That last bit is the whole problem-- the person feels abandoned because of what happened in their early years.

When you start accessing that early pain and trauma to try to deal with it, it's like that young child part of you comes forward, you remember how you felt then, you remember the desperate longing to be properly cared for. You are not, as a client, entirely in your adult mind. The earlier the trauma you experienced, the younger the feelings.

How does a two year old see its parent going out of town for two weeks? As abandonment. In a healthy parent-child relationship it can be worked through and handled, but nonetheless, a two year old feels grief, rage, a whole range of strong emotions at the removal of a parent for even quite short periods of time. You can see why a therapist vacation can be awful for someone who was improperly cared for in their early years, then.

There's something called the Still Face Experiment where a parent is interacting with their baby, and then on a cue from the researcher, they make their face go blank for a minute or two. Babies freak out and start to cry quite quickly when they're ignored like this. Of course as adults we know that taking 8 hours to reply to an email is reasonable, but some clients are having to tamp down the very young child who wants a response in 60 seconds.

It's not the client's fault, because if you don't access those young feelings you're not going to process anything-- you basically have to let those feelings come to the surface. But the examples toomanycats gave -- no response to a message, a vacation, a week in between sessions -- those feel like abandonment to a young child. I agree, we know as adults that it's not abandonment. (If only our child parts could be healed by our adult intellect that would be awesome! I so wish this were true!)

Maybe this could be remedied somewhat by screening for early trauma and early attachment issues, and offering a different schedule of therapy to such clients. Early on, frequent sessions and lots of out of session contact could be offered. As some security was established, this could be tapered to a more typical therapy schedule. Many therapists wouldn't do this, but some could specialize in it.

I do agree that for child parts hurt at young ages, therapy feels a lot like abandonment, and there is a possibility of retraumatization. This goes triple for therapist termination, needless to say.