- How can you overcome the fear of abandonment?
Do you ever fear people closest to you
might suddenly leave you?
Do you feel nervous that the people may abandon you,
that people don't like you,
or that you have to work so hard for approval?
Are you worried about being left alone, being rejected,
being abandoned, being replaced, being diminished?
Do you think you're very, very needy
and you need other people's approval to feel good?
If any of this sounds familiar,
then you might be experiencing the fear of abandonment.
It is a very real fear,
and it's a very painful fear too,
so keep watching, because I want to show you
that you have the power to overcome it.
So what is the fear of abandonment?
Well, fear of abandonment is the kind of overwhelming worry
that the people that we think we need,
the people we are closest to will leave us,
and here are some signs that you have fears
about abandonment or indeed abandonment issues.
You're extremely sensitive to criticism.
You have low self-esteem.
You have difficulty trusting other people,
making and maintaining friends,
you are a big people pleaser.
You feel nervous that people don't like you
or will leave you if they find out who you really are.
You remain in unhealthy relationships
just to avoid being alone.
You're doing all you can to avoid separation
or rejection or even conflict.
You blame yourself when things go wrong in a relationship
and you get attached to people too quickly.
You stay in a relationship
even when you know it's not good for you,
and you've kind of forgotten who you are.
You've made it your life's work to pretend to be someone
that you think other people will like.
So where does this come from?
Well, let me tell you something about abandonment.
You know, we are hardwired to be a part of a tribe.
If you went back 1,000 years
and you lived in a fort or a walled community or a village,
a little tribe, you know one thing,
"As long as the tribe accepts you, you will survive,
"and if they don't, you may not."
And many, many cultures
throughout the years have practiced abandonment.
We cast people out from the village
if they don't conform to what we expect of them.
We used to maroon difficult sailors,
put them on a desert island,
put difficult prisoners in isolation.
People still get cast out
from particular religious organizations.
And in our very psyche, we have a powerful need
to find connection and avoid rejection.
After all, when you come on the planet, you know innately,
"If I find connection and avoid rejection, I will make it,
"but if I'm abandoned, I could die."
After all, if you were cast out
from a village in medieval times,
how could you live?
In 'Romeo and Juliet,' when they said to Romeo,
"You are banished to outside the city walls,"
he said, "I'd rather have death.
"There's nothing outside the city walls except purgatory."
My father lived in a village that had an 11th-century church
with a banishment window.
What did that mean?
Well, if someone in the village didn't behave
in a way the village found acceptable, they were banished,
cast out, abandoned.
They were not allowed to come back to that village,
but they had to turn up at the church,
they had to turn up just after the service began.
They had to crouch down in all kinds of weathers
at the banishment window,
and just before the service ended, they had to run away,
they were not allowed to belong.
They were disconnected, abandoned.
And abandonment is painful.
Babies are traumatized when their mother leaves,
they don't know when she's coming back,
and we'll say things like, "You abandoned me."
In fact, there's a great song by Rose Royce,
"You abandoned me.
"Love don't live here anymore."
It's the opening line.
She wasn't abandoned, somebody moved on,
but the feeling of being abandoned is painful,
because our primitive brain believes,
"I can't survive if I'm abandoned."
And so, often, childhood trauma, loss of a parent,
parental neglect,
a bad relationship, not having your needs recognized or met,
difficult family situations,
being rejected by friends or relatives at a very young age,
feeling your mother's replaced you with a new baby,
feeling that you are not enough
and not as good as other people
set off powerful, sometimes life-lasting, abandonment issues.
So, how does abandonment impact your life?
Well, imagine if your father left when you were one
and he never came back, but he had a new family
and he tret that new child different to you.
Now you have a belief, "People leave me,
"I get abandoned, the people I love don't stay,"
and that makes it hard, even impossible
to maintain healthy relationships.
When you feel that your mother abandoned you,
left you for someone else, left you emotionally,
because she's at work all day...
You see, a child thinks, "Mommy's always at work,
"Daddy's always at work.
"Oh, I guess they like work more than me."
You see, when a child's needs are not met,
the child doesn't even know
how to stop loving the caregiver
because they are dependent on them.
A dependent child is dependent on the person
that takes care of them to meet to all their needs,
and so guess what happens?
When a caregiver doesn't meet
that young child's need effectively,
the child immediately stops loving themselves.
They don't stop loving the caregiver,
they stop loving themselves.
And when you stop loving yourself,
stop believing that you are worthy of love
or indeed deserving of love,
you now have low self-esteem, low self-worth,
low self-image,
relationships that are unhappy,
you lack confidence,
you find it very hard to trust yourself
and even harder to trust others.
And that's not a happy picture, I know.
How do you overcome the fear of being abandoned?
Well, first of all, you have to look at it
and understand the truth.
When you're a child, you would've suffered greatly
if you were abandoned.
If you were going on a wagon train across America
and the wagon train left you behind, you might have died,
you probably would've died,
but nowadays we do not die from abandonment.
We feel like we will, but we won't.
You can live in an apartment with six cats,
have Amazon and Instacart deliver everything you ever need
for your entire life and live until you're 108.
I'm not suggesting that is a happy life,
but I'm showing you that we used to die from abandonment
and now we do not die from abandonment,
and that's one of the fastest things to help you to say,
"You know, I don't like this.
"It doesn't feel good, but it's not going to kill me."
So when you can address why you have
that fear of abandonment,
who left you when you were little? Really left you
or at least emotionally left you.
Who failed to meet your needs
and why do you believe it will always be that way?
When you get to the root
of where your abandonment issues come from,
you can get over it.
I've worked with many people who say, "You know,
"my dad was in the army, we moved every year,
"and after the seventh move, I stopped making friends.
"I just couldn't stand the sadness of saying goodbye,
"knowing I would never see that person again,
"it was so painful."
So having therapy will help you very much to
uncover where your abandonment issues come from,
talking it through with a trusting friend,
reading my new book, 'Tell Yourself A Better Lie,'
working on loving yourself and saying,
"You know, if you left me, I would be sad.
"I would be unhappy, but I would live."
There was a girl in my book, called Emma,
whose mother had died and she said, "I need my mother."
And I said, "You don't need your mother.
"You're 45, I want you to tell yourself a better lie,
"'I miss my mother, but I don't need her,'
"because that's the truth.
"At 45, you don't need your mother, you may want her,
"you may miss her, but you do not need her."
There's a huge difference between needing and missing.
I miss my mother,
I miss my father terribly,
but I don't need them to be happy.
No adult needs their parent to be alive to be happy,
they may love that and prefer it,
but that's different to needing it.
So she had such abandonment issues because of the belief,
"I miss my mother,
"I can't be happy without my mother,
"I need my mother,"
and she was a mother herself.
And when she understood what was really going on
and she said, "You know, my mother died of cancer.
"She should've stayed."
But then she realized the truth,
"My mother had cancer for 10 years and said,
"'You know what?
"'I'm not going to put you through another 10 years of this,
"'you have your own family.
"'I'm leaving, because I do not want to make you watch this
"'for 10 more years.'"
So then saw her mother's leaving her
was actually an act of kindness and generosity,
not an act of abandonment.
People say, "You know, I was put up for adoption,
"I wasn't loved," when sometimes the truth is
that parent loves you so much,
they gave you to people who they believe
would give you a better life.
I've worked with many fathers who abandon their family.
That's so terrible. You know what they say?
"I was no good.
"They were better off without me, I was an alcoholic.
"I was an addict, I was useless.
"I thought if I left my children, never went back,
"they would do so much better without me."
I've even worked with people who survived suicide,
and guess what say?
"I was no good to my children.
"I thought the best thing I could ever do
"was remove myself from this world.
"They'd be better off without me."
But those children don't think, "Oh, you were right."
They feel abandoned.
"My dad didn't love me enough to stay.
"My mom didn't care enough to be at home.
"My parents didn't care that I was being bullied,
"they just said, 'Get on with it, parent yourself.'"
But when we go back and see, you know,
the worst parent in the world
doesn't wake up and go, "Where's Google?
"I'm going to Google how I can damage my kid
"for the rest of their life."
The worst parents in the world,
if they could do better, they would do better.
And even if they did abandon you emotionally,
even physically,
that doesn't mean you cannot have an amazing life.
One of my best graduates is a guy called Didi Khan,
and his parents put him on the street when he was 11.
Can you imagine?
And they never let him go home again.
And he went through a series of traumas
and now he's an amazing therapist
in a beautiful relationship,
and he can look at what happened as immensely sad,
but it has not shaped his entire life.
In fact, he used that experience of being abandoned
to help other people,
young kids who feel abandoned.
Charlie Chaplin, by the way, was put on the street
at 10 years old and told, "Fend for yourself."
You know what? He did.
So being abandoned is very painful
and it can cause a lot of damage and trauma,
however, we have the power to go back
and look at that abandonment through a different lens
and say, "Well, it happened.
"It was horrible, but it can only shape my entire life
"if I let it, and guess what? I will not let it."
There's an English actor called Lesley Manville.
She's amazing. At 16, she left home,
lived in a bedsit on her own to become an actress.
She said, "It was very lonely, but I did it."
And then she went on to marry, she married Gary Oldman.
She has a wonderful son. And I love the fact
that she was effectively abandoned at 16.
I wouldn't let my daughter live in a bedsit at 16.
I would move with her.
I just wouldn't let that happen.
But I love the fact that it's not what happened,
it's how you look at it,
and Lesley Manville looked at it differently,
and did not allow that to shape her negatively
but to shape her positively.
So if you would like some really powerful help
on how to feel enough,
which is a powerful way to overcome
the fear of being abandoned,
click below for my "I Am Enough" module.
I promise you, it will help you powerfully,
and let me know how you get on with it.
Thanks for tuning in.