ABANDONMENT ISSUES AND RELATED FEARS, IE. IF I DON'T POST EVERY DAY, YOU'LL LEAVE ME

   Wow. I started this yesterday in the a.m. and wrote the title because it was what I was thinking about. I never got back to it until 24 hours later.  And...

   I was shocked that I hadn't written anything but the title. Woe is me.

What brought this to mind yesterday? 
   Never mind. This was going to be about abandonment. At least from my own experience combined with my wondrous textbook and clinical knowledge. That was meant to be facetious. Well maybe a little.

   It took me many years of therapy to understand that my really bad anxiety attacks were in fact abandonment anxiety. Are there different kinds of anxiety?
  Yeah. Pretty much. there are quite a few.

  Anxiety is generally defined as a diffused, unidentifiable fear. Fears are usually specific. I am afraid to make a mistake in front of people. I am afraid I have spinach stuck between my teeth. In my mind a very legitimate reason to not eat spinach.
  You get the idea. If a specific fear is extreme and out of the realm of your reality, it is termed a phobia. Fear of heights, being enclosed, driving over a bridge and the things you've all heard of. If I lived in a desert that was crawling with spiders and I had a fear of spiders, it might not be a phobia. If I live in my house in Florida, where the exterminator comes every three months, and in ten years I've only seen two really big spiders, AND I had to do a complete house check every morning and every night, I'd have a phobia.


  I surely have/had ?  generalized anxiety disorder because I came from a very fear based place. I had a couple of phobias that thankfully passed. I couldn't ride in elevators unless they were somewhat large and no one else was in it. I still don't like heights.

  I can't say I like crowded elevators but if my life takes me to one, I go.

  Since I was 14, right before my sister died, I started to get physical symptoms of nausea and vomiting. Only certain situations cause it. Like going on a school trip. Or later, going to school. What caused it? Was that anxiety?Or was that activity making me anxious. Anxiety can be a symptom or a cause. Sweet thing anxiety.  It's a multitasker.

  So, I would get nauseous and vomit. It was quite effective in stopping me from going out of my comfort zone. However, when it interfered with my school life and would have made me drop out and lose a year, I decided enough was enough. I pushed through it and came out on the other side.

  I surely didn't get rid of all of my anxiety. I had just decided that there were some things that were too important to allow myself the luxury of self-sabotage.
 
 Life went on. I did lots of things. Sometimes I was anxious, sometimes I wasn't. Since this isn't a complete biography, we'll leave it at that.

  I believe it was around 18 years ago, when I was finally able to fine tune the origin of a certain type of anxiety.  It was the one with  the feeling that was so bad I didn't know what to do. I felt empty. I felt like I'd crawl out of my skin. I felt I was on the verge of panic. I felt rooted to the floor. I felt unable to do anything. I thought it would never pass and it was absolutely intolerable.  

  I had a really awful fight with my fiancé. We weren't married yet and he left the apartment. I was flooded with those feelings. I felt helpless, lost and there was only one thing I could do to make it go away.  Take a valium and go to sleep for the night. The next morning would usually find me feeling better and some conflict resolution would have to take place.  i.e.. we'd talk.


   This night, instead of hitting the valium I decided to try to ride it out and think about the cause. I recall asking myself what preceded this response? It was an overwhelming fear of being abandoned and I was responding like a little child who was unable to take care of herself. I feared for my life.

  I was in my late 40s and I was responding to something as if I were 4, or 6?  That was an eye opener.

  I know a lot more now than I did, even back then. But I knew that I never felt safe or secure. I also knew that I had never been taught skills on how to soothe myself when I got hit with anxiety. At least not anything particularly effective.  Sorry folks, eating a gallon of ice cream may be soothing, but the byproduct isn't helpful, is it?

  How on earth do you learn to soothe yourself? For me, part of the process was understanding why I felt the way I did. I was able to use self-talk. Like remind myself that I was a grown woman and did not depend on anyone to take care of me. I also realized that after a certain age, the only one who could abandon me, was ME!

  Once I learned how to recognize the particular feelings for the abandonment issue  I could start soothing myself before they got out of control.

  Those of you with anxiety and panic know the metaphor. It's like a little snowball that rolls down the hill and keeps collecting more snow as it rolls faster and faster. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger until it rolls you over and you attack yourself. Or hit the wall and knock yourself out.

 Since that time, I have had only one episode that I was unable to talk myself down from, and I think that's a damned good success rate.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY ON SEPARATION:
DR. G.'S INTERPRETATION

   This was of particular interest  back in graduate school. I knew I had issues related to separation and attachment , so I read the books and wrote some papers. 

    Back in those days, before it was all about neurology and physiology, there were actual theories and ideas about children's emotional development and how they become attached to the significant people in their lives. I'm using the term mother, because it's easier than listing all the possible care givers. The "who" doesn't matter, as research found. The fact that the baby bonds is what is important.

  There were infants during WW II who were orphaned. You've seen some of the photos of the nurseries in England. Rows of cribs and one nurse, feeding and changing them all. There were infants who died for no apparent reason. It was referred to as the Merganser effect, if memory serves. Later it was found that that infants also need love and tactile affection to survive, if not thrive.

  John Bowlby was a British physiatrist who first studied infants and their attachments' to their mothers. He wrote three seminal books on the process.

 I can't go into too much of the theory. Three books and all, well that' a lot of material to try to condense.  Hell, even if I did, you'd all leave me because I'd be boring you to death and fear of that is keeping me from writing too much.

  YES !!! That's why I thought about it yesterday.  I saw a video about one's presence on their blog. The person said you have to be consistent. If you post every day and you cease that pattern, people will stop looking after a couple of "no post days". If you post weekly, then keep to that schedule.  That got my abandonment anxiety cued up. I post sort of every other day, or sometimes more, so if thought if you didn't see me for a few days, you'd leave me. Nuts right? But so true.  Anyhow,

   Mary Ainsworth also conducted research and found three forms of attachment. Secure, Insecure, and Ambivalent.

  A secure child, well when mummy comes back, the child is glad to see her and goes to her, and then is able to go back to playing. The insecure child, ignores mummy when she returns and makes mummy really pissed off.  The ambivalent child (guess who), is relieved that mummy came back,(oh thank God she didn't just leave me here)  but is also pissed off that she left at all. This child waffles, looks at mummy, looks away, looks back and can't decide what to do.

  These types of children become who they are because  of the nature /nurture situation. Unfortunately, in this case, nurture has influenced things a bit more. The children who are ambivalent usually have inconsistent mothering as compared to the insecure who have poor mothering. These kids know they can't count on her. At least they know where they stand. See, being consistent is so dammed important in so many things. I used to say that the only thing I'm consistent about is my inconsistency. Does that mean I'm doomed?

  I expect that many of us who fall into the ambivalent style, form codependent relationships. Can't live with them. Can't live without them.

THEORY ABOUT ABANDONMENT:
  It's pretty much a known and accepted theory. This isn't one of my ridiculous ones. At least I haven't made it into that yet.

   Not everyone is fortunate to have had a good enough mother. If they were lucky, they had enough people around so they could form solid attachments and go through life with a usual amount of anxiety and fear. Some were constitutionally fortunate and although they may not have gotten what they needed, they had the internal strength to give it to themselves.

  For those us of who did not get what we needed, have a few more struggles than others. Of course everything is in varying degrees. You can use a continuum or a scale of one to ten. Some got it worse than others or perceive it that way. That's just the way it is.

CONCLUSION: 

Never, ever lose hope. I believe that you must be brave and be able to look into your self. You can't blame other people. My mother did the best she could. It wasn't her fault that it wasn't good enough. If I accept that, and then after I understand it, well, that's on me if I still want to be hurt and angry.  Do I still blame my parents? Of course I do. It's so much fun. As long as I keep it on the light side, it's okay. Holding onto the heaviness, it's  not healthy nor does it make you better. If you want to get past your anxiety and fear, you'll have to do the work. It's not easy, but anything of value requires work. Even if you were told over and over that you're worthless, they were wrong.
   You are valuable and you are worth working on.