How To Cure Fear Of Abandonment

How can I end my fear of abandonment and rejection?

I wish I could give you a good answer.Every human has dependency needs. As infants and children we are very much dependent on parents to take care of these needs. Erik Erikson explains that there is a kind of fundamental trust that needs to be formed very early on in an individual’s development. If the parents push the child away, do not give the child the required cuddling, physical and psychological security, etc., and instead make open or implicit threats of driving the child out of the family, then there will likely be a lifelong deficit at this level.That’s what apparently happened to me. I once explained it to my good shrink as being the feeling of climbing up a chimney with an arm and a leg on one side and the other arm and leg on the other side. The expectation is that if anything makes you lose your grip you’ll fall all the way to the bottom.A person with good early parenting would always have the feeling of there being something to fall back on. Any fall would be arrested by the love and comfort and protection of one’s parents.For someone without that early security, the only answer seems to be establishing a series of surrogates. If one forms one strong friendship, then even if the other person is a world away there is still the feeling that s/he would not let you down. You have something to fall back on.The more of these successful relationships you have, the less you need fear abandonment and rejection. So what if Jack rejects me? I still have Jill.Another element of resilience is to become one’s own protector. I changed quite a bit just as the result of getting enough martial arts technique to feel that if somebody attacked me I would at least make their attack expensive for them. (I couldn’t stop with just a little of that kind of security.)A third element of resilience is discovering that when somebody does dump you the bad feeling persists for some time but eventually fades away and you discover that you are still doing well enough in the world without the outside support.Another things that may help is to risk being open with some people. Starting as an undergraduate in university, I told a couple of people things about myself that I feared would get me ostracized. Nothing of the kind happened. So I had a few backup points in life from that point on.

How do I overcome constant fear of rejection, separation, abandonment and sense of disappointment by people (I know exactly that it's only my impression but this knowledge does not help me; I'm diagnosed with BPD)?

There is a good reason the reality therapies are referred to affectionately and respectfully as the “Gold Standard”: they earned it. With little or no medication, the reality approach gently escorts the BPD - nearly always with abandonment feelings - back to being in touch with reality such that emotions aren’t quite so dysregulated.The problem is reality distortion, which accompanies many conditions, but emphatically BPD. The best approach then would be a gentle re-acquaintance with reality. It helps to sort things out and to develop skills the BPD missed out on through isolation in the home, hurting, general discord and early sense of rejection / abandonment. This sets the stage for a more frank sense of abandonment not from abuse after all but for poor communication. Parents - after all - are not mind readers, and it’s hard to help a son or daughter who freezes you out when you ask what is wrong.The rejection and neglect feelings come more from a mis-read of family interactions than any genuine abuse, which explains why research is leaning more into neurologic evidence (in the emotional center of the brain) than history of abuse. The child feels unworthy and the rest simply fills that void, inaccurately, but it does. Kids are confused enough by things, and they tend to fill in the blanks with their own logic. It is limited and cannot replace the guidance of parents, so the child loses opportunities to develop coping skills adults have for life’s adversities.The child hurts because he or she has no one, it seems.But what if they are wrong and the parents didn’t hurt them? What if they were wrong for years and refused to let mom and dad help because they thought - they felt - that mom and dad were gaslighting them?Where would they get that idea?