10 Signs of Abandonment Issues in Relationships

Are you a victim of unresolved abandonment issues in relationships?

If you find yourself always on the verge of leaving a relationship, the answer to this question may be “Yes.”

In a healthy relationship, you balance the desire for acceptance with fear of losing connection. You are not afraid to draw people near and experience their affection. You are also ready to let them go when the relationship is not healthy enough to be sustained. You evaluate relationships, work on them, and are open to giving and receiving love.

Have you ever trusted someone to do something important for you; anything physical, spiritual or emotional, and they failed to do it? If you knew that the reason why they failed was negligence, would you continue to trust them? When you hold a relationship in high regard and your partner fails to reciprocate, you are bound to feel used and abused. This is the main cause of abandonment issues in relationships.

Any unresolved abandonment issues make it harder for you to trust other people. You become rigid about letting people into your life. You treat future relationships with mistrust, threatening their ability to last.

10 Characteristics Of Abandonment Issues In Relationships

When you experience abandonment, the pain dominates your subconscious. You may not be aware that you harbor such pain until certain features become evident in the way you handle people. Have you noticed these features in your life?

1. Tiptoeing around new relationships

To keep yourself safe from further harm, you become overcautious in your relationships. You find it hard to trust people who try to get close to you. In fact, you treat them with suspicion. Any information about you is highly guarded and you ensure that only those people who must know, get it.

2. Counter-dependence

To avoid further disappointment, you avoid other people’s input in your life at all costs despite experiencing isolation. You make sure that you do not invest your feelings into them. You build up a strong wall of independence to show them that you don’t need them. Even when circumstances force you to depend on people, you triple-check their input and most of the time write it off. The risk of having outside contribution is too much for you to bear; so you stand solo.

3. Clinginess

On the other hand, abandonment issues in relationships may leave you wanting to cling to relationships even when you know they are flawed. Fear of rejection makes you seek people’s approval and attention. To them, you appear needy. You fear to stay out of relationships, so you jump into the next available relationship without evaluating it which can result in yet another desertion.

4. Inability to express love

You find it difficult to accept genuine affection and physical contact from anyone around you. Holding hands and hugging are no-go-zones for you. Even when you may care about someone, you hide these feelings to avoid being betrayed again. To those around you, you seem disconnected and unable to express your true feelings.

5. Domineering attitude

You get tense about being out of a relationship so you micromanage anyone involved. You tell lies to gain sympathy and influence their decisions. There is also a deep need to look perfect before them so you maintain a self-righteous attitude making you look superior. Phrases like, “They can’t do without me”, “I made them who they are today” dominate your conversations. This happens more when the relationship is troubled and the chances of being abandoned increase.

6. Embracing a destructive belief system

When situations turn the way you didn’t expect, you believe you are at fault and expect the worst. You find it difficult to take feedback because to you it feels like hate. This originates from the pain brought about by previous abandonment. In every relationship, you feel the need to earn people’s love. You don’t expect to get anything good even when you deserve it.

Your language changes to, “Who would want to love me?’, “I never get things right”, “They would never approve of my input.”

7. Addiction to perfection

You demand perfection in every relationship you get into and are unwilling to see other people’s viewpoints. You operate with a list of expectations that you insist that people fulfill before getting close to you. When you come across anything that doesn’t meet your strict demands, you write it off without investigating further. Imperfection worries you to the core. This means that unless you are absolutely certain that a relationship will work, you don’t engage.

8. Fear of affection

You anticipate rejection and betrayal from those who care about you. To make it easier for you to handle future abandonment, you search for and find faults where they don’t exist. This gives you a way to exit from relationships before you get dumped. In a give and take situation such as marriage, you shut down your emotions to prevent intimacy. You emotionally disconnect from your partner while having sex to avoid being hurt.

9. Compromising your values

Are you in an abusive relationship and are finding excuses as to why you need to stay even when your life is in danger? Like working in a place that forces you to compromise your values so as to pay your bills? How healthy is that in the long run?

This is a result of unresolved abandonment issues in relationships. Playing the role of the sacrificial lamb while blaming yourself for a faulty relationship won’t make it right. It will destroy you.

10. Raising walls against future relationships

Every relationship is held together by the positive participation of the parties. It calls for you to create room for people to know you even as you get to know them. Abandonment issues force you not to trust. You barricade people out of your life because you don’t expect them to do their part in the relationship. You withdraw for fear of criticism. This prevents you from connecting with people.

Bonus: Making excuses to justify your flaws for fear of abandonment doesn’t make the relationship any stronger. It is a sign that you are insecure in that relationship. For any relationship to succeed, you must create room for correction and feedback.

Resolving Abandonment Issues in Relationships through Christian Counseling

True love drives out fear. That love enables you to trust others. To give them a chance to love and experience love. Fear, on the other hand, burdens you with the ‘what-ifs’. It robs you of the opportunity to belong and have friends or a partner.

Don’t you desire to break free from the power of the unresolved abandonment issues? At Seattle Christian Counseling, we have professional counselors who are willing to help you to face your past, confront your fears and create healthy relationships. Call us today; let us help you experience true affection again.