Five Steps Toward Moving Past Abandonment Issues

Abandonment issues can have devastating effects on a person. It can produce poor self-image, along with feeling lost, insignificant, hopeless. Because it represents a severing of an important connection, it can come as a complete shock to the system.

As a result, a person can feel at loose ends, trying to fill something missing in their life. Any other relationships become a potential source of hurt and are sabotaged by the suspicion that the other person is just going to abandon you.

This, in turn, makes a person overly sensitive and clingy, as they obsessively seek to manipulate the other person into staying, in order to quell their anxiety. The longer this goes on, the more a person comes to hate themselves and feel a sense of shame at their behavior.

A deep and pervading sense of insecurity drives them to become dependent on their partner for self-image and emotional stability. They need the other person’s approval in order to feel good about themselves. Likewise, whenever their partner displays disapproval, it is interpreted as personal disapproval and a sign that they will abandon them.

They live in a chronic defensive posture, merely reacting to ebbs and flows in the relationship. Their life is out of their control (or so they believe) and their partner is their rock of stability.

The trauma incurred by abandonment should never be trivialized, however, and the road to recovery can be long and hard. It requires taking responsibility for yourself and your own recovery. It requires one to stop seeing themselves as a victim and implementing (with God’s help) intentionality in your life and relationships.

Five Steps Toward Moving Past Abandonment Issues

Here are five steps to take in order to move past abandonment issues, break free from codependency, and acquire a godly view of self.

1. Take responsibility for your own emotions.

When struggling with abandonment issues, it is easy to rely on your partner to smooth things over and soothe your anxiety. This is born out of a desire to be cared for. Though in other situations this desire can be a good thing, when suffering from abandonment loss, it can skew your sense of personal accountability.

The vast, empty hole inside you longs for another relationship to fill it and to fix everything that is wrong. Some, in order to gain a sense of security, expect their relationship partner to behave in certain ways. If they do not achieve perfection on that score, then panic sets in, because their sense of security is derived from their partner’s reassuring behavior. When the partner struggles, the person’s world falls apart.

To get past this, it is crucial for a person to take responsibility for their own emotions. Even if their partner does something that makes them feel insecure, they need to realize that how they respond to it is completely their own choice. Part of maturity as a human being is taking responsibility for our actions.

Even if this were not the case, the partner is not able to take on the task of managing the other person’s emotions. It is literally not in their power to do so, and they should never be blamed for failing to do it.

2. Set realistic expectations.

It is common for someone who has suffered abandonment to come to a relationship with unrealistic expectations of their partner or of the relationship in general. They may expect it to magically fill every need, coming to it with an expectation that they are in it to get, rather than to give.

This can be a result of a sort of entitlement mentality that is a response to being hurt. They feel that they are owed emotional stability and expect their partner to provide it. As a result, they end up in addictive relationships because they think that their partner is the perfect person to provide what they need.

It is common for a fear of abandonment to coexist with an addiction to love. People who suffer from love addiction are always looking for the next “love high” and use those around them to achieve a sense of wholeness. However, the law of diminishing returns kicks in and the “high” doesn’t last.

These sorts of expectations strain a relationship and put pressure on the other person to be the perfect partner. Because no human being can completely satisfy another person’s every desire and need, disappointment will follow.

In order to get free from this kind of addiction, a person must reassess their expectations with respect to their needs. Are their needs realistic? Are they even possible for another person to fulfill? Are they the kind of needs that are only satisfied by God Himself?

3. Receive validation from God.

Those who wrestle with the fear of being abandoned need continual reassurance that they are all right. Being abandoned so devastates a person’s self-image that it becomes natural for them to look to others to make them feel good about themselves.

Receiving affirmation from other people is not necessarily wrong, but it becomes problematic when a person places a higher value on it than the affirmation that comes from God. Likewise, validation should never find its source in us but always in God.

If your partner expresses disapproval of you or even just disagrees, does your world fall apart? Does criticism cause you to go off the rails? We don’t always get the approval that we want, so allowing our moods to be controlled by others is unstable at best.

Other people should never be given power over your sense of worth and value. Ultimately, no amount of approval from other people will ever bring lasting satisfaction. Only the fact that God is who He is and the fact that we are made in His image can ever bring a sense of affirmation that will go the distance.

4. Be real.

Is the person you present to the public the real you? Do you wear a mask whenever you are in a relationship?

Abandonment can wreak havoc with a person’s sense of identity and individuality, teaching them to believe that nothing they are or do will ever be good enough to be accepted by anyone. This causes them to show a false face to the world and they begin to forget who they really are.

They become afraid to let people see the real person and constantly fear that to do so would endanger the relationship’s stability. A person can come to the point that they are willing to give up any sense of self if it means that they will gain the approval or attention of the other person. They offer a version of themselves that is sanitized for public consumption, designed to keep from making waves in their relationships.

This is nothing less than the “fear of man” that “lays a snare” (Proverbs 29:25). To live this way is to give up all that makes you who you are. It is to live a life of people-pleasing that will keep you in a constant state of fear of offending someone and of accepting abuse and inappropriate behavior.

Be who you are. Realize your identity in Christ and your intrinsic value.

5. Confront yourself.

Chances are you have compromised your standards in order to keep a relationship together. This is because conflict often draws out a person’s worst side and those who have suffered from abandonment issues have often become absolute masters at manipulating others in order to keep the fear of abandonment at bay.

Lying and misrepresenting the truth, playing victim to get sympathy, pretended confusion when confronted, shaming, hitting someone’s weak spot in order to get one’s own way, all these things and more are symptoms of the native depravity that every person possesses.

Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we not only hide from God but from ourselves, as well. Also, like our First Parents, it is much easier to blame someone else than to point the finger where it belongs – at ourselves.

Before we can ever confront anyone else, we must confront ourselves and deal with our own sin. Even though we may have suffered a great wrong done to us through abandonment, we must take responsibility for our own sinful responses to that sin that was perpetrated on us.

We must acknowledge that our own sinful actions have hurt others and have violated God’s commandments. We must daily confess these sins to God and strive to establish new patterns of holiness and obedience. The irony is that we must do this not in order to have a better relationship with other people, but first of all, with God. As our relationship with God improves, normally our relationship with others will, too.

Christian Counseling for Abandonment Issues

None of this will be easy. Taking the necessary steps to overcome abandonment issues may cause you anxiety, discomfort, and sometimes pain, and it will humble you before God. But it is worth it. The consistent daily repentance and faith will build spiritual “muscles” that will strengthen over time.

This is more than mere “personal growth.” It is much deeper than that. It is growth in “holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14), and that makes the whole process worth it.