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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we're talking about the fear of Abandonment and what I want to go over is how this fear itself can become a
Heidi Priebe explores how fear of abandonment becomes self-fulfilling, why abandonment is inevitable, and how childhood gaps create self-abandonment and insecure patterns.
Key Takeaways
- Fear of abandonment can create the very abandonment it fears through self-fulfilling behavior patterns.
- Abandonment is an unavoidable part of life; the aim is to stop the fear from robbing present connection.
- Fear of abandonment usually traces back to childhood experiences rather than a single later event.
- Self-abandonment in adulthood often reflects unmet developmental needs from childhood.
- Becoming securely attached involves self-intimacy, internal resourcing, and meeting one's own unmet needs.
What the video covers
- Fear of abandonment can operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy: believing people will leave leads to treating them in ways that push them away, confirming the belief.
- Abandonment is inherent to all relationships, since partners eventually fail each other, experience ruptures, or die; securely attached people accept this reality.
- The goal is not to avoid abandonment entirely but to shift the mindset so that the fear does not steal present-moment connection and gratitude.
- Anxiety about abandonment is compared to generalized anxiety about death: worry does not reduce actual risk but creates chronic suffering.
- The fear usually stems from early experiences, especially abandonment in childhood, which can cut off emotional, sexual, and practical development.
- Childhood abandonment leads to self-abandonment, where areas of the self not mentored in childhood are naturally neglected in adulthood unless consciously addressed.
- Securely attached children received mentorship and containment across emotional, intellectual, bodily, and spiritual domains, creating scaffolding for adult self-development.
- Insecure attachment can cause overwhelm and pressure in partners, leading to disconnection and reinforcing the belief that everyone leaves.
- Attachment research (such as early studies on children's distress when parents leave) is referenced to illustrate differences in secure and anxious responses.
- Healing involves internal resourcing, moving through emotions fully, and identifying developmental wounds to meet one's own needs.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Fear of Abandonment
- 01:53Abandonment as Inevitable in All Relationships
- 03:49Shifting Toward Presence and Gratitude
- 05:37Origins of the Fear in Childhood
- 07:26Mentorship, Containment, and Self-Abandonment
- 10:16How Fear Triggers Push-Pull in Relationships
- 13:20Attachment Responses and Internal Resourcing
- 16:40Moving Through Emotions and Closing
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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self-fulfilling prophecy so when we have a very simple and direct model of self-fulfilling prophecies it looks something like this we have a belief we act as though the belief is the truth of the world because we actually think that
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it is right and then we go around self- selecting scenarios that confirm our belief and not noticing or not kind of logging scenarios that disconfirm our belief so we're engaging mostly with things that reinforce what we already believe to be true and then we get more
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of the same thing that we believe is true and that reinforces the original belief that this is the way the world is so if we were to run the fear of Abandonment through this kind of simple belief model it would look like this so
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we might hold the belief everybody is going to abandon me it's only a matter of when and then in our relationships we treat people as though they are necessarily going to abandon us and then because we treat them that way they end
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up leaving or abandoning us which brings us right back to our original belief but this specific sequence of beliefs and actions could apply perfectly to someone with more secure patterns in to be securely attached means to be grounded
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in reality and the reality the absolute truth of The Human Condition is that everybody we love absolutely will abandon us at some point or another in some large or small way they will either abandon us when we are with them on this
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planet or they will eventually abandon us through death no matter how secure your relationship is there is no relationship out there where Partners do not in small ways fail to show up for each other or experience conflicts and
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ruptures along the course of their relationship so abandonment is baked into the essence of every type of relationship that we will ever have if we are insecurely attached and living with this deep fear of Abandonment what we are actually trying to do is Achieve
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an unachievable goal which is never get getting abandoned there is no way to personal develop our way into the type of person who will never get abandoned under any circumstance what we actually need to do is find a way to shift our
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mindset towards the more secure model of Abandonment which looks the exact same right secure people do believe that everybody is going to leave them at some point or another and the way that they treat people when it comes to this
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second step right of treating people as though they will abandon you is they treat them with presence and gratitude while they are with them because if I know that everybody I love is someday going to leave me I just don't know how
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or when it feels like an Incredible Gift to be treasured anytime I do have them in my presence and anytime we are feeling connected to each other but if I'm living with a fear of abandonment I am so preoccupied with my thoughts about
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the future where I won't have this person in my life anymore that I cannot be present with them in the moment and this is what separates out a fear of Abandonment from the fundamental human nature that we all share which is that
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abandonment is a part of life so what we want to Target here is the fear because it's that fear that is robbing us of the experience of deep presence and connection with the people in our lives and it's that fear if removed that's
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going to return us to a state of reality where we understand that abandonment is inevitable but we don't have to give up all of the good parts of our lives that are available to us before it happens so
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I kind of liken this to someone who has more generalized anxiety and they might have a lot of thoughts about all the different ways they could die that person is not less likely to die than someone who does not have generalized
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anxiety the same existential and physical threats aren't present for both of them all of the time maybe with some variation based on lifestyle preferences but definitely not enough variation to protect one from ever dying or getting harmed the difference is that one of
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those people lives with chronic worry and chronic mental suffering while the other does not they both exist in the same based reality but one of them is having a much more fulfilling experience and one of them is having an experience
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of chronic suffering So today we're going to talk about what gives us this deep fear of Abandonment if that fear that anxiety that worry is something that we live with and what would need to happen so that we could shift out of
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that and we could enjoy being present with the lives that we have without chronically feeling preoccupied IED by what might happen in the future or what losses we are bound to incur and I definitely do not believe that living
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with this fear of Abandonment is a choice or that it's random it's usually a direct product of the experiences that we've been through in life but it's not necessarily the experiences that we might consciously tie it to so we might
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think I have a fear of Abandonment because of my first boyfriend Ricky who left me for a hotter girl in high school when in reality the fear that led to to that worry about abandonment actually started much earlier than that when we
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were abandoned in some significant way in childhood at a time when we needed to not be so the difference between getting abandoned from a child State versus getting abandoned from an adult state is that when we are abandoned as children
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what often happens is we are cut off from learning in some significant way because when we are young what we need from our caregivers and from the people who are there to provide us with support through life is the
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safety to grow into ourselves as autonomous beings so if there is some significant way in which our caregivers abandon us as children there may have been crucial things we did not learn we might really struggle with emotional literacy and understanding ourselves
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when we are alone with ourselves or we might have gaps in our sexual development if certain events happened to us at a young age that caused us to shut down parts of ourselves that were innately connected to our sexual
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development we may have never learned crucial skills around providing for ourselves and seeing ourselves as capable and worthy so when we are literal children and we are still emotionally and cognitively growing into ourselves when we are abandoned it means
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that we are getting cut off from mentorship and wholeness because without that mentorship that we need to help us make sense of ourselves and how we exist in the world we're not going to grow into people who are aware of ourselves
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in all areas there's going to be some Gap in the way that we experience ourselves in whatever area we were abandoned as young children so this leads to self-abandonment if I was never really mentored in a particular way or I
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never had an adult help me contain and make sense of my experiences in some area when I grow up that area is going to be an area that I naturally neglect in myself unless and until I draw conscious attention to it
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so now there's some way in which I am cut off for my wholeness as an adult if there were significant places where I was abandoned as a child now let's contrast this to the type of support and mentorship and containment that people
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who air more securely attached tended to have as children when we have support all the way through in our childhood growing into the people that we are going to be as adults which means developing both our emotional selves but
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also our intellectual selves and our skills for practically navigating the world and our relationships to our bodies and to our spiritual selves if we have good enough mentorship in all of these areas it gives us the scaffolding we need as adults to kind of take over
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our own development in those areas and so now when we're out in the world whether or not we're in close connection with other people we feel whole we feel as though we have internalized enough resource to go out and source for
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ourselves whatever we need to continue to develop in the areas that we want to do more work in so to be secure as an adult means that you have self- intimacy and there aren't significant areas of yourself that you naturally self-
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abandon or fail to show up for yourself in when we aren't needing other people to come along and help us kind of fulfill parts of ourselves that we have never found a way to stay present with and develop inside of ourselves we form
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connections with other people predominantly for serving the purpose of just having company so we might turn to our close- loved ones for co-regulation and for sharing our experiences of life but we don't feel incomplete as people when we do not have them around so when
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we are abandoned temporarily or in larger ways it doesn't cause a crisis of self the same way that it does for someone who is approaching abandonment from that place of childhood wounding where abandonment even as an adult might
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still feel like you are being deprived of the resources that you need to be a whole person so we're going to look at how this cycle perpetuates itself so if you have those early developmental unmet needs how that can lead to a cycle of
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Abandonment that can be excruciatingly painful in less and until we start to address the problem at its core so this entire thing starts off through nobody's intentional Choice with that unmet developmental need so let's say you were developing relatively normally up until
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a certain age in a certain area whether that is emotional self-awareness interpersonal skills autonomy whatever it is and then either some abandonment happened so maybe your parent had some block that came up for them in their teenage years that left them immature in
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a particular way and so now they can't really enter you emotionally any further so there's some developmental wound some way in which you have not yet grown into your adult self that is present for you that you may or may not be conscious of
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and again what this leads to is self- abandonment in that area so if you never learned emotional regulation skills you're going to not be able to stay present with yourself when really strong emotions come up you might instead go
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into some sort of panic response and try to get your need met externally instead of being present with yourself and doing whatever emotional regulation you were taught as a child and when we are abandoning ourselves in significant areas what tends to happen is we only
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feel like we are whole when we are having the needs that we abandon ourselves around met externally so now we're in this place where we only feel whole when we are in a particular type of intimate connection with someone else
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because they are being present with us in the areas that we don't know how to be present with ourselves and this often feels like a crazy big high so this is the kind of love we fall into where it
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feels like we are finally complete and whole in a way that we didn't know was possible and if we don't know any different we might assume that's what love feels like for everyone rather than more secure love feeling like a more
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equal experience of deep companionship and appreciation so in that more secure form of love you have two people relating to each other for Mutual adult States in their ego neither is turning to the other as their sole source of
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getting some really deep and painful need met both are relatively resourced and they're relating to each other as equals but when we're in this place where we do have that giant gaping need that we have no idea how to F for
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ourselves or maybe no conscious awareness that it even exists it is going to feel excruciating if we experience a separation or a rupture from the person who is meeting that need for us because when a secure person gets abandoned what
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they are losing is the other person's company when an insecure person gets abandoned what they are losing touch with in a lot of cases is their sense of wholeness and this is much more painful and feel feels much more personal than
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the former the problem is that we are generally unconscious of this being the case all we know is that it feels excruciatingly painful when someone leaves and so now if we are in this place and we get abandoned we are not
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responding to the other person as though we are losing their company we are responding to the other person as though they are robbing us of our wholeness and that is a very very large crime to be punishing someone for and the thing is
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it is literally true if we only feel whole around this other person that when we are not around them we don't feel whole so our emotional selves are telling us the truth about what is happening but with the wrong
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attribution it is not this person's fault that we do not feel whole when we are alone their absence is just just returning us to the state of fragmentation and lack of wholeness that was there before they came along but
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because our emotional selves don't know that we're just going to feel the intensity of the pain and assume that they're leaving is what caused that and this is where it gets really easy to push even the most secure of people away
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because if we are punishing someone for a crime as great as robbing us of our wholeness it's going to feel very conf refusing to the other person when the only crime they committed in reality was robbing us of their company which is a
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painful experience right if we're in a secure connection with someone and we're having a moment where we really want them to be present and with us and we want that co-regulation and they're just not able to meet us there it's going to
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feel lonely but it's not going to feel unbearable because we still have that inner resource to show up for ourselves in that moment but again if as soon as someone is gone we'll return to the state that feels unbearable for us we're
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going to be punishing them for an offense that is much greater than the one that they actually committed and this is in most cases going to lead to feelings of disorientation confusion and resentment in the other person because they know on
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an emotional level I am being punished to a much higher magnitude than what fits the actual crime or even in the best case scenario where they're desperately trying to give us what we need if we ourselves are not deeply
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conscious of what that need is they are never going to be able to fulfill it for us and we are going to continuously try to get them to and So eventually our partner might start feeling like they are up against an impossible task which
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in most cases is going to lead to Chronic feelings of overwhelm like there are expectations they have no idea how to fulfill and disconnection which might lead to the relationship ending and that's going to reinforce that belief right everybody leaves and then
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you're right back where you started in that place of self-abandonment when we're in that place at the end of a relationship the fixation we develop mentally might be how do I find a partner who is not going to abandon me
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next time but that question is the wrong question the question we need to be asking is what are these huge unmet needs I am placing on my partner that are causing tiny abandonments to feel so unbearable so we're going to contrast
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this with what a more secure relationship cycle looks like when it faces moments of Abandonment just to get a little bit of an idea of how else this could go so when we do have that good enough development as children and we
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grow into relatively secure adults who feel whole in their emotional selves now in the place of that self-abandonment we have self- intimacy and wholeness so the ability to feel like a complete person when we are on our own and being a
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complete and whole person includes a sense of security and an ease in which we form connections the world naturally feels abundant with people we could have potential connections with because we know that we have the skills we need to
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relate from an adult to adult place so when we are around others we're relating from that adult to adult place where we feel whole and we are appreciating the wholeness of someone else then if and when an abandonment happens
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so a rupture occurs in the relationship there's an argument something goes wrong instead of Desperately clamoring to figure out how to get back into a state of feeling whole we're able to focus on how we can invite the other person back
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into a state of connection because we are okay and we assume that they are okay and capable of taking care of themselves and so the only thing to really figure out is what wasn't working here where were we not on
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the same page how were we not aligning and how can we make sure in the future we're able to stay in Connection in this area or maybe this is an area where we're just never really going to be
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super close but this particular area isn't one where it feels particularly important for them to always be on the same page as us maybe this is an area where we have friends who can fulfill those emotional intimacy needs in the
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way that we need and vice versa so there's a lot of flexibility and creativity when it comes to how to stay in connection so now when there's some sort of rupture there's somewhere you really wanted your partner to meet you
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and see you where they didn't and you make that invitation to them hey I'm comfortable with this part of myself I want to show it to you and I want to feel seen by you here are you willing to
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do that with me are you willing to kind of work with me to get on the same page in this area or not if they are able to meet you there now you're back in adult to adult connection or if the request
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does not work for the other person maybe they themselves are not particularly secure and they haven't met themselves in an area where you're asking them to meet you and that request feels too overwhelming for them it could lead to a
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rupture that doesn't get repaired and maybe the relationship ends but if so where do you get returned to back to that place of self- intimacy and wholeness which once again gives you the skills you need for going out and
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sourcing new secure connections from a place of resource rather than despiration so again the goal here is not to become unabandoned and it's also not to find a partner who we are absolutely certain is never going to abandon us it's to build
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ourselves and to reparent ourselves into people who can tolerate abandonment on both a small scale and a large one that is the thing that's going to make that chronic fear of Abandonment that robs us of our ability to be present and
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appreciative of our relationships and our lives as they're happening finally leave us alone so the oldest and most well-known study in attachment theory is known as the strange situation procedure it was a procedure developed by a woman named Mary answorth right at the
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beginning of attachment Theory springing into existence where she designed a stressful situation that showed patterns of behavior that different children exhibited in a situation where they got separated from their caregiver so in the strange situation procedure what would
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happen is a child and a parent would be playing in a room and then a stranger would come into the room and then the parent would leave the room so the child would now be alone with the stranger
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children who were not securely attached experienced prolonged longed distress responses to their parents being gone so once their parents left the room if the children aired more anxious they tended to get extremely distraught and stay distraught until the parent returned if
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they aired avoidant they tended to ignore the stranger and stay really focused on playing with their toys or self- soothing in some way but they were experiencing physiological distress while their parents were gone secure children tended to cry when their
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parents left the room but then they would adjust to the situation and they would often turn to the stranger who they had witnessed their parent interacting with in a trustful way and they would play with the stranger which
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would help ease their distress so what we see happening in this situation is secure children do experience grief and pain when they feel separated from their caregivers but they're able to adjust to the situation that they're left in
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because they have an internal working model of the world as a safe place where their needs can get met so instead of staying fixated on the fact that their caregiver is gone they turn to what options are available in my environment
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now interpersonally that will help me meet my needs now that I've experienced and moved through my grief over my needs not getting met in the way that I wanted which is by my caregiver and this is the same model we want to end up with as
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adults when we are secure adults we still experience pain and grief and distress when we are abandoned by the people we're closest to whether that is once again a very overt abandonment so someone leaving us or someone dying or a
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more commonplace small scale abandonment so our partner being kind of zoned out when we really want their attention or something like that we still experience that grief and that pain of disconnection but because we are internally resourced we're able to
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readjust once we move through that pain and go okay if this person is not available to me for whatever reason in this moment who can I turn to to get my needs met how can I find a different way
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to self-regulate so there's a lot of flexibility and adaptiveness in the secure model of processing including processing abandonment it will still hurt to get abandoned but that hurt will not be the stopping point point that hurt will be something that is faced
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directly moved through and then a solution will be found on the other side so the real trick here is figuring out at what part of that process am I blocked like the avoidant child am I blocked in the area that causes me to
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experience conscious distress over my caregiver leaving so if this is the case as an adult you might not feel much consciously when you're experiencing separation or abandonment but you will still be having an elevated stress response that you are not aware of and
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because you won't be dealing with that and moving through it on an emotional level that stress is likely to persist and you're likely to have your blinders on when it comes to how you could get your interpersonal needs met now and if
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you air more anxious you might feel so preoccupied with the way that you want your needs to get met which is through a specific other person that you might struggle to self-regulate in the face of grief and distress
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so you never move through your emotions in a way that allows you to arrive on the other side of them and notice what options are available to you now so what we want to look at is where is the area
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where I need to increase my self resource so that I can feel whole in the instances where I am being abandoned do I need to up my emotional literacy do I need to learn that the times when I
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feeling physiologically distressed it's likely there's some emot that I'm repressing that needs to be brought into my conscious awareness or do I need to find a way to contain my emotions and lean on my ability to be autonomous as an adult so that I feel
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whole and complete when I am on my own and all of this is in essence just the art of attachment healing right the art of rounding ourselves out in the areas where we once experience neglect or abandonment and becoming people who are
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able to cope with a wide variet of situations that life might throw at us again this will not keep us from being abandoned but it will take the fear and preoccupation out of our experience and when that is out of our experience we
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can be more present more engaged more grateful for the people in our lives which is both likely to lead to less abandonment but also likely to just increase our satisfaction with our life and our relationships all around no
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matter how they end up going all right I think that's all I'm going to say for today on the topic of the fear of Abandonment but as always let me know in the comments what you guys are thinking feeling any questions
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you have I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again very soon [Music]
Topics:fear of abandonmentattachment theoryself-fulfilling prophecyinsecure attachmentself-abandonmentchildhood woundssecure attachmentemotional healingrelationshipsHeidi Priebe
