Dear miyoid:

You are welcome. “I can try to understand how I won’t die if I would get abandoned again”- the fear of being abandoned was born in you when you were a child. For any young mammal, it is very, very scary to be abandoned because it means death (there’s no one to feed the young mammal, and no one to shelter it from the cold and/or from predators). Humans are mammals and we are born with the same instincts, so when a child fears abandonment, that fear is great, just as if the child was in the wild.

In reality, you survived childhood fed and sheltered. Now, as an adult, you are able to feed and shelter yourself, and you have been doing for a long time. You still fear abandonment because your brain is the same brain you had as a child, and it is in the habit of being afraid of abandonment.

One therapy recommended for adults who suffer from separation (abandonment) anxiety disorder is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) where you sort of.. catch yourself thinking something that made you feel bad, you then think: is what I just thought true or not? Then, if you figure that it was not true, you think again, replacing the untrue thought with a true thought.

For example, you suddenly feel stressed/ worried, then you wonder: what made me so stressed just now?.. Next, = you notice that you were thinking something like: I will die if he leaves me! Next, you think: is this thought true? If you figure out that it is not a true thought, you replace it with: “I won’t die if I would get abandoned again” (your words). Next- relax into the new thought.

anita