Abandonment Anxiety The Hidden Cause of Your Relationship Issues

Welcome to the presentation, everybody. Today we're going to be talking about Love Me, Don't Leave Me Addressing fears of abandonment. So what we're going to try to get out of this presentation is a broad overview of the way that we can help clients increase awareness of their story, including beliefs about behavioral reactions to situations that trigger their fear of abandonment. We'll do this by helping them learn about what fear of abandonment is, which means we've got to learn about it. We will explore the concept of schemas, or core beliefs and examine common traps in thinking, reacting, and in the relationships that we create not only with others, but with ourselves. And we will help clients learn the skills necessary to accept their past as part of their story and how to acknowledge that their past does not have to continue to negatively impact them in the present. So how does abandonment impact recovery? Regardless of whether you're talking about addiction or depression or anxiety, abandonment issues can be there, and they're often there in one way or another. So we need to be able to address this and figure out exactly what it is that's causing dysfunctional relationships and what it is that triggers this fear inside our particular clients. Connection is a basic human need. We don't just grow up and all of a sudden we can become hermits and we're perfectly fine. Some people just give up, but most people need some sort of human connection. Extroverts tend to need more human connection than introverts in that we draw energy from other people. Introverts are just fine with one or two other friends that they see occasionally. So that's going to be important to consider when you're talking about abandonment issues and why one person develops them where another one doesn't. As infants and children, survival was dependent upon the relationship with the primary caregiver. When a child is born, when a child is two, when a child is six, they can't just run up to the grocery store, buy what they want, and come home and fix themselves. Food. They can't pay to put a roof over their head. So as infants and children, if the primary caregiver is not there, it's the life threatening issue. Not only are they not getting the emotional support that they need, they're not learning how to identify their internal states and effectively meet their own physical and psychological needs. But you know, without the caregiver there, they may not eat. So this is a big, big deal for children. People's beliefs about other people and relationships was formed largely based on their interactions with their caregivers. Now, if you think about it. And we're going to talk about this more later. When we're born, we don't have these huge conceptions of how the world works. We learn it through observation and through experience. Unfortunately, as Piaget helped us learn, children, especially under the age of seven, don't think in terms of what are the possibilities that may explain why this happened. It's all or nothing, black or white, and it's focused generally on one aspect of the situation. It tends to be very concrete. Children are not able to take other people's perspectives. They're very egocentric. So when these schemas are formed, they tend to be very dichotomous. And you're thinking now about some of the clients that you've worked with in treatment, and you say, one of the problems that we run into a lot is the fact that their thinking is very dichotomous. It's all or nothing. You're either here or you're not. I either love you or I hate you. You can see a theme coming out here. So we're going to look at these schemas and understand that the child formed the best representation of the world that they could with the skills they had at that time. But an adult has had a lot more experiences. An adult cognitively has developed more and can think abstractly. So we need to challenge our clients to reevaluate those situations and try to separate what was very traumatic as a child from now. And healthy relationships serve as a buffer against stress. So in recovery, we need to make sure that our clients are able to form healthy relationships with themselves and with other people. And I will always come back to with themselves, because if they don't like themselves, if they can't support themselves emotionally, then they're always going to be looking to others to fill a need instead of to be in an equal partnership. We want to help people address beliefs that are formed as a result of these negative relationships and help them create a new understanding of those events. You know, maybe mom wasn't there because, yes, she was a cocaine addict and she went to jail. And, you know, there were a lot of things that went into it. A child sees that as the child's fault because it's egocentric. Mom went away. It must be because of me. We need to look at it again as an adult and go, well, what else might have been going on? That your mom chose to use cocaine or chose to abandon the family instead of staying? Instead of, Are there other options? Are there other explanations besides it was all about you? Maybe it was all about her. She was not functioning well, she was hurting, she was desperate. Let's look at some of the options. We want to help people better understand themselves and their reactions so they understand when they get into relationships and maybe somebody's behavior changes or there's this little hint of discord and they like freak the freak out. They will understand a little bit better where that comes from so they can make more conscious, healthy decisions and how to handle it. So let's talk about this abandonment experience. Remember I said it differs for everybody, but we want to look at when it happened and what happened in childhood. Like I said, survival depends upon caregivers. Fear of abandonment is a natural survival response. If children develop this fear, it was a natural response. You put your hand on a stove, it hurts, you pull it off, that's a natural response. Your body wants to help you survive, your brain wants to help you survive. So if the brain thinks that there's a threat of lack of safety of some sort, it's going to try to do what it can to help you survive in the way it understands it. And we're talking about a six month old's brain or a six year old's brain. So it's doing the best it can with the knowledge it has. Meeting biological needs and safety needs are key triggers for anxiety at any age though. So there can be instances where the abandonment issues really didn't start happening until later. So we want to look and say, you know, if this person was in their teens when they had this abandonment crisis, in what ways did that crisis trigger biological or safety fears that they weren't going to get those needs met? When focused on survival, people can't focus elsewhere. Think about Maslow's hierarchy. The baseline is our biological needs. Right above baseline, right above biology is our safety needs. We can't focus on self esteem and relationships and all that other self actualization stuff until we get our basic needs met. If you're hungry, if you're scared, if you're tired, if you don't feel well, you really don't care about focusing on a lot of the other less tangible stuff. So we need to help people understand that it makes sense what's going on. It's not necessarily the best reaction now. Now that you're older and you have other tools, we can choose how those experiences currently impact you. But it's important to understand that right now you're reacting based on those dichotomous schemas that you formed when you were, you know, a child. However, however old you were in the insecurely attached child when, when there wasn't a parent there to say it's okay and teach the child how to self soothe. Every situation is a crisis. They go from 0 to 150 in the drop of a hat because it automatically triggers those primitive survival fears. Now remember, schemas are the way we kind of conceptualize the world. When we think about perceptions and attributions. When we go out into, you know, you go to a college campus, your schema, you have a schema form that says, okay, on a college campus. This is kind of what I would expect to see, you know, young people anywhere from the age of 18 to 26 milling around carrying school books. That makes sense to me. If you show up at the college campus and everybody there is over the age of 50 and nobody has any books and they're all just kind of milling around aimlessly, you're going to scratch your head and go, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense in my schema. So schemas are basically a shortcut to help us predict what's going to happen. So we aren't hit quite as much by this, the unknown. You know, I don't know what to expect when I show up at the college campus. We have an idea. Maybe not the right one, but we have an idea. So what causes this abandonment experience in infancy and early childhood? A lot of times caregivers were away for long periods of time. And I am not trying to point fingers and say anybody's wrong or bad or anything. I just want to point out that extended absences, if they are not handled well by the remaining parent, can lead to an abandonment experience. And that's the key. The remaining parent is able to mediate this response. In the case of soldiers who go overseas, they're deployed for six months, 18 months, that's a really long time for a child. But there are ways to handle that. So I'm not saying that every child of a soldier has an abandonment experience. That is so not true. But it is important to understand people who are away for long periods because of work, maybe they travel and they travel and they're gone for two, three, four months at a time. Again, if the remaining parent is able to help the child negotiate and navigate, especially if they're able to still contact the traveling parent, is a much different experience than if the traveling parent just disappears and shows back up. Whenever parents go to jail, it happens. If the child is able to visit the parent in jail, it may help. Sometimes the child may Feel rightly or wrongly, that whatever the parent did, they chose to do in spite of because they loved that activity or they loved that substance. Usually it turns out to be addiction more than they love the child themselves. And this is a big issue we have in early recovery with clients who have addictions is helping them reforge those bonds with their children who are like, well, why did you choose that over me? Some parents choose to abandon the family. And you know, there can be a lot of reasons for that. That's a whole different class. But if a parent just up and leaves, goes out for cigarettes and never comes home, you know, we hear that all the time on TV skits, you know, there's not much the child can do to wrap their head around and understand why. So they've got to make sense of it. And then death. Death is hard for grownups to understand. Death is even harder in many cases for children to understand. I've known some children that seem to be wise beyond their years, but they're the exception, not the rule. So something that causes the parent to be away physically for long periods is one. And that, like I said, can be mediated by the remaining parent and by the ability to have some kind of contact with the absent parent even when they're away. So maybe through letters, maybe through Skype, whatever's available. Other things in infancy and early childhood is if the parent has been inconsistently or unpredictably physically or emotionally present. This is more true with parents that have some sort of emotional distress. And you notice I didn't say mental illness. If somebody is going through a crucial stressful period, they may not be able to deal with their children. If they're in extreme emotional distress, they may not be able to recognize the needs of their children at that point because they are in their own turmoil. If this happens a lot, then it may cause the parent to be unpredictably emotionally available. Addiction, we know the person is struggling to deal with life on life's terms. They're trying to numb out the pain with the addiction, which means when they're using, they're probably numbed out to everything. And when they're not using, they're probably overwhelmed and in a state of emotional distress. So again, they're not emotionally present. And then there's the case of the parent that's just ill equipped to deal with a child. When you have 14, 15 year olds having babies or you have someone who has a severe and persistent mental illness, who has a child and just doesn't even know how to deal with this being, we would have women in our mother baby unit, one of the places I worked, and they would give birth and they were raised or they came to believe, culturally, if you want to say it that way, I don't know that that's really accurate. But they put their babies in the swing and they wouldn't touch them again for eight hours unless they had to change a diaper or give them a bottle. And they would do that and then put them back in the swing in front of Elmo. And I had a big problem with that because they weren't really responding to the child. They were just like, you've got your needs met. If you're crying, you just need to cry it out. Not so much. So these parents, it's not that they were trying to be bad parents. They just didn't have the skills. They didn't know what they were supposed to do with the children or how to react to the child when the child was crying. Abandonment issues that can come up in later childhood. If it's a poor family fit, if the person is the black sheep of the family. And we've all heard about people who never felt like they belonged in their family or never felt like they could get parental approval, that may trigger some abandonment issues. If there's a trauma that ruptures the relationship with the primary caregiver or introduction of a new, less emotionally or physically safe caregiver. So anytime there's abuse, neglect, or introduction of a new person who is disruptive to the family environment can cause an abandonment experience. The child may shut down as a means of protecting his or herself. So the reaction. Reaction to fear is what? Fear, Fight or flee. Anger towards someone who is unavailable. The child may become very angry and aggressive and just cantankerous. Sadness, which is really a representation of the child's sense of helplessness. Inability to make that person come back and fear that they are going to cease to exist. Shame about feeling needy. And obviously this is more later in teenage years adulthood, where people are made to feel shameful for being needy. And I guess that can be true sometimes with children who are constantly criticized for. You have. By the parent saying something like, you have to be always on me, just go do something else. Fear of rejection, isolation, Fear of loss of control, of the unknown, and fear of failure. We've talked about these before, and when we talk about abandonment, all of these are present. If the parent leaves, if the parent abandons you, and I say parent, it can be caregiver. I'm using those terms interchangeably. The child takes it as a rejection. The child fears isolation because they can't, you know, put on their pampers and crawl next door and make a new friend. Loss of control. They don't have any control over making the one person who is responsible for their existence come back. That's kind of deep. And failure. How must a child feel like a failure if the caregiver chooses something else over them or is constantly criticizing and telling them to go away? So questions for our clients. When we think about these fears of rejection, loss of control, failure, feeling shameful because people made you feel needy, all of these things. What caused these fears for you as a child? Let's think about some instances when this happened and when you felt, like, fearful that you were being abandoned. When these things were going on, how was this reasonable or helpful? And I know you may be scratching your head right now going, what? As a child, these reactions were reasonable and. Or helpful in some way or another. So we need to figure that out. What was the survival purpose? This helps clients kind of start putting things into perspective and go, okay, I see how that kind of made sense. But we move to the next question. What causes these same fears or feelings now? And how are your reactions to these situations unhelpful? Because the way you reacted when you're six is going to be different when you're 26. So we're just going to add another layer of difficulty on top of it based on their temperament. Children need different types and amounts of caregiver interaction. And if you've had children or you've been around children, or if you've worked in a classroom, you know this, you know that there are children who are wide open constantly. Well, not constantly. My son, when he was awake, he was wide open. I mean, it was like there was no middle ground. He was either sleeping or wide open. But he would also get easily overstimulated, which would mean he would need structure. And in order for him to start understanding that, we had to work with him to help him understand what it meant when he started feeling a certain way so he could identify before he would melt down and do something differently. Then you have the energizer bunny. And this is. I'll use my kids as examples. My daughter wasn't wide open. She was constant. But she, like, I swear she never slept when she was awake. She had this steady, moderate pace of inquiry and play and everything else. I mean, she was a good girl. She was. She was a wonderful child, but she just. She never really took a break. She just kept Going and going and going. And, you know, as a parent, got one that's wide open and all over the place, and then I've got her, who's an energizer bunny. I'm going, oh, my gosh. Some days. So I can see how parents get overwhelmed sometimes. These children require different types of interaction. Haley, my daughter, she really didn't need a whole lot of interaction. She was more of an introvert. You know, she was inquisitive. She would read books, she would play. She would do pretend stuff. And, you know, she would gladly engage with you, but it wasn't like she had to have your constant interaction. Sean, on the other hand, would take my hand, and he would lead me over somewhere, and he'd go, let's do this, mommy. Or, let's go do that, mommy. Or, sit down and play with me, mommy. So he was wide open, but he expected me to be wide open with him the whole time, and I would get overstimulated. They needed different amounts of attention. They needed different amounts of reinforcement and different amounts of guidance. The introvert child is the one who can go and just play independently quite nicely without feeling neglected. You know, some kids are like that. The extrovert child is the one who always wants you to play with them. And they are just. It's not that they are angry or that they can't do it themselves. They just want to share it with you. Understanding what the kids need and finding a way to help them harness that and understand their needs is important in early childhood. It's not like you can tell the extroverted child, no, I need two or three hours to just let my hair down. So you need to go do something. Watch Barney for a couple hours, and we'll be fine. That's rejecting to the extroverted child who just desperately wants to interact with you and learn. By the same token, you know, I feel I need to put the little caveat in here. It is important to pay attention to the behaviors that are being reinforced. So if a child is doing something that ultimately will not be helpful or productive, we don't necessarily want to reinforce that all the time. That's a parenting issue. What we're focusing on is how did the child feel and how can we address those issues that may come up for the person now? And schemas. I talked about it a little bit earlier. Based on their needs and caregiver reactions, children form schemas or core beliefs about the world and others. If they go to mom and they ask her to play and she always says no. Then they're going to learn that the world is rejecting, it's not a safe place. If they fall down and mom responds right away and gives them a hug, they're going to learn the world is a safe place. If they fall down and the first reaction of mom is, get up, brush yourself off and go back and play. That's more dismissive. And obviously those are two ends of a very broad spectrum. But this helps children understand how people will respond when they are needy, when they need to be comforted, when they need some positive reinforcement. How are other people going to react? Now, children up to the age of seven have very primitive cognitive skills. Children eight to 12 are developing these skills. We can't expect them just to magically turn eight and be like, okay, I can think abstractly. That's not how it works. They start developing the ability to think abstractly. So we don't want to assume that once they hit 8 magically, they think like an adult. Doesn't happen. That being said, children in general think dichotomously. It's all or nothing. They're egocentric. Whatever happens is a result or impacts on them and they think about how it impacts them. So if it makes them sad, they assume it makes others sad. If it makes them scared, they assume it may make others scared. If something happens and people run away or people abandon them, a lot of times they assume it had something to do with them. By the same token, children can only focus on one aspect at a time. So they can't go, alright, let's consider this situation here. You know, mom and dad are fighting all the time and dad's been drinking a lot and he just lost his job and yada, yada, yada. So maybe dad just needed to take a time out. That's not how a child thinks. A child thinks, daddy's here, Daddy's angry all the time. I wonder if I were a better child, maybe he'd be happier. Daddy went away, I guess I didn't make him happier. So they're only focusing on one aspect. They're not able to abstractly think about all the potential reasons, which means that they're focused on some very misleading information. The good thing is, as adults, they can look at that dichotomous, that dichotomy, and they can start kind of pulling it apart, going, okay, you know, maybe that is too all or nothing. Let's look at some alternatives. Schemas are a broad way of perceiving things based upon memories, feelings and thoughts. Their memories, feelings and Thoughts are not wrong. That's exactly how they felt, that's exactly what they thought, and that's exactly what was the truth to them at that point in time. We don't want to take that away from them. What we want to say is, how are you going to deal with how it impacts you? Now, I've dealt with hundreds of clients who've had lasting resentments and anger and abandonment issues towards their caregivers and family of origin. And that concept of forgiveness is really difficult, especially when there are abandonment issues and everything else going on. Helping clients look at it from a different perspective and maybe look at possibilities that what happened wasn't their fault. Maybe look at possibilities that the parent did not have the tools to do the job at that particular time. Sometimes, and you know, I'm couching this as much as I can because obviously it's not with every client, but sometimes I found this to be very helpful in encouraging clients to take a more healthy view of the present. They can't change the past, but is holding on to this anger and resentment really worth their energy? Schemas that trigger abandonment fears center around the self. They're a person's acceptability, or are they going to be rejected? They center around the self, love, ability. Am I lovable or am I going to be isolated and living with 30 cats the rest of my life? The self. Am I competent? Can I do things? Can I succeed, or am I a failure? And adaptability, Am I adaptable? Can I deal with changes? Can I deal with the unknown? Or do I have to hold on as tight as I can to the reins of control because I cannot deal with ambiguity? These are all things that children learn as they grow up. You know, that's the. If you look at Erickson's models, you know, we talk about trust and mistrust and industry versus inferiority. The child learns as they're growing up that they can go out and they can try things and they can explore things. And yeah, sometimes they're going to fail, but they can always come back to the safe, welcoming arms, if you will, of their primary caregiver in a healthy relationship. You never knew that Piaget and Erickson would keep coming up. Even in clinical practice, schemas that trigger abandonment, fear center around others as well. Are others, remember we said it forms their schemas about a lot of things growing up. Are others accepting or do other people tend to be rejecting? Distant, cold, and unable to handle my needs? Am I just overwhelming? Do others tend to be absent or present? Do others tend to reward competence or do they always find fault? Are others predictable or are they unpredictable? If you have a schema that says other people are going to be rejecting, they're going to be absent emotionally or physically. They're constantly going to be critical, and then they're going to be unpredictably available. It makes you not want to hang out with other people. So then we move to how our schemas form about relationship of self to others, back to those same thoughts. Acceptability. If I try to engage with another person, who will I be deemed and will that person be deemed acceptable? Is there a way that two acceptable people can get together? Or are relationships always filled with rejection? If I get into a relationship, is it going to be lovable? Is it going to be one filled with compassion and caring? Or is it going to be one that's just two people kind of coexisting? If I get into a relationship with other people, is there going to be some sort of consistency or is this relationship going to be all over the place? If I get into relationships, you know, I never know from one minute to the next if my partner will be there. And if I get into a relationship, do I have any control over whether that person stays around or not? So with all those schemas and all those things that are forming in the kid's head, there are attachment styles. And as they start viewing the world and others and relationships, they start developing these attachment styles. In the ideal situation, the child develops a secure attachment style, seeks the caregiver for comfort. Upset when the caregiver leaves, especially in new situations, but happy when the caregiver returns. And I think I've told this story before, when my son went to preschool, I walked him in the first day and I had vetted the school and I felt really positive about it and everything. I walked him in the first day and I handed him off to his teacher and she took his hand. Very wonderful, pleasant woman. He cried. Oh, did he cry. So I went around the. Went around to the other side where he couldn't see me on the other side of the wall. And I cried. Oh, did I cry. The very next day, Can I tell you, the very next day, I took that child to preschool. I handed him off to his teacher. He grabbed her hand, he looked at me and he waved and he said, bye, bye, mommy. See you at three o'. Clock. Excuse me. So again, I went around the wall and I cried and I cried after that. It was like, okay, he's securely attached. He knows I'm going to Come back and this is a good place for him. He feels secure, he feels safe in this place. He doesn't need to cry and whine. In a secure attachment, the child learns to trust that others will be responsive. And when we talk about caregivers here, we're also talking, you know, as the child grows, those caregivers kind of expand to include teachers and people they spend a lot of time with. They learn to be self reliant and try things but know they can return to home base if they fail or if they're scared. They learn to adapt to a variety of situations because children are curious, so they by nature will kind of push that envelope. They learn how to deal with stress and have relatively accurate expectations of others. So in a secure relationship, if something happens and the child feels rejected, he goes back and sits with the caregiver. And the caregiver kind of decompresses and helps him process what's gone on. Now he may not understand it all, you know, understand everything that's being said, but, but the takeaway message he gets is that not everybody is always wanting to play or not everybody is always there. It doesn't necessarily mean it's you. Those are words to very, very young children. As children get older, the words start to have more meaning as they get less egocentric. Then we have our two problems. Avoidant. The avoidant child has a rejecting or harsh caregiver. They, they depend less on the caregiver for security. They show little response when the caregiver leaves or returns. And the child learns not to depend on the caregiver for comfort, connection or security. These are the caregivers that we see that are always telling the child to go away, stop that, don't do that. It's always rejecting. It's always pushing them away. It's always give me space. It's always, I don't really care what's going on with you right now, you're annoying me is the sort of undercurrent message. So the child just avoids the parent. It's like, well, you're not going to be there for me. So at a certain point, even I know it's better to get no response than to get rejection all the time. Ambivalent. This is the inconsistent or chaotic caregiver. Sometimes the caregiver is there and responsive. Sometimes the caregiver is rejecting and harsh. Sometimes the caregiver is not there at all. So the child never knows what to expect, which is really anxiety provoking. If you just can't even predict from one minute to the next what's going to happen? The child may be clingy and demanding, trying to elicit a response. Remember earlier I said, let's look at what's being reinforced. Negative attention is better than no attention. So if the caregiver is kind of emotionally or cognitively in their own little bubble and the child starts clinging and demanding and throwing a hissy fit and they get attention from the parent, guess what the child has learned? This is how I get mom's attention. The child is upset when the caregiver leaves, but is also inconsolable when the caregiver returns. Maybe because the child is going, well, I don't know if you're going to be mean caregiver, so I should be avoidant, or I don't know when you're going to disappear again. All I know is the world is out of control and I never know if you're going to be here or be gone. All these things put together create a situation where the child may develop some core beliefs about relationships and abandonment. The first one is an abandonment belief. All people leave. That one's pretty simple. Second one is mistrust. People will hurt, reject or take advantage of me or just not be there when I need them. So I can't trust anybody. I can't rely on anything. Emotional deprivation. I don't get the love I need because nobody understands me, cares about me, or even tries to meet my needs. Defectiveness. If people knew me, they would reject me. Think about how many clients have communicated something like this in session. I can't let people know about these thoughts or feelings because I'm not acceptable. Failure. I don't measure up. I'm not able to succeed. One thing I want you to notice is the all or nothing language in these schemas. All people leave. It's not some people leave when they are having a bad time. It's all people leave. Mistrust. People will hurt and reject me, period. There's no caveats, there's no conditions. That's the way it's going to be. These core abandonment beliefs are that dichotomous state right now. Now, we can alter those in therapy or, I mean, people can do it on their own, but they need to know what to start working with and what to alter. We can help people change the all or nothing language in these schemas and say, okay, people leave. That's true, but some people stay. So let's look at why some people leave and why some people stay, which is kind of where we're Going now. So what do we do with these clients? Well, when these fears are triggered, we go to the fight or flight response. So fight responses basically communicate. You don't want to leave me. Because. So there's aggression, hostility, blaming and criticizing dominance or trying to control the other person, bully them into staying. You can't leave me. You won't leave me. Recognition seeking to get attention, validation, or approval. If I am all that and everybody wants to be with me, then you won't leave me. Manipulation and exploitation through seduction, lying or justifying, making excuses for others, inappropriate behavior and clinging and chasing. You are not going to leave. You don't want to leave me. And I'm going to prove to you why. The flight reaction more communicates, you know what? I don't care if you leave, because guess what? Everybody leaves. Withdrawal, physical or emotional, including addiction. And we can talk about drug addiction, we can talk about behavioral addictions. Basically, it's anything that can help the person escape from this pain and this fear and this anger that's being triggered by their thoughts of abandonment and distraction. They will do whatever they can to distract themselves. So now that we've got all that kind of under our bells, how do we help clients deal with these core beliefs? The first one, abandonment, all people leave. Some questions that we might ask clients is, what does it look like to be available? If you say all people leave, okay, so if somebody didn't leave, what would that look like? What does it look like if somebody's available because we don't want to just look, lump everybody together. Who in your past left you or was emotionally unavailable? What did they do to make you feel rejected or abandoned? And what are some alternate explanations? What else was going on for that person at that time? And sometimes if you go to the cognitive processing therapy, challenging questions worksheet, and you can google that, but it walks you through some very poignant questions to help challenge some potentially irrational beliefs or even schemas. My goal here in asking these questions of clients is to encourage them to start looking at possibilities that maybe not everybody leaves all the time. Yes, it happened in the past, but was it about you? Who in your past has been available to you emotionally? It may be nobody you know, and generally that's the first response you get is no one. Listen for clues throughout the therapy sessions about people who might have been there, who in your present, in the present, you know, back there, lots of abandonment in the present. We want to create a situation that's not filled with abandonment. So who's available to you emotionally and it may not be a lot of people, because my guess is, and my experience is people with a lot of abandonment issues shut people out. They don't let other people be there for them emotionally. But this is something we can think about. What do you do in your current relationships that might cause people to leave? Do you push them away? There's a lot of clients are very in tune to the fact that, yeah, I get into relationships and I just, I go in head over heels and I overwhelm them and it pushes them away. Okay, what are your alternatives? How can you avoid doing that if you're clingy? If you're, you know, some people say, well, in my prior relationships, people have said I was just too high maintenance, I was too needy, I was too clingy. Tell me what that looked like. Did you need to have texts every 15 minutes, 24 7, 365? What does that look like if you don't get those, what does that mean to you? And how can you make it so it's workable? In an adult relationship where people have responsibilities, what would be a reasonable step down that would still help you feel safe but not be overwhelming to the other person? The mistrust schema. People will hurt, reject, take advantage of me, or just not be there. Okay, so again, let's start out with the positive. What does it look like if someone is trustworthy and safe because these are the people we want in our life. If you start having them identify what that looks like, then they might be able to say, you know my friend Sally, that sounds an awful lot like her. People with abandonment issues, even if somebody is trustworthy, even if somebody is compassionate, will tend to look and see the negatives because they fear getting hurt. Again, they fear abandonment. So those criteria, those characteristics may be there in some of their current relationships, but they're overlooking them because they're seeing what they expect to see. Abandonment, hurtfulness, etc. Who in your past was untrustworthy and safe? What did they do that taught you people were untrustworthy or dangerous? And what are some alternate explanations? You know, now that you look back at it, we probably need to deal with whatever this issue is that created the abandonment fear. As an adult, can you understand it differently? Who in your past has been trustworthy and safe, even sometimes, maybe not all the time? Who is in your present is available and trustworthy? We've already talked about what it looks like, so now we can say, okay, now that you've talked about what it looks like, what a safe person looks like, is there anybody in your life that meets that criteria? Mostly. What do you do to yourself that is unsafe or dishonest? Ooh, that's a big one. Because most of our clients lie to themselves. I don't need anybody. Do you not need anybody? Or are you more afraid of getting hurt than you are of being alone? So that can be a whole therapy session in and of itself. But looking at the behaviors that they do to themselves, that they lie to themselves, they hurt themselves, they put themselves in harmful situations, how does distrust of other people and yourself maybe impact your current relationships? Distrust of other people. You can see that suspiciousness, yada, yada, distrust of yourself. If people are not able to trust their own internal spidey senses, then they don't know how to interpret other people's behaviors. So their own distrust of their internal cues may negatively impact their current relationships. So what could you do differently to create this situation where you trust yourself and you can surround yourself with at least a couple trustworthy others? What will that look like? Emotional deprivation. I don't get the love I need. Nobody understands me, cares about me, or even tries. What does it look like when someone understands you and meets your needs? Always start with the beginning of how are we going to know when this problem is solved? It's almost like creating a treatment plan. So if you had someone in your life that did that, what would it look like? Who in the past failed to meet your needs? How can you deal with that now? You can't change the past right now. It's negatively impacting you. What are you going to do about it? Who in your past has understood you most? Everybody has somebody in their past that got them. Who in the in your past was was that, and who in your present understands and cares about you? Another big one. How can you start better understanding yourself and taking care of you? Remember we talked at the beginning of the presentation about the fact that people with abandonment issues often tend to act in ways and relationships that they realize are not really productive, but they don't. And they don't understand why they're doing it, but they feel just terribly driven to do it. The anxiety and the fear just is overwhelming. Helping them understand themselves is a big step. Helping them be compassionate with themselves and not telling themselves, well, you're too needy or you're too this or you're too that or you'll never be a success. Helping them be nice to that inner child, if you will, or just be nice to themselves. I don't care how you separate it for them. And what can you do to start getting your needs met? Well, first you got to know what your needs are. And that's going to be a big issue for a lot of our clients to realize. What is it that I need in a relationship? It's not going to be Disney princesses. So what are we going to, what do we really need in a relationship? Defectiveness. If people knew me, they would reject me. Okay, so how will you know when you're accepted or acceptable? A lot of this goes to self esteem work. Helping them understand what about them is lovable and also helping them understand that nobody's perfect. Who in your past made you feel defective? Were they always pushing you away? Were they always criticizing you? Were they always doing other things that made them feel defective? One of my friends has a parent who is very critical and her mother will just smile at her and nod and say everything's okay and oh, I'm so glad you did that. And then turn on a dime and be like, oh, I'm so glad you're not doing that anymore. I was just so beside myself. So she never knew what to expect from her mother. She couldn't trust her. And she always knew that whatever she did, whatever she chose, was going to be wrong. So we have to look at, alright, so are your choices always wrong or does this have more to do with something with your mother's stuff? How can you silence those old tapes? Sometimes we hear stuff that people said to us when we were children about being not good enough, about being defective. How do you silence those old tapes and say, you know what, that's not me anymore, or that doesn't matter, maybe I'm still not good at it. But it doesn't matter who in your past has been accepting and supportive. Who in your present is accepting and supportive. And it may be between different things. You may have somebody at work who's accepting and supportive of what you do at work. You may have somebody in your family or your friends who's accepting and supportive and you guys just enjoy taking your kids out to the park and hanging out together. It may not be an across the board accepting and supportive, especially if the person's not in a long term relationship with someone and has divorced themselves, at least, you know, theoretically speaking, from their family of origin. So we may need to look to find where the acceptance and support is coming from and figure out ways to increase that. And how can you start accepting yourself, realizing that you're not going to be perfect all the time. Failure. I don't measure up. I'M not able to succeed. So what does it look like to be successful? My definition of success and one of my friends definitions of a success are very, very different. I'm not going to say that that person's definition is wrong because that's their definition, but it's very different. So what does success look like to you? What in your past made you feel like a failure? Because again, we always want to go back and confront those schemas and address the all or none thinking I'm a failure. No, probably you're not a failure. You may have failed at something, but you globally, as a person, as a human being, are likely not a failure. So what are alternate explanations or ways of viewing things that happened in your past in which you felt like a failure? What have you succeeded at? What are you good at in the present? A lot of our clients are really, really good at minimizing their positive things and going, oh, you know, I suck at this, this, and this. And you're like, well, you got promoted to vice president. Oh, well, anybody could have done that. Come again? We want to encourage clients to pay attention to that and not minimize their successes. Ask them what it looks like in terms of being successful in relationship with other people. Ask them, who are three successful people you know, and what makes them successful in your eyes? You can have them talk about whether success equals happiness. So if success means being the richest and having the biggest house on the block, does that mean if you get that, are you going to be happy? What does. How does that equate another way of asking it? And these are all different ways of kind of asking the same question. So you can be a politician for a while. What do your kids need to do to be successful? You know, if they have one standard for themselves and another standard for everybody else, and they're holding themselves to a higher standard than they would hold anybody else to, which often happens. This is something that we want to point out, because as long as they're telling themselves they're a failure and they don't measure up, that's what they're going to project. Triggering relationships. A lot of times, people with abandonment issues get into relationships that are unhealthy, or they may get into relationships that are healthy, that don't last long because they are so unhealthy. Either way, if they get into a relationship and any of these behaviors come out, it will likely trigger abandonment issues. If they're in a relationship with an abandoner, someone who's unpredictable, unstable, or unavailable, you can see where that can Be a problem. Now, it's important to remember that everybody is going to be unpredictable at times, but it's whether it's a pattern or an exception, getting into a relationship with someone who's abusive, they're untrustworthy, unsafe, the depriver is detached or withholding. The devastator is someone who's always judgmental, rejecting, and critical. And the critic is also critical, but also highly, highly narcissistic, always putting themselves as perfect and painting you as anything but. So questions we want to ask clients, how do you exhibit these behaviors? Because guess what? They probably have some of these behaviors in their repertoire. They can start working on them now so they don't create the same negativity in future relationships. In what ways are these present in your current relationships? Sometimes people with abandonment issues will be highly critical in order to keep other people kind of at bay. In what ways were these present in your primary caregiver relationships? So we want to look at patterns, because patterns can be undone. Behavioral triggers, abandonment or mistrust can be triggered if there's a change in someone's behavior. And it may have nothing to do with the relationship, but a person with abandonment issues will be like, you used to call me every day and it's been 36 hours and I haven't heard from you, so you must be getting ready to leave, not getting constant reassurance if that's something that is in that relationship. Or maybe they don't even get that far in relationships, because if they get into a relationship and throw three days into it, they're not getting constant text messages. They're like, well, that person doesn't like me, or that person's unavailable, and they sign them off, the other person's relationships feel threatening. So if you're in a relationship and your significant other wants to go out with other friends or talks about friends at work, and those always feel threatening, it may be a behavioral trigger for core abandonment issues. And if you're hyper vigilant, if the person is hyper vigilant to rejection and disconnection, and they see it in everything their partner does, that's probably a result of abandonment schemas that need to be addressed. Questions for clients how has this threatened you in the past? When someone's behavior has changed, how has it caused a situation that actually was dangerous or hurtful in the past? Because that's where you learned it from. That's why now when somebody's behavior changes, you're like, oh, I don't want to go down that road again. What are Some alternate explanations for the current situation and what would be a helpful reaction to these behaviors now? Defectiveness and failure. And I'm going to pick up the pace a little bit because we're running short on time. Criticism, unexplained, time apart, absent or inconsistent reassurance and failure. So, questions for clients. Again, how has this threatened you in the past? What are alternate explanations, and what would be a helpful reaction to these behaviors now? Because something in the past taught them that when they get criticism, it means they're about to be abandoned. Envisioning activity I love this one because it's positive. What does a healthy relationship look like if someone is present instead of abandoning you? If someone accepts you instead of rejects you? If there's emotional support and compassion versus emotional availability, what does that look like? If somebody's trustworthy, what does that look like? If somebody's safe, what does that look like? So what does a healthy relationship look like to you, and how can you create this relationship with yourself? You need to be present, consistent for yourself, accepting, compassionate, trustworthy, and safe to yourself before you can start really interacting healthfully with other people. And then how can you work on creating this relationship with others? What can you do differently now in order to develop the relationship you want? Mindfulness questions. People need to remain mindful of what they're feeling and what's triggering it so they can address those abandonment issues as they come up, because they will be triggered from now until doomsday. And as they learn to deal with them, as they learn to address them, they will have less power. Each time they need to ask themselves, am I safe now? If not, what do I need to do to get safe? Is this bringing up something from the past? If it is okay, how is this situation different? How am I different now than I was back then? And. Or how can I silence my inner critic? How can I silence that alarm system going off? Finally, since I'm feeling kind of wonky and is being triggered by these abandonment issues, whatever they are, we've answered all those questions. What would be a helpful reaction that moves me towards my goal of having a healthy, safe, consistent relationship and a more positive emotional experience instead of this constant anxiety and worry. So, core beliefs about self, others, and relationships are formed in early life due to children's lack of knowledge, other experiences, and primitive cognitive abilities. These core beliefs are often dichotomous, which creates problems in later life. Core beliefs can be formed around events and experiences outside of conscious memory, and identifying and being mindful of abandonment triggers in the present can help people choose alternate, more helpful ways of responding.