How to Heal Abandonment Issues

Abandonment issues can cause lifelong suffering, crippling anxiety, and destructive patterns that destroy relationships.

But it doesn’t mean if you have them, you can’t beat them.

Today’s blog is going to go deep into:

• What are abandonment issues
• What causes them
• The most common abandonment issues symptoms in adults and children
• And how to get over abandonment issues for either yourself or your partner

Let’s begin!

What are Abandonment Issues?

Abandonment issues refer to people experiencing a strong fear, anxiety, and stress of losing a loved one or being rejected or isolated when someone leaves them.

While not a “mental disorder” or “distinct diagnosis”, it can cause symptoms that are similar to many disorders. People will experience a range of different emotional difficulties when they feel they’re being abandoned by their partner, friends, or family members.

Abandonment issues can start at any time in life but have their roots in childhood. It also has an impact on the formation of your attachment style.

Understanding the root cause of your abandonment issues can help you navigate a healthy path forward and remove the deeply destructive behaviors of these issues.

Now, let’s look at how abandonment issues are formed below.

What Causes Abandonment Issues?

Abandonment issues are rooted in childhood and can stem from various scenarios and experiences. However, several distinct events or experiences contribute to these issues more than most:

Abuse or neglect Children who experience abuse or neglect from their caregivers or other individuals have a more difficult time forming attachments when older, leading to the fear they’ll be abandoned.

Death Witnessing someone dying is a traumatic event that affects anyone – especially if you’re a child. Death can form the idea in children that they’ll be abandoned, which festers until they are older. The fear of abandonment can be incredibly intense if the death is sudden.

Unstable living situations Similar to abuse and neglect, if a person grows up in an unstable home where their basic needs — food, sleep, and shelter — aren’t met, they develop the anxiety they’ll be abandoned if they don’t do what’s necessary to earn that affection.

Unmet emotional needs While we have basic needs, we also have emotional needs, such as love, support, kindness, and affection. If we don’t experience any of these as a kid, we tend to develop abandonment issues when a romantic partner fails to meet these needs.

Abandonment itself Adults sometimes fear abandonment because they experienced it as children when their parents or caregivers left them. Naturally, they’ll worry the same thing will happen when they’re older.

The problem with detecting these issues is that they look and feel similar to others.

Let’s look at these symptoms (or signs) below and how your attachment style might be involved.

Signs of Abandonment Issues in Adults

Insecure attachment styles can be a great indicator if you’re experiencing these issues. As securely attached individuals are great communicators, are confident in themselves, and have a healthy upbringing, they don’t tend to experience these issues.

Anxiously preoccupied, fearful, and dismissive avoidants suffer from abandonment issues, as the above experiences – death, unstable living conditions, abuse or neglect, unmet emotional needs, and abandonment itself – form the foundation of their attachment styles.

Here’s how they experience it:

Anxious Preoccupied (AP) APs grow up feeling like they can’t depend on others to provide love and support due to inconsistent parenting. To compensate for this, they become attached to their partners and develop intensely close and codependent relationships, fearing they won’t get abandoned. They tend to be alert if they suspect their partner will leave them, triggering their issues.

Dismissive Avoidant (DA) DAs didn’t experience any emotional support growing up, so their basic and emotional needs weren't met. In response, they become withdrawn, private, and distant. They avoid intimacy in relationships, not allowing themselves to get close to anyone for fear they’ll get left behind.

Fearful Avoidant (FA) As for FAs, they experienced a childhood of neglect, abuse, or other childhood trauma. This leads them to be inconsistent in relationships, jumping between loving their partner and not, and can be seen as a way not to get too close to someone in fear of being abandoned if they do.

While the experiences may vary from person to person based on their attachment style, there are multiple symptoms they can experience abandonment issues as adults:

• Anxious about partners and the relationship in general.
• Distrusting and constantly seeking out reassurances.
• Codependency with their partner.
• Intentionally sabotage personal relationships to avoid getting too close.
• Unable to regulate emotions healthy.
• Staying in unhealthy and abusive relationships.
• Quickly jumping from one relationship to another.
• Acting in abusive, manipulative, and coercive ways in fear they'll be abandoned.

Signs of Abandonment Issues in Children

Children can also develop abandonment issues, and detecting them at a young age can help them overcome their problems.

The main sign of abandonment issues in children is separation anxiety.

Now, separation anxiety isn’t an issue within the first few months of birth, but it can develop after the first year. Once they start to think for themselves, it can become a problem.

Here’s how the child might respond:

• Crying when parents are not present.
• Getting anxious when being left alone.
• Being hypervigilant, always checking where their parents are.
• Reluctance to go to daycare or be left with another adult.

How to Heal from Abandonment Issues

Determine Your Attachment Style Your attachment style dictates how you approach love and relationships and cope with issues. Identifying your attachment style can give you insight into your fears, making you more aware of your behaviors. Most importantly, you can change your insecure attachment style to beome it to become securely attached, getting to a state where you can handle all issues with confidence and self-worth.

If you need to know your attachment style, take our 5-minute quiz. You'll get a personalized report detailing your style and everything you need to do.

Focus on Self-Soothing and Self Care You have to focus on yourself.

How do you find care for yourself and self-soothe? Everyone has different ways to do it, so it all depends on you. However, focusing on how you approach heightened moments by putting yourself first can make a huge difference in your transformation.

Here are some things to help:

• Doing things you love to do.
• Communicating your emotional needs to your partner.
• Taking time to think about what you want to do (doing it alone is crucial).
• Learning ways to calm yourself in times of high stress.

Develop Healthy Habits for Emotional Triggers How you respond to your abandonment emotional triggers is a crucial step to helping you overcome these issues. Your old coping mechanisms aren’t working anymore, so trying new ones is the best step forward.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Write down what triggers you to experience these thoughts and feelings.
• Think about how you respond to it.
• Start considering alternatives approaches to these emotional triggers to make you respond better to them and to reinforce positive emotions.

Reprogram Your Beliefs Subconscious reprogramming is the cornerstone of the Integrated Attachment Theory™ approach. If you work to reprogram your subconscious thought patterns and behaviors, you can overcome your initial beliefs about why you feel abandoned.

You can do this by challenging the negative thoughts about your issues and switching them to positive ones. Here are some ways to help:

• Write down your thoughts about your abandonment issues.
• Challenge those thoughts with positive reinforcement.
• Repeat it until it becomes your core belief.

Feel free to try our Stop Abandonment & Rejection in A Relationship (Anxious Attachment Style Re-Programming) Course to learn more about reprogramming your thoughts.

How to Help Someone Else Deal With Abandonment Issues

It can be hard to watch someone you love struggle with abandonment issues – and target you when they feel you’re about to leave them.

There are some steps you can take to help them with this process:

Validate Their Emotions and Thoughts Explain to them that you understand their emotions and why. Disregarding their feelings will only cause them to go deeper down the rabbit hole. You also should not overreact to any of their behaviors either.

Don’t Enable Their Unhealthy Behaviors If you encourage them to keep acting like they do, they’ll keep doing it. Manipulation, blame, and isolation are constant behaviors that you’ll reinforce if you don’t establish boundaries between the both of you. Make it clear that you won’t tolerate such behaviors.

Offer Open Communication Someone who fears abandonment usually has trouble trusting people, so to help them in the long term, you have to be open with your communication, feelings, and emotions. Only then can you develop a strong relationship while helping your partner overcome their issues.

Encourage Them to Seek Help It’s not your job to “fix” people; you can only guide them to improve. If you’ve tried to help your partner but to no avail, then you should help them get professional help. They can seek traditional therapy or try The Personal Development School.

The Final Word on How to Heal Abandonment Issues

Overcoming and healing abandonment issues isn’t an easy journey. There is no set timeline – it all depends on how you approach it and commit to it.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel to help you get through this. You just have to learn new coping mechanisms, understand your triggers and attachment style, and how you can get better.

We can help you through this journey thanks to our courses. Feel free to check them out. You can start off by trying our Stop Abandonment & Rejection in A Relationship (Anxious Attachment Style Re-Programming) Course.

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