Peter Szabo answers a viewer question about fear of abandonment and explains attachment theory (secure, anxious, avoidant, and mixed styles). He recommends the book Attached and taking its quiz to identify one’s style, then using a memory-flipping process—listing childhood memories of abandonment—to work toward a more secure attachment and reduce relationship self-sabotage. The tone is practical and encouraging.
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How can I change my fear of abandonment? It's so scary and allows me to feel happy and secure in my relationships. I'm sure that my boyfriend will leave as soon as he knows me better. Good question. I would first recommend you check out the Attachment Theory. Yeah, it's a book called Attached. I would recommend you check out, they say essentially based on how you are raised and how your parents or primary caregivers treated you, especially as a child, it kind of develops our sense of attachment, right? You become secure attachment. If the parents were present, they helped you cope with negative emotions, gave you attention, so you feel quite secure, right? Then you have the anxious attachment. So secure attachment style, you got the anxious attachment style. Now what you're talking about seems like you may be the anxious attachment style. Now again, I really dislike putting labels on people, so, you know, I kind of take it back. But make sure we read the book, you do the quiz and then you can kind of figure it out by yourself. Based on what you said though, it kind of is pointing in the anxious field of view. And long story short, the anxious attachment means that the parent, primary caregiver might have not been super available, haven't addressed the baby's needs and now they're anxious because they are afraid that they're not going to be loved, they're going to be abandoned and it becomes like this big fear. And then it also can become like a self sabotaging mechanism in relationships because if you're so anxious deep down you may sabotage the relationships, right? The person may become too needy and that may push the other person away and stuff like that. So I don't want to go too deep into it, but it's very interesting. I would recommend you read the book, look at the quiz and then you can kind of figure out which one it is. And the avoidance style is more like a really, you know, where the parent wasn't really available so the child kind of decided to just rely on him or herself, become very independent and that they don't feel good getting too close to people because they feel like they may get hurt. And then lastly there's like kind of like a four group, fourth group where you mix the anxious and avoidant and that's typically the most complicated. But long story short, just to make it simple, step one, check out the book, do the quiz and figure out which one do you relate to the most. And step two, now you could start doing the memory flipping process and just make a list of all the memories where you felt abandoned as a child or not loved or mistreated by your parents. And now you can start working on those. And as you do, you may notice that your attachment style becomes more and more towards the secure one. And then soon enough, you know, you may still have worries or jealousy. We're still human, right? But this unconscious, underlying, you know, fear of them leaving you, especially when they get to know you. Right. As a common thing, people say that will start to diminish and you will start to, you know, feel and understand your value and worth even more so. And yeah, that's going to help you create a happy relationship. So, great question, and I think this will be very helpful if you check it out.
