A child's greatest fear is abandonment. 3) All children are ego-centered. 4) All children have numerous abandonment experiences — their needs are not met in a timely, judicious manner. 5) When a child has an abandonment experience, he always believes that he is the cause. 6) This naive misinterpretation creates toxic shame — a belief that he is "bad". 7) Children develop survival mechanisms to try to cope with their abandonment experiences, try to prevent the experiences from happening again, and try to hide their "badness" from themselves and others.
