Codependency and Abandonment Anxiety | Week 5 Self Help Series

Hey there, everybody. Welcome back to the Codependency Recovery series. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. This is week five of 20, and today we're discussing understanding and addressing abandonment fears. The fear of abandonment and or rejection is a core feature for most people with codependency. And I say and or rejection, because some people will say, well, nobody ever, like, actually left, but they rejected me. And rejection is a form of emotional abandonment. So I say abandonment or rejection. So whether somebody physically left or rejected you as a person and just kind of emotionally checked out, it's still abandonment. Abandonment can take many different forms. Divorce, for example, for a child that is in a household where the caregivers get divorced, the caregiver that leaves the child may feel like they've been abandoned in some way. Or when the one of the caregivers gets remarried, the child may feel like they have been abandoned in some way. Addiction and mental illness, and we're going to cover both of these together, can contribute to a sense of abandonment. Because when people are struggling with uncontrolled addiction or mental illness, it makes it virtually impossible, at least very difficult, to be consistent and responsive and attentive to the children or to the people that you are living with. So when a child especially, but any person is in a relationship with somebody, is living with somebody who has addiction or mental illness, they may feel abandoned. They may feel like that person's not there for them. Especially when we're talking about addiction, the thought that the person, the dysfunctional other, is choosing the addiction over me can also come into play. And then death. This isn't one we talk about a lot, but it is not completely uncommon to see people who've experienced a sudden death of a loved one to potentially develop some codependent behaviors as a way of trying to protect everybody else in their life, anybody else that they try to get close to, from leaving them. They don't want to feel that hurt again. So sometimes death can actually prompt some of these codependent behaviors. Like other experiences, abandonment trauma is written into your memory. Every experience you have is kind of filed away in your brain. And when things change, hopefully it modifies your memories. So, for example, stop lights. I use this one all the time. Normally you're driving along and you start approaching a stoplight and it is yellow. You expect it to go red. That's just what's going to happen. But what happens if you are driving and you get to one of those stoplights that's a flashing yellow? It's a warning, especially if it's around a fire station or something, then you've got to kind of reprogram that in your mind that sometimes lights are going to flash yellow, especially if they're, they look like the little flashing yellow lights that don't have the option for three. But then you've also got the situations when a stoplight, for example, goes to a flashing red. And that can happen especially in cities, they do that a lot in kind of the middle of the night when there's very little traffic, they don't have it rotating through the green, yellow and red, it just flashes red. So people stop and they use their best judgment before proceeding. But each time you experience one of these exceptions, your brain has to modify that. So initially you believed that a stoplight always goes from green to yellow to red and then back to green again. Okay. And then you encounter one of these other situations, you have to modify your belief system a little bit. And first, practical things like stoplights, we tend to do that. And that's our brain's way of making the information fit. They it. You either have to change your remembering of the situation to make it fit your existing schema, your existing memories, or you have to change your existing expectations to accommodate to be able to add this new information. And that's what we do in, in recovery is help people start modifying those maybe outdated beliefs to create something that helps them live a richer, more meaningful life. It's important to remember that the memories you have and the interpretations you had were based on your age and your level of experiences at the time. A 5 year old thinks very differently than a 15 year old or a 25 year old. A 5 year old has many, many fewer experiences than even a 6 year old or a 15 year old or a 20 year old. So the 5 year old is drawing on a very limited memory set to help them understand and anticipate what's going to happen next. So when the experiences are problematic, that's what is encoded. And children especially tend to think concretely, what I see is what's going on. They think egocentrically, the way I understand it is the way everybody else understands it. And personally this happened because of me. Whatever it is, it's at least partially my fault. And so a young child who's experiencing a dysfunctional household is often going to internalize a lot of what's going on as their fault. And the world is being very unsafe and, and chaotic for them. Left unaddressed, these old memories will continue to alter how you perceive others as well as yourself. So this child or this person, because codependency can develop later in life, may have started to believe that other people weren't seeing safe. They get into relationships with people who are struggling for some reason and maybe they have a series of these relationships and they start to see, quote everybody as unsafe, everybody is potentially abandoning the child is the same way. I mean, think about how many relationships they've had. The five year old, probably not many. So they're basing their understanding and expectations of others on those limited experiences that have been unhealthy. That also impacts how they interact with others in the future. If they expect others to be dangerous, they're going to act in other in ways to protect themselves. So these memories that get encoded are I often call the inner child and other people do too. But they're all the memories and all the understandings and interpretations of events that you had as a child that may not have ever gotten readdressed. So you're still holding on to that fear, that trauma, that sense of hopelessness or helplessness that you had as a child. In order to address abandonment fears and abandonment trauma, you need to start looking at some of these relationships. In this relationship processing activity, I encourage people. You only do it if you feel safe doing it. But start out by writing your autobiography and reflect on your relationships. After you write your autobiography autobiography, reflect on those relationships. And I do have a video. It's called Unpacking my Baggage. That goes over steps for writing a really thorough autobiography. But once you've got it written, look back and identify for each traumatic relationship and go back to whatever the first one was and then look at the one since then. Most people have successive traumatic relationships. In what ways? In that particular relationship, in each relationship, were you abandoned or rejected? Were you abandoned physically? Somebody just left or ghosted? Were you abandoned emotionally? They were there, but they were checked out all the time. Or on the other side of it, they were there. And you would express your feelings or your thoughts and they would negate them. They would tell them that you were wrong. Either way, that can be abandonment or rejection. And when we are abandoned and and or rejected, it starts taking a toll on our self esteem. Go back to that child who personalizes everything. If you are disagreeing with my thoughts or my feelings, then you must not like me either. And that child probably internalized that, that I'm not good enough, I am not smart enough, I don't have the right feelings, I don' going on because my caregiver or this dysfunctional other keeps telling me That I don't think about, you know, in what ways were you abandoned or rejected? And then how did you interpret or understand it at that age? So if you are talking about a five year old who is living in a household with someone who has uncontrolled major depressive disorder and they are just completely checked out, they have difficulty even getting out of bed, let alone making meals and being emotionally available. Well, the child often interprets that as I made this person upset or I need to be able to fix it. And they can't fix it. So when they fail to fix it, they feel hopeless and helpless. When they don't get the attention and resources that they need, when they don't get the relationship that they need with that caregiver, they often feel like it's their fault and that impairs their self esteem. It's important to understand as an adult, looking back, you may say, oh, I can see that that person was just, you know, completely non functional at that period of time because of their depression. Well, yeah, as a grownup you may be able to look back and see that. But that child, those memories that were formed and stored in your brain as well as your body at that point, that child felt scared, that child felt sad and hopeless. So it's important to recognize how that, how you interpreted it interpreted it and how those interpretations affected every relationship after that and your interpretation of other people's behaviors in every situation after that. Then ask yourself, all right, that's how I understood it back then. How do I understand it now? Do I understand it differently? And as I said, as a grown up, you may be able to look back and go, oh, you know, they, they were doing the best they could even though it didn't meet my needs. Even if you were in a dysfunctional relationship as an adult, this dysfunctional dysfunction happened if in began in adulthood, looking back at that relationship, you may have initially blamed yourself, thinking that you should be able to fix it, you should be able to help them make the right choices. You should be able. Well we, you know what I say about shoulding. So it's important to recognize how you understood it in the context of that relationship at that time, with your knowledge at that time and what you understand now. When you're dealing with people with addictions, for example, a lot of people don't understand the pull of the addiction for, to use that's the only word I can think of right now. And because of that, they have difficulty understanding why the person with the addiction is making the choices they are. But Once they start to understand the physiological and psychological components of addiction, then they can start to better understand the behaviors that the dysfunctional other exhibited as symptoms of the the addiction and not rejection of them. What behaviors did you develop or use in that relationship? And remember, you're doing this for each relationship. What behaviors did you develop or use to help you stay safe? And this is what I call programming the ic, programming the inner child. As you started to encounter these situations that were unsafe or that may have prompted fears of rejection, you develop strategies to anticipate them as well as to mitigate them or avoid them. What did you need to do in order to stay safe? You probably are still exhibiting some of those behaviors today if you're watching this video. How did that dysfunctional relationship impact your ability to trust other people in future relationships and your ability to trust yourself, your ability to think, I know what I need to do here. How did it impact your belief that you were lovable? When you're in this type of relationship, now a dysfunctional relationship, or are exposed to similar behaviors or triggers even in healthy relationships, do you still feel like that? Scared younger you? You may be in a healthy relationship with somebody now, but you grew up in a household where there was a active alcoholic. And now when your significant other drinks, it triggers those feelings all over again. You know, that just gives you kind of one example. But it's important to recognize that codependent behaviors may come out in healthy as well as unhealthy relationships, because that's how you learn to stay safe, to survive. And when somebody reminds you, you know, somebody triggers memories of those traumas in the past, you're probably going to react with those skills you learned back then to cope now until you start the recovery process. Do you currently abandon yourself either through neglect, you just say, I'm not going to pay attention to what I think, need or feel. I just, I can't feel anything right now. Or in order to do things for other people to make yourself indispensable. If I do these things, then people will need me. If I am the president of the pta, if I help, so and so move. If I am always there to bail so and so out, then they will need me so they won't abandon me. Do you have any non dysfunctional relationships? If not, how do you think your prior abandonment traumas causes you to gravitate towards dysfunctional others and unsafe relationships? For some people, there's a need to be needed to avoid abandonment. Those prior experiences taught them that or made them come to believe that they were unlovable and feeling unlovable. The person says, oh my gosh, since I'm unlovable, then people are only going to be with me if they need me. So I need to be needed. And I'll get into relationships with people who need me. In order to prevent abandonment. Sometimes they get into dysfunctional relationships. You see people getting into relationships with others with alcohol addictions over and over again. For example, it may be a subconscious desire to heal the pain of that other person that you couldn't heal as younger. You remember I said children personalize everything and they think, hey, this is my fault, I did this and I should be able to fix it. Because children have that magical thinking, that inner child part of you may get into these relationships. You have limitless compassion. You see somebody hurting and you want to fix them. You want to do now what you couldn't do as a child. You want to make that pain stop. And you're sort of on a mission in and you may not feel like you are safe or empowered until you're able to fix it. Unfortunately, we know that doesn't work. We can't fix other people. Are there other reasons you tend to gravitate towards relationships with unhealthy people or unsafe relationships? Do you have any non dysfunctional relationships? If yes, are they different than the relationships with the dysfunctional others? How you know if you have them? How are they different in the ways you interact, the ways you feel when you're together, the things that you say, whatever, how are they qualitatively different than those other relationships? What helps you feel safe in those relationships? If it's a healthy relationship, then you're going to feel safe in it and you're not going to constantly fear abandonment. So what is it about this relationship that helps you feel safe? What would happen in this healthy, safe relationship if you were able to let go of those codependent behaviors, if you were willing to try to stop controlling everything, if you were able to hear constructive feedback without going on the defensive or able to tolerate people having a different opinion or disagreeing with you without feeling like you are being cut to the core. And how can the present you or the grown up you start being a safe person for the younger you? And again, codependency can start at any time in life and as a result of any type of abandonment relationship. So I'm not saying that everybody with codependency had a dysfunctional childhood. Happened a lot, but not always. However, that younger you that was in that traumatic relationship doesn't have all the skills and knowledge and everything else that you do now, even if it was two, three, five years ago. So how can you be a safe person for that younger version of yourself? How can you revisit those memories, that inner child, that inner younger you, and help that person process the grief and feel safe? And we're going to talk about connecting with that inner child or inner younger you next week. Identifying and processing prior abandonment traumas will be essential to help you under the understand the function of your codependent behaviors, then become aware of their impact on other relationships. You see how you develop this to try to stay safe, but then when you use it in future relationships to try to stay safe, it ends up creating more problems or leading you into other dysfunctional relationships. It is essential to help you explore the current validity of your expectations of others. Are you seeing them based on the facts in the current context, or are you interpreting everything they do and seeing it through that lens that is shaded by prior traumatic experiences? And it will help you identify strategies to feel safe in the present.