“Although the push-pull behaviors in our current relationships seem to be triggered by our partner, they are actually a result of old fears we carry from our childhood."
Anxiety is a normal part of being in an intimate relationship. It usually comes in two forms—the fear of abandonment, and the fear of engulfment. Part of us worries that if we dive in to love, we will be abandoned. On the flip side, we fear that if someone gets too close, we will be swamped or never able to leave.
This post focuses on the fear of abandonment, which, to its excess, could show up as a lingering feeling of insecurity, intrusive thoughts, emptiness, unstable sense of self, clinginess, neediness, extreme mood fluctuations and frequent relationship conflicts. On the flip side, one might also cope by cutting off completely, and become emotionally numb.
Neuroscientists have found that our parents’ response to our attachment-seeking behaviors, especially during the first two years of our lives, encode our model of the world. If, as infants, we have healthy attachment interactions with an attuned, available, and nurturing caregiver, we will be able to develop a sense of safety and trust. If our parents were able to respond to our calls for feeding and comfort most of the time, we would internalize the message that the world is a friendly place; when we are in need, someone will come and help us. We would also learn to calm ourselves in time of distress, and this forms our resilience as adults. If, in contrast, the message that we were given as an infant was that the world is unsafe and that people cannot be relied upon, it would affect our ability to withstand uncertainty, disappointments, and relationships' ups and downs.
Most people can withstand some degree of relational ambiguity and not be entirely consumed by worrying about potential rejection. When we argue with our loved ones, we can later bounce back from the negative event; when they are not physically by our side, we have an underlying trust that we are on their mind. All these involve something called object constancy—the ability to maintain an emotional bond with others even where there are distance and conflicts.
In adulthood, object constancy allows us to trust that our bond with those who are close to us remains whole even when they are not physically around, picking up the phone, replying to our texts, or even frustrated at us. With object constancy, absence does not mean disappearance or abandonment, only temporary distance.
Since no parent could be available and attuned 100 percent of the time, we all suffer at least some minor bruises in learning to separate and individuate. However, when one had experienced more severe early or even preverbal attachment trauma, have extremely inconsistent or emotionally unavailable caregivers, or a chaotic upbringing, their emotional development might have been stunted at a delicate age, and they never had the opportunity to develop object constancy.
For the insecurely attached individuals, any kind of distance, even brief and benign ones, trigger them to re-experience the original pain of being left alone, dismissed, or disdain. Their fear could trigger coping survival modes such as denial, clinging, avoidance and dismissing others, lashing out in relationships, or the pattern of sabotaging relationships to avoid potential rejection.
Without object constancy, one tends to relate to others as "parts," rather than "whole." Just like a child who struggles to comprehend the mother as a complete person who sometimes rewards and sometimes frustrates, they struggle to hold the mental idea that both themselves and ourselves have both good and bad aspects. They may experience relationships as unreliable, vulnerable, and heavily dependent on the mood of the moment; There seems to be no continuity in the way they view their partner—it shifts moment to moment and is either good or bad.
Without the ability to see people as whole and constant, it becomes difficult to evoke the sense of the presence of the loved one when they are not physically present. The feeling of being left on their own can become so powerful and overwhelming that it evoke raw, intense and sometimes child-like reactions. When abandonment fear is triggered, shame and self-blame closely follow, further destabilizing the anxious person’s emotions. Because the origins of these strong reactions were not always conscious, it would seem as though they were "unreasonable," "immature." In truth, if we think of them as acting from a place of repressed or dissociated trauma; and consider what it was like for a 2-year-old to be left alone or be with an inconsistent caregiver, the intense fear, rage, and despair would all make sense.
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