How to overcome fear of abandonment

You may be suffering from relationship anxiety if you find yourself seeking constant reassurance from your partner, looking to please your significant other no matter what the cost to you and when your agreeable tendencies conspire against your best interests. Other pointers to relationship anxiety may include behaving in a controlling manner towards your partner's movements or whom they associate with. It could also entail wanting to be around them constantly and behaving in a clingy way.

When we become emotionally over-involved with another person we tend to lose our sense of self and more specifically our own direction in life. We become overly focused on their life, their struggles, their problems, their mission, and end up under-focused on our own lives. It could be that this focus on another comes from our own fear of abandonment and this can ultimately spell danger for the long-term viability of our relationships.

The origins of your fear of abandonment are most likely located in your early life, typically in your very early childhood. How we are attached to our primary caregivers in our early lives can set the tone for how we attune to others in adult relationships. Where John Bowlby, one of the founders of Attachment Theory, held the view that attachment was an everything process, we now have the benefit of the groundbreaking research work of his colleague Mary Ainsworth, another founder of Attachment Theory. Her team’s strange situation experiment demonstrated that there are individual differences in attachment quality. Further to this, one of the primary paradigms in attachment theory is the security of an individual’s attachment.

We are said to have an attachment style when we show a specific pattern of behaviour in our relationships. There are four adult attachment styles: secure attachment (or what the research referred to as "B" babies), anxious or avoidant attachment ("A" babies), anxious/ambivalent attachment ("C" babies), and disorganised/disorientated/fearful attachment ("D" babies). There are, of course, some sub-types, but in general, these four styles can give a sound understanding of Attachment Theory and any legacy for adult relational patterns.

We may have a set of road maps from our very early life experiences which will influence how we relate to others in later life. These templates can, however, shift and they can be rewired in response to intentional and purposeful actions. When children are starved of affection, and have a lack of emotional connection to their primary caregivers, or if they feel unsafe in their presence, they might decide to believe that people are not to be trusted or relied upon.

These early life experiences happen at a pre-verbal stage, where there is no developed ego or, much less, a well-developed pre-frontal cortex (the so-called CEO part of the brain). They might come to fear future physical and emotional abandonment because that is what is familiar to them from early life and it is what they come to expect. Intentional and purposeful actions occur when a person takes responsibility for the legacy of their negative early life influences and enters a phase of emotional recovery. 

The good news is that the templates from our early life are not necessarily set in stone.  The process of neuroplasticity, the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganising its structure, can make forming more secure relating patterns more possible. We may have a strong blueprint from our early life that heavily influences our adult relational style but we can change for the better. The brains of those engaging in deep therapeutic and recovery work will reorganise themselves to support a different attachment style.

Counselling can be a safe place to explore the impact of your early life experiences and uncover the ongoing legacy of your current relationships. Overcoming a fear of abandonment is possible so that you can have more positive and empowering relationships. It is possible to achieve an 'earned secure attachment' by healing past wounds and experiencing healthy reparative relationships.