10 Signs You Have Abandonment Issues
By: Kathy
March 23, 2016

Do I Have abandonmentAbandonment issues? Wondering for sure if you have them or not?  You don’t have to have been left in a basket on a church doorstep in order to have abandonment issues.  I myself didn’t even know I had abandonment until I was 35 years old, but when I learned more about it, you’d better believe I had the signs all along!  Here are 10 signs you might have abandonment. . .

  • Calling or texting repeatedly when you don’t know where your loved one is.
  • Constantly watching the door when you are waiting on someone to arrive.
  • You don’t like surprises such as last minute changes in plans or finding out someone knew about something before you did.Abandonment Issues
  • Visualizing what it would be like if you lost a loved one and what you would do.
  • You have a terrifying fear of losing a loved one to death, divorce, etc.
  • Feeling threatened if someone else is close with your loved ones.
  • Feeling a huge sense of sadness or anxiety when your loved one is gone, busy, or otherwise distanced from you (i.e., mad at you).
  • You consistently pick physically or emotionally unavailable partners (i.e., cheating, addicted, abusive, very self-focused, etc.)
  • You over-react to situations and later don’t understand why you ‘flipped out’.
  • You have moments in your reactivity that you don’t recall very well afterwards.

Abandonment is no joke.  If you have it and it is not under control, your life can be hijacked in an instant by someone else’s actions.  It makes people feel like they are crazy or even psychotic in their reactions to anything that feels like the original abandoning circumstances.  It is easy to look at the situation afterwards and say you shouldn’t have reacted that way, but in the moment, you feel like you had absolutely no control.

Abandonment can come from being shamed (directly or indirectly), by having emotionally distant parents or siblings that excluded you, being bullied in school, moving around a lot as a kid, being physically, verbally, emotionally, or sexually abused or other trauma that you experienced early in life.  fear of abadonmentThe net result is that even decades after the original traumatizing events, we are still coping with the anxiety of it all!  Unfortunately, most of us learned undesirable behaviors that only provide us momentary relief from our anxiety, but we have really only been treating the symptoms.

If you recognize that you have abandonment and you want to begin dealing with it at the source instead of ineffectively managing the symptoms, we can help.  You CAN free yourself from the pain, the anxiety, the helplessness, the hopelessness, and finally get the love that you have been desperately seeking!  I won’t tell you that it is a fun journey, but I will promise you that the results are worth the effort!