4 Indications That You Have Abandonment Anxiety

It’s not always easy to know when you have abandonment anxiety. There are occasions when people face physical trauma and walk away from it feeling fine, only to discover they have obtained a hairline fracture in one of their bones. Abandonment anxiety is similar in that. You might have felt as if you sustained no emotional damage from a traumatic event in your past, only to experience strange twinges of pain and annoyance from unexpected events later in life.

Abandonment trauma tends to lie dormant in your heart and only becomes apparent when you get emotionally close to someone. Then, you are suddenly afraid of damaging the relationship irreparably or doing something that will cause them to walk out on you.

It’s not always easy to identify abandonment anxiety, and even more challenging to know what to do with it once you’ve recognized it. You are not alone in this experience, but you might have to risk becoming vulnerable so that you can address these issues and experience authentic, secure intimacy with your loved ones.

Indicators of Abandonment Anxiety

You struggle with unresolved conflict

It’s not unusual to struggle with conflict. However, some people feel crippled when fights are left unresolved. If a disagreement with a loved one has been left without a conclusion, you might find yourself keeping your distance from them, wracked by nerves when you are around them, and unable to focus on anything until some resolution is reached.

These levels of anxiety over conflict would be considered extreme, and they likely point to a person dealing with abandonment trauma. At the core of abandonment trauma is a fear of being left behind, forgotten, overlooked, or dismissed.

When you are in the middle of a fight that has not been resolved, you are out of control of what the other person thinks of you and what they will decide to do. Your instinct tells you that they will leave you over the disagreement, and you might find yourself scrambling to save the connection, even if it means you compromise your values.

To be clear, conflict is rarely comfortable to navigate. However, it is also a natural part of any close relationship. Just because two people disagree or fight does not mean the connection between them has ended.

When you scramble to make things right in the aftermath of a fight, you might be ignoring some key information about yourself or the other person. Conflicts are an opportunity for growth and insight. By hurrying to smooth things over, you are ensuring that you remain uninformed and unchallenged.

You are emotionally guarded around almost everyone

It’s generally true that people with an abandonment wound are more sensitive and vigilant than others. What this means is that you are never able to relax in a relationship or close friendship because you are constantly trying to detect if the other person values you enough to remain connected with you. This is a subconscious defense mechanism of someone with abandonment anxiety. You might need someone to point it out to you if you are going to deal with it.

The tricky thing is that there will be times when you are undervalued or invalidated by those around you. It might be family members, close friends, or coworkers taking your efforts for granted. When that happens, it’s a good idea to confront it. This is a good way of standing up for yourself and protecting your boundaries. However, people with abandonment issues often struggle to recognize actual mistreatment because they are too vigilant in looking out for it.

You can think of it as having an alarm system installed in your home. Many people need to calibrate their security systems because alarms can be triggered by things like insects crawling across the sensors or owls sitting on cameras. The constant alarms are exhausting and create a sense of unease. If left unfixed, you will miss the actual threat when it comes because, by that time, you will have started to ignore the frequent warnings.

Hypervigilance works similarly with people. If you monitor every intonation of every conversation, you will always be on the lookout for signs of fatigue or disrespect. Your system will become exhausted. Your friends and loved ones will hurt you at some point, just as you will hurt them. You need to calibrate your inner alarm system so as not to pick up on every imagined slight or insult to your worth.

You struggle with ambiguity in relationships

There are moments in almost every person’s life when they don’t quite know where they stand with someone. It might be a new potential romantic partner sending mixed signals, a friend who blows hot and cold, or a boss who seems hard to please. These types of connections are frustrating to almost anyone, but they severely trigger people with abandonment trauma.

If you examine your feelings about these types of connections, you will realize that you believe abandonment is inevitable; you are expecting them to walk out or at least neglect you. Some people are proactive in such cases. Just like dealing with unresolved trauma, they will kick into action and try to bring clarity to the uncertain relationships. They might even “pull the plug” on the situation, becoming the one to walk out.

Other people are more passive and will quietly spiral into unexpressed anxiety at the state of the relationship. It is not in their nature to take action over such issues, and they will wait and hope for the other person to bring clarity or closure to the uncertainty.

As with unresolved conflict, it is healthy and natural to have certainty and clear boundaries in all contexts where you’re dealing with people. The struggle is that you will not always have that. Ambiguity, uncertainty, and a lack of clarity are everyday sources of anxiety and opportunities for growth if you allow them to be.

You find yourself reliving childhood experiences where you felt neglected

Abandonment anxiety frequently stems from childhood experiences. You might have had loving parents who tried their best but failed in a few crucial areas or on a few different occasions. The things you experienced as a child framed your expectations of the world and of how other people act.

If you learned at a young age that you can’t always trust the people who are meant to be there for you in all situations, you will likely struggle to trust anyone later in life. This goes against our logic, because we might rationally know that our loved ones will not intentionally hurt us, but we have an instinct warning us that they might.

Old wounds have a habit of resurfacing, and there are frequent times when you might flash back to moments in your childhood when you felt dismissed, neglected, or overlooked. Your brain is adept at noticing patterns. Your instincts are alerted to try and protect you from feeling similar things that you felt as a child.

Most self-sufficient people learned to be that way from a young age because no one else showed up for them when they needed it. They tend to trust their instincts about others in their adult lives, even when those instincts are wrong. It takes a lot of time, practice, and vulnerability to trust others, but you will never know if you are healed from something until you try doing the thing that caused pain before.

Relationships are not easy to navigate, least of all when you are dealing with abandonment trauma. You might need someone to come alongside you and help you begin the process of dealing with it. If you would like to meet with a counselor, contact our offices today. We can pair you with a therapist who will walk with you, in a non-judgmental way, toward healing.