The fear of being abandoned
So we are born into this world dependent on the adults that are responsible of us. We place our faith and trust into our caretakers and parents. We love them unconditionally as children and we expect the same in return.
But the attachment we so deeply long for doesn’t always happen in the most ideal way. If there is fear involved, abuse of any kind, negligence, addiction, no emotional support, or a role exchange (the parent becomes the child and the child becomes the parent) the child will have difficulty forming a safe emotional bond with her caretakers/parents.
Later on in her life, the girl will grow up to be an woman that is fearful in her relationships because she hasn’t learned to form an intimate and safe emotional bond with the people that were her primary caretakers which in turn, has resulted in her not trusting or loving herself enough to feel safe within her. She is still craving that feeling of having an intimate emotional connection to another person. So all her life, this woman will search for a man to make her feel secure and to reassure her and will have trouble making herself feel secure within herself in relationship with others.
In order to not feel the fear of being abandoned, a woman with abandonment issues will learn to abandon herself first in order for others not to abandon her. Personally, I had trouble saying how I truly felt, I had the tendency of always saying yes to other people, to put myself last, to people please and to not truly be myself but rather be someone whom I thought would deserve love and affection…bringing me more disappointment and loss of self-esteem, self-worth, self-confidence and ultimately loss of identity. I was a true chameleon, and I didn’t know whom I truly was because I was so busy trying to be someone else.
I used to be so fearful of being abandoned in my love relationships that I would reject my partner before he could reject me. I was not able to be vulnerable and to show my true feelings and emotions in a relationship because I didn’t trust that I would be safe in being vulnerable. I had to learn that it was ok for me to cry in front of a partner even if that partner would not be able to have empathy for me. The important thing that I realized is that I had to become a loving mother for my inner child and not have expectations from others to reassure or comfort me. I was the only responsible of my feelings and emotions and I had to learn to become a loving mother to inner child.
There was a certain relationship breakup at a moment in my life where I had so much abandonment pain from the past waking up in me, that I had become obsessed at getting that partner back in my life. I did everything in the book: manipulating him, threatening him, letting him use me, not respecting myself and losing myself in all that mess. All out of a desperate attempt to not feel my childhood abandonment pain. I had to learn to cut the cord with my ex, to let him go, to feel whatever I had to feel without grabbing him as an escape from feeling my own emotional pain and grief.
For a woman that is afraid of being abandoned (emotionally or physically), when her partner is not able to reassure her and make her feel that she is important to him, all her insecurity from the past will resurface. She will cry, she will beg, she will make treats and try to manipulate him into making him behave the way that will bring her a sense of security.
This was me and I had to really work on releasing my abandoning emotional wound so that I would not need external validation or reassurance anymore. Accepting to release my grief and sadness when it came to my abandonment issues, was an important step in my healing process. During that time, I had therapy sessions, I did journaling but true healing came from transforming my subconscious negative beliefs I had about myself : that I was not worthy of love, that I was not enough, that I was not lovable, etc., etc.
The fear of abandonment has its roots in the emotional and intimate bond that the child has created with her parents or caretakers making her susceptible to attracting to her, relationships where she will make desperate attempts to be reassured that she will not be abandoned.
When a love partner would go out with friends, I would become worried, would feel bored and would not know what to do with myself. I would call him repeatedly and ask him to come back home and end up suffocating and invading him…I didn’t know how to respect his boundaries as I didn’t had any awareness of mine…I had to learn to find ways to keep myself busy in his absence and I soon found out that I could have a lot of fun being by myself and attending to things that were interesting to me. I had to learn to love spending time with myself and reparent myself by comforting myself in need.
I hope this article brings you comfort that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Bianca (aka Mystical Queen Goddess)
Because every deeply wounded woman deserves abundance at all levels!