Roots of Abandonment Issues

People with abandonment issues frequently find themselves engulfed with fearful anxieties when their relationships -- especially their close relationships -- enter turbulent phases. In reality, few, if any, intimate relationships can remain permanently steady. Life throws too many contingencies in the path of most people for that. But pre-existing abandonment anxieties can often turn a difficult situation into an impossible one. Psychoanalysis suggests that abandonment fear in the present has roots in unresolved and unacknowledged abandonment issues from the past.

The Unconscious Never Forgets

• Contrary to popular misconceptions, psychoanalysis does not consider the unconscious as a psychological warehouse filled with buried memories. The unconscious lives, actively evolving and influencing conscious thoughts and perceptions. Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas describes it as the "unthought known," or the place where unacknowledged or refused experiences continue to exist without conscious elaboration or integration into the sense of personal identity. Small children and babies lack the mental resources to remember early experiences and rely on parents to tell them about their early lives, but a troubled parent who abandons the child at this stage may leave a permanent imprint in the unconscious.

Formative Experiences of Abandonment

• Sigmund Freud argued that experiences which cannot be processed properly, either because they occurred too early in life, when mental structures had not yet grown to reflect on them, or because they were too shocking and incomprehensible, never disappear. But neither do they get stored as memories. They persist in the mind as existential anxieties instead. Abandonment, from this perspective, can take many forms. A small child can feel abandoned through the tragedy of parental death, or through parental separation and divorce. She can also feel abandoned by a parent drowning in personal depression, for example, or one who is emotionally incapable of tuning in to the child's inner world.

Reliving Early Abandonment

• In Bollas' reading of Freud's concepts, a fear of abandonment that feels eerily familiar but simultaneously indescribable is existentially known, because somewhere in development it's been experienced, but consciously "unthought." Thinking, from this perspective, involves embracing and integrating disturbing emotional states using the most cognitively advanced resources of the mind. But defense mechanisms impede this process - if something feels potentially overwhelming or unbearable, the mind shuts it off from conscious processing. Freud called this "repression," but it's a mechanism that sometimes founders, failing to protect the mind from anxiety. Anticipating abandonment signals a failed repression - the unthought known of early abandonment gets powerfully transferred into here-and-now relationships.

A Safe Base

• Attachment theorists such as John Bowlby painstakingly observed small children's emotional and behavioral responses to separation from a parent. If a separation wasn't negotiated sensitively between parent and child, or the child was too young to sustain a comforting inner picture of the parent in his mind during the separation, enormous and inconsolable distress would ensue. Bowlby argued that children needed a "secure base" of safe, unbroken attachment to a loved parent as a precondition for exploring the world more independently. He also saw psychoanalytic therapy as the provision of a safe base for adults to explore their early abandonment anxieties and heal from them.

Consequences of Abandonment Fear

• Children who suffer unmanageable separation anxieties early in development inevitably evolve a range of defenses aimed at protecting them from further distress. A severe defense, which Bowlby called "defensive detachment" involves an impossible quest to remain totally independent of all relationships with others. Such people may appear aloof or superficially charming, but never risk deepening their attachment for fear of abandonment. A more tortured development occurs with people who crave intimacy but fear it in equal measure; the paradox here is that intimacy is desperately needed, but once experienced, instantly evokes fears of abandonment, transforming love into hate in the process. Psychoanalyst Eric Brenman described this agonizing deadlock as "clinging and hating."