15 Things People Who Are Scared Of Abandonment Experience

Abandonment trauma is a common condition of hypersensitivity about things such as deserving and keeping love, feeling secure, having a stable sense of a worthy self.

That trauma is often created by experiences of affective deprivation, painful separations, or inconsistent parental caretaking, early in an individual's life.

If you've had an early experience that left you with fear of abandonment, you probably feel intrusive worry and pervasive insecurity.

You might have the desire to please and win people over constantly. Perhaps you also fall in love the wrong people, giving too much of yourself too fast and too readily and cutting them always a better deal than you cut yourself. What is really happening is that you don’t lovingly allow your trauma to come to awareness.

Here is a list of the behaviors and feelings that you may want to watch out for.

1. You Suffer From Anxiously Anticipate Abandonment:

You are secretly scared that others will be easily disenchanted with you. Therefore, you try to prove your worth by always being helpful, unique, indispensable, available. You also read into people’s words and gestures to find confirmations of their love or even to scan for signs demonstrating their disregard for you.

2. You Feel Insecure In Social Situations:

In social environments, you often feel clumsy, shy and awkward. That makes you shut down when you feel ostracized by the daring extroverts having a good time. The awkwardness you feel is caused by the fear to expose yourself and be shamed, or disliked. And this fear, in turn, leads to a feeling of not belonging, of being boring and excluded.

3. You Secretly Sabotage Yourself:

You often do and say things that provoke others actually to attack you, abandon you, and reject you. That's like a game in which you try to prove to yourself that there's a reason why you're scared that others will turn away from you in the end.

4. You Always Find Yourself In Hurtful Situations:

It's not hard for you to recall several situations when you were poorly treated, patronized, lied to, cheated on and hurt – psychologically and emotionally.

5. You Don’t Remember Huge Parts Of Your Childhood:

You feel that whole years are somehow erased from your memory. Sometimes, that happens to protect an individual from remembering traumatic experiences that can irreparably damage them.

6. You Feel Detached:

You often feel like the world is out of reach and you are out of its reach as well, impenetrable to its mundane pleasures and impregnated against its horrible brutalities.

7. You Are Self-Destructive:

Undigested trauma can lead people to engage in dangerous behaviors such as fights, reckless driving, sex sprees, binge drinking – these episodes are often triggered by insecurity which the person tries to medicate with excessive and dangerous behaviors so that their attention is taken away from what causes them anxiety.

8. Relationships Make Or Break You:

Your relationships can either destroy your emotional balance or take you to a level of blissfulness such high that no other thing counts or matters. That creates a certain propensity for you to feel shattered by problems in the relationship and suffer in cases of minor and mild difficulties or even short separations.

9. You Are Extremely Sensitive To Criticism:

Even constructive remarks make you feel rejected and blamed, shamed and excluded. This kind of trauma makes disappointment extremely hurtful since it robs you of your sense of worthy self.

10. You Often Unloved And Underappreciated:

Abandonment trauma leads to a phenomenon called affective gluttony, which is an insatiable need for affection, acceptance, and reassurance. That's why the slightest change in the behavior or mood of someone you love can make you feel unloved, threatened, forgotten and excluded.

11. You Feel Repelled By Available Partners:

You often feel disgusted by the tenderness of those who admire and court you genuinely, even though that's exactly what you say you want. You might perceive their desire as engulfing neediness or feel that their transparent stability lacks the passion that only uncertainty can generate. That's why you are less likely to create relationships with available partners – they simply turn you off.

12. You Are Infatuated With What Is Unattainable:

The ones who do turn you on are the unavailable people. That's because the fear of abandonment had depreciated your sense of a worthy self, so to restore its value, you chase after unattainable partners – to prove that after all, you deserve love even from the people whose love is almost impossible to win.

13. You Rush Into Relationships Too Fast:

You usually rush into intimacy in relationships but not because you are ready. You do it because you don’t want to miss out on getting close as soon as possible.

14. You Have A High Need For Control:

You often need to ensure everything is fine and to check on other people to make sure they are ok. Therefore, you tend to feel anxious about what could go wrong.

15. You Are Secretly Afraid Of Commitment:

Fear of abandonment is interestingly connected to the fear of commitment. The reason is simple; people who don't like the pain of a breakup will try their best to avoid feeling this pain. That's why when they find a person who's willing to commit to a serious relationship, they tend to run away.