Fear of Abandonment

I have a fear of abandonment.  I've been writing in this space for five years and you probably don't know this about me.  Family members who have known me for most of, or for the entirety of my life, didn't know until recently, when I invited them in to this secret and shameful place.  I imagine this feels akin to an alcoholic's public admission of being an alcoholic.  It feels liberating.  And yucky.

I've been married a month and a half shy of fifteen years.  This fear, dressed as insecurity, has been an intermittent, spasmodic struggle throughout.  Interestingly, as far as I can tell, it doesn't show up anywhere other than in my marriage, and show up it does.  Always with full force.  It is triggered by occasions when my husband is in mixed company, and I am elsewhere.  In my body, it manifests as an unininvited pit in my stomach that demands my full attention.  In my mind, it travels like suspicion, and in my emotions, it feels like fear and betrayal.  I've tried to whisper reassurances to it, suffocate it with reality, smash it with Scripture, pray it away, ignore it, bore it to death, and nothing works.

It must be confronted.  But, not until I am fully humiliated by telling my husband that I am struggling with this.  Again.  UGH.  There is not a bold enough bold or italicky enough italics or a large enough font to properly convey the feeling behind that little three-letter word.

Through my education, some periodic bursts of internet research, and discussion with friends and family with degrees in personal development, I have learned that this fear stems from forming insecure (as opposed to secure) attachments in my childhood.  Depending on who is writing and reflecting on attachment theory, it seems the nature of these attachments are established as a model for future relationships, some time by the age of six.  (Man, that seems like such a short period of time, to be screwed up forever).

I have a very, very poor memory, so, I cannot consciously recall or point to the reasons this problematic manner of attachment is my very own.  But, I have parents and siblings and the collective experience of our life together.  This history includes my parents' divorce when I was four (while divorce is consistently hailed as a major culprit for insecure attachments) , and a string of possible contributing events and relationships for the next twenty years.

It may become important to more fully understand these reasons, as I move forward in the healing/managing process, but for now, I think it is enough to know that the reasons were a real and sufficient cause for being periodically and devastatingly afraid.

I'm afraid of being rejected or replaced.  I am afraid of playing the fool.  I am afraid of not being enough.  I'm afraid of coming up empty-handed, through some fault of my own.   I would say I'm afraid of being alone, as the word abandonment implies, but I am not afraid of being alone.

And so, I write.  I write to understand myself and I write here, because I believe sharing this with you is my duty.  Maybe you don't have the words.  Maybe you haven't had somebody who will give you fifteen years of grace to look at something you don't understand and will put up with your hiding or lashing out when you are afraid of it.  Or maybe you can't relate to any of this, but you know somebody who can.

God only knows.

May the God whose ways are not our ways, and the peace that surpasses all understanding, be ours.  Amen.