mind and body are telling you. And that sense of intuition is a slow growing process of long term relationship between you and your conscience.
If the mind and body’s natural reaction to trauma is to separate from reality to protect yourself from the harm that is happening, then subsequently, trauma means having to forget so you can survive. On the contrary, successful goodbyes are dependent upon knowing what is real. The two struggle to exist together.
How Psychotherapy Can Help
There is no insight oriented work (or any work) that can change what happened to you, your history, and the facts of your life. You might wonder how looking inward and backward can have any impact on moving forward. Science that has proven that making sense of your life allows for relief of human suffering both physiologically and psychologically. According to psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapist Jon Nathan Shedler, “People who undergo psychodynamic therapy continue to make gains after the therapy ends, perhaps because it addresses underlying psychological patterns that affect many areas of life.” He added that, “Psychiatrist Allan Abbass of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia examined the effectiveness of psychodynamic treatments and founded six separate meta-analyses and reported data from follow-up assessments, and all showed benefits that kept growing long after treatment ended. This continued improvement suggests that psychodynamic therapy sets in motion psychological processes that lead to ongoing change.”
Psychotherapy is about understanding yourself thoroughly enough to learn another way of being so you can impact your experience and direction in your life. Psychotherapy is about finding a new way other than suffering.
If you are someone who has recognized that goodbyes for you have always been difficult and you want to understand how to make good sense of these experiences so that you can begin trusting yourself and your decisions, and have more fulfilling relationships, then psychotherapy would be a great start.