Abandonment is going to kill me

This is how I feel; that being abandoned is going to leave me unable to cope and live which was born when I went from a stable household as a child, to one that was no longer. I began to develop a negative behaviour that I didn't know really existed until last year - my fear that I will not be able to function if someone just disappears from my life.

I wouldn't say I am a people pleaser, but in my very young years I would make sure that I would do everything in my power to not upset people and if I did, accidentally, then my world felt like it had been turned upside down and I would need to do anything to bring back the equilibrium. Once I had gone over and beyond to make sure that the person understood that my actions were not intentional and we became friends again, I was happy and I could cope. But when I began to experience a person of great trust, at the time when I was just at the end of primary school life, was leading a different life as well as leaving my life, my life changed before my eyes. I could't understand why it was happening, but I was angry more than I wanted the person to stay. In fact, I wanted them to go and never see them again, at the time. I'm glad to say that now, through lots of hard work I don't let that side plague me as much anymore. What it did create however, was the biggest mental health trigger that I have and one which I only really discovered last year. That is; abandonment.  I developed a huge, almost irrational fear that if someone extremely important to me, leaves then I will be unable to cope. I believe this attached itself to my younger self's need to keep the equilibrium between people and that's why it became one big difficultly for myself.

I experienced something last year, which brought this abandonment fear to the surface. I didn't really know that it was something that I needed to deal with until then. The feelings that resulted from that experience were strong and powerful. It took over my mental and physical capabilities and I'm not sure I have felt something so overwhelmingly powerful since my phobia of school, but I guess if I didn't experience the fear then, it would've caught up with me eventually and I would've had to deal with it at some point. It was always hiding in plain sight. At the time, I felt like I couldn't cope as it was such a strong automatic reaction. Even trying to practice self-care was hard and working through daily life, but slowly over time it got easier until one day the abandonment hole was filled and that's when I felt I could cope again.

Throughout the year following, I had worked really hard to overcome the fear of abandonment in such a way that I can appreciate that it is there and know that I am going to experience it a lot throughout my life, but it is something that I can cope with, rather than die of. Believe it or not, the thought that I wasn't able to survive as a result of abandonment was a huge thing to rationalise and something that I can still feel to the core of me, today. It's like an automatic switch where I get taken to a place of not being able to function and feeling like I can't live. It lives alongside the fact, that the reason I avoid abandonment is because I'm so strongly taken back to such a traumatic painful period in my childhood, that I couldn't rationalise at that age, which now lives in my sub-conscious. Now I can understand the situation with a more adult mindset. My counsellor taught me that we have two parts of us and maybe more; but there is an adult side and child side. The things we experience as children, affect us as adults as they tend to stay in our subconscious and become normal parts of our actions that we don't even second guess. But, it's recognising when there is an an unhelpful behaviour that you learnt as a child and becoming the adult to look after this part of you; so you can overcome it and be the hand to hold, that the child always wanted.

I still have a long way to go and I know that abandonment is still my biggest trigger and can still put me into a huge downward spiral. But instead of running back to the easiest known path, like a racing pigeon does to get home, I have to take a step back, evaluate the situation in all in its glory and maybe take the route which is not as comfortable, but one that will help me to get through this big trigger, like I have done with other situations that used to terrify me. The thought of abandonment may put me further into my shell when communicating with people, with the thought at the back of my head that I don't want to go through the pain of abandonment if I can help it, but I know that if is going to help me on my mental health journey, it is something that I need to do.