Feeling safe in all areas of our lives is critical to living well-being, but it is even more important in relationships, if there is security, trust and protection will arise, but if this feeling is threatened by the ghosts of the past, fears. will take over. Among them, the fear of abandonment.
Insecurity caused by fear of abandonment can undermine a romantic relationship, especially when it is the result of a broken and silent childhood; unknowingly, those who obsessively feed this fear can end up causing, through their behaviors, the other to confirm what they think. or that the relationship becomes so destructive that both members are trapped in a spiral of unrest and suffering.
- It is normal to be afraid that the relationship will not work at the right time.
- From now on living in a constant situation of mistrust and hypersensitivity to rejection only generates discomfort and instability.
- Let’s take a closer look at what fear of abandonment entails.
During the first year of life, we established an emotional bond with our primary caregiver, called attachment, through this relationship and the kind of bond we build, each of us acquires a series of emotional skills that we will put into play in our interpersonal future. Relations.
The fact that the bond has not been established or that it has not met our physical and emotional needs may have conditioned us to grow feeling unprotected, insecure and distrustful, this is one of the causes established by the theory of attachment to explain the profound. a sense of abandonment felt by many people, even if they are surrounded by others who love them, let us take an example to understand it.
A baby is hungry because he or she has not eaten for several hours, feels a great activation of his body and the only behaviors he manifests are crying and restlessness, his mother, as the primary caregiver in this case, picks up the signals she is sending and interprets that she is hungry. For what? Because he has learned to detect and calm his physical and emotional needs in relation to him, which will restore his physiological and emotional balance.
If the baby experiences these kinds of experiences several times, he will eventually seek physical closeness with his mother with the confidence to calm down and regain balance; later in development, the child will be able to endure discomfort simply by seeing his mother approach or saying “I’ll be right there. ” Finally, when something happens to you as an adult, you’ll calm down thinking that in a few hours you’ll meet a family member, your partner or a friend. Your brain has learned that it can calm down and that it’s a permanent sensation.
However, if the baby’s brain has never experienced this sense of calm or the belief that after discomfort a state of tranquility may appear, neither will the adult brain. You won’t feel safe in an intimate relationship or partner relationship because you haven’t. Learned.
In addition, lack of contact and lack of care result in increased adrenaline production in the brain, which predisposes to more aggressive and impulsive behaviors and a great difficulty of emotional management.
As we see, there are wounds, such as the feeling of abandonment, which although we do not see, are rooted in the depths of us and are able to condition much of our lives, situations lived in childhood that leave their mark and are able to tear us apart inside, without realizing it.
Bowlby has established that the emotional bonds that form in childhood persist in the form of models in the adult’s representative world, a statement that Hazan and Shavercom agree in their research, demonstrating that adult behavior in relationships is made up of mental representations of the relationship between the child and the primary caregiver.
Thus, the fear of abandonment in relationships has its origin in childhood, it is the ghosts of the past that return, insecurely, to remember that one is not worthy of love or good care, usually appear because the brain receives an alarm. Signal.
A word, place, behavior or memory is enough to activate the emergency situation in the person who has never felt entirely safe, from there begins to produce a cluster of emotions and behaviors: instability, apathy, sadness?
On the other hand, the person who experiences fear of abandonment usually develops an emotional dependence on each other, often requiring approval, so even if the relationship is toxic, will be unable to break or distance, it is as if there is no one without each other and, to maintain it, could do anything but reopen your old wounds.
In some cases, fear of abandonment generates a kind of self-contempt, the person, when he does not feel loved or safe at all times, must confirm that identity still exists, so when he finds protection and security, he ends up disparaging it or not believing it. Its reality is formed by the deep trace of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fear of abandonment is a very deep emotional wound, rooted in childhood, healing this wound involves accepting and forgiving the past to let go, a complex task, especially if the person does not know how he is conditioned by previous experience or if his fangs, which were built for protection, are very impervious, in fact, in the most complex cases , it is advisable to call a professional to help you, especially in the first steps.
Another aspect to consider at work is self-esteem, which is usually cracked or even broken. In this sense, learning to appreciate is essential to break the trap of emotional dependence, and with good self-esteem, it will be much easier to manage emotions and thoughts rooted in past experiences.
As we see, healing the fear of abandonment is about rebuilding ourselves, a time-taking process and, above all, learning to prioritize, not to mention that, on many occasions, what we think is going on outside is nothing more than the projection of brands. of what breaks us inside.