Healing Mistrust, Abandonment,
and Betrayal in Self and Society

The Wellness Warrior Podcast – with Dr. Michael Obsatz – July 2025

Dan Gorbunow: “What came up with your last conversation was issues around trust and then that triggered a flagging of this conversation for deeper exploration around that and how trust is broken. [1]

Dr. Michael Obsatz: So, trust is the most important thing. The things you have to trust in life are specific people that will care for you and accept you for who you are. Trust that everything will be ok and you will get what you need. Trust that you can be your authentic self and know that you are loved, lovable, and loving. That is what trust involves. If you do not have that there is a reason for it. I believe that everybody is trying to be their authentic self, but they have been limited in certain ways by certain situations. One is their family. Another is the culture we live in, which has what I call Empire Consciousness. Also, this whole idea is the most important thing to do is to rise to the top and “fit in” somehow. And when you have to “fit in” you have to fit into whatever dysfunctional situation you are in. You have become not yourself and dysfunctional. That is what happens to a lot of people.

Abandonment is not just emotionally being abandoned or physically being abandoned. It has to do with the idea that you are not good enough as you are. You have to conform to what other people want you to be. If you don’t do that, you are unworthy. But you never can be totally worthy because you never know if you are safe. My first psychology teacher was Abraham Maslow. He said the very first need people have is safety. In an empire situation with consciousness and behavior such as power, hierarchy, domination, oppression, and control no one is safe, not even the people at the top. When no one is safe you can not learn to trust.

So, the challenge is to move out of that level of consciousness and then out of that kind of behavior. You can not solve it just by mandating it, or making it legal, or somehow having a law about it. It has to be an inside job. It has to come from oneself. A person has to say to themselves, yes, I have been abandoned but it was never about me. This is happening to me, around me, but was never about me. I am still loved, lovable, and loving. That is the unity, or oneness consciousness, that I talk about. Knowing that so deeply in your soul, in your heart, inside you, that you don’t have to conform to what other people think you should be. So along with abandonment by the culture, by competition, power, domination, and families where you are not allowed to express your whole self, comes self-abandonment. You then don’t know who you are. You abandon yourself. One of the things that goes on is shame. I’m not enough. I’m worthless. I can never be enough. I can never do enough. The worthless feeling is the ultimate abandonment. Shame is the ultimate abandonment. The result of ultimately not loving yourself. So, the solution to that is to return to your inner being, know your inner being, and then you can not let the world tell you who you are…”

[1] Previous Wellness Warrior Vox podcast with Dr. Michael Obsatz – Healing Shame: Empire vs Unity Consciousness –June 2025 – link: HEALING SHAME EMPIRE VS UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

.

Listen to the entire podcast. Just click on the white arrow below to begin.”