Episode 44: Overcoming Your Fear of Abandonment

In this episode,

Lizzie tackles the fear of abandonment, where it comes from, how to recognize, and how to overcome it.

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Post-pod questions to consider

Do you struggle with these thoughts? Where does your fear come from?

Episode Transcript

Hey, you are listening to Midnight Philosopher with Lizzie. Thanks for tuning in. 

Today, I'm going to talk about the fear of abandonment. At its most extreme, the fear of abandonment shows up in borderline personality disorder, or BPD. BPD gets a bad reputation, and I personally think this reputation is unjustified. People with BPD have been through extreme trauma and often went through that trauma as a young child. 
Their reactions, for example, a strong fear of abandonment make sense given the context of their upbringing. While some clinicians believe that personality disorders cannot be treated, I'm not one of those people. I believe a trusting therapeutic relationship with a clinician can be extremely healing and beneficial for someone with BPD, who often had unstable and scary relationships in their life. 

However, the fear of abandonment is on a spectrum, and you don't have to be diagnosed with BPD to experience it. Often, any kind of interpersonal trauma can leave you feeling this way. I have a fear of abandonment and have worked with clients who have a fear of abandonment. 

I once worked with a client who had just turned 18 and she exhibited all the symptoms of BPD. She had also been through horrible trauma that no one should ever have to go through. And this client and I had a good therapeutic relationship because as she liked to say, I kept it real with her, which what I think she meant by this is that I was direct with her and didn't lead a leave a lot of room for subtext. I told her about trauma and how it impacts the brain and functioning, and we explored how some of her behaviors like skipping school might actually just be trauma symptoms. 

This client also had a fear of abandonment. She often feared that people important to her life would leave her. Coincidentally, at that time, I was planning to leave the organization I worked for, and so I gave her a month's notice. Together in session, we were able to work through what having a healthy goodbye might feel like. We talked each week about what fe, what saying goodbye might feel like and what it might feel like to have a good goodbye instead of a sudden abrupt and unhealthy one. At the end of our time together, she thanked me saying that no one had ever given her time to process when someone was leaving. 

I have also felt the fear of abandonment. While I don't meet the full diagnostic criteria for BPD, I do have some of the elements of it. You can have elements of BPD without having the full diagnosis. My fear of abandonment really became prevalent after my mom died when I was 22. Her death was really scary for me, and she's the one I wanted to process her death with, but I couldn't because she had passed and I started feeling like death is sort of an abandonment in a way. Of course, no one's fault, but I still, I found myself feeling abandoned and suddenly scared and alone. 

After my mom's death, I worried that everyone in my life would die suddenly. I sometimes told people I loved them extra just in case. I often thought I might die at any moment, too. I would walk down the street and worry that in the next instant I'd be dead. I often thought I might die and people would die, too. I worried that people would in a way abandon me by their death. It took a lot of therapy to work through those feelings that someone might die suddenly. Of course, you never know what's going to happen, but you also can't live your life in fear, and I was living my life in fear and a great fear of abandonment at the time. 

Another time that I feel the fear of abandonment is when I have a disagreement with a loved one. I worry that they won't wanna be part of my life anymore. And as I've gotten older, I realized that handling conflict is really important to me and how people handle conflict is also important to me. Everybody makes mistakes, but the way you handle them and the way that you handle them with grace can make a big difference. If people abandon me after an argument, then they usually weren't right for me to begin with. Disagreement can be healthy in relationships, and working through disagreements can make relationships stronger. 

So what can you do if you have a fear of abandonment and how can you tell if you have a fear of abandonment in the first place? If you constantly worry that people will leave you, you might have a fear of abandonment, and this can especially crop up in romantic relationships. If you worry that the people will leave you, this often impacts the relationship and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And this might look like you saying like, oh, this person will leave me if I tell them this thing about myself, or this person won't truly like me if they truly get to know me and they'll leave me. 

These worries, like I said, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Believing someone will leave you often causes you to act in ways that are dismissive towards that other person, because you might be thinking, why should I get close to them when they'll leave me anyway? This will, as you guessed, leave them the other person feeling dismissed and not close to you, which in turn might cause them to actually leave you because they don't feel close and they don't feel that intimate connection. Intimacy and trust are really hard to accomplish when you're struggling with a fear of abandonment. How can you become close to someone? How can you trust them when you don't think they'll stay? 

So sometimes an anxious or disorganized attachment style might be impacting your fear of abandonment. For more on attachment styles, check out episode 43. But for example, someone with an anxious attachment style might be seeking that reassurance that they're not going to be abandoned. 

So what can you do if you have a fear of abandonment? You can practice checking the facts for more on this. I talk about that in episode 39 on reality testing. But checking the facts, for a short definition, is basically checking the evidence of a situation. You can see if there's any logical reason that you know of that this person might leave you. For example, did you do anything that crossed their moral compass or values? Did you have a disagreement that you felt you could not come back from? And as you check the evidence, you can start to think logically if this person might leave you. 

You can also work on building up your self-esteem so that even if someone does quote-unquote abandon you, you can know that you have the inner strength to overcome the situation. People leaving is part of life, but people staying is also part of life, and working on the skills to know you have the strength to stand on your own two feet if someone leaves while also working on vulnerability and learning how to trust others - you can check out episode 22 on trusting for that - these skills can help you make strong and meaningful relationships. Trust and vulnerability can lead to intimacy and can help steer away from the fear of abandonment. 

Furthermore, be kind to yourself. Recognize that your fear of abandonment often stems from your trauma history when things in your life were unpredictable. A caregiver might not have physically left you, but for whatever reason, whether it was substances or depression or working two jobs, your caregiver might not have been as consistently present for you as you needed at the time, and that might have caused some feelings of fear of abandonment to crop up into your life. 

Tonight, I talked about the fear of abandonment. I talked about how the fear often stems from trauma and that it can be seen in certain diagnoses such as BPD and other trauma-related disorders. I talked about how the fear of abandonment is on a spectrum and that it might crop up in meaningful relationships in your life. I also talked about how building up your self-esteem while learning to trust people can be important for counteracting this fear of abandonment. 

Thanks so much for listening. Tonight, I'm gonna go practice trusting people. Have a good night.