PTSD
Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder of Abandonment:
The intense emotional
crisis of abandonment can create a trauma severe enough to leave an emotional
imprint on individuals’ psychobiological functioning, affecting their future
choices and responses to rejection, loss, or disconnection. Following an abandonment
experience in childhood or adulthood, some people develop a sequela of post
traumatic symptoms which share sufficient features with post traumatic stress
disorder to be considered a subtype of this diagnostic category.
As with other types of
post trauma, the symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder of abandonment
range from mild to severe. PTSD of abandonment is a psychobiological condition
in which earlier separation traumas interfere with current life. An earmark of
this interference is intrusive anxiety which often manifests as a pervasive
feeling of insecurity – a primary source of self sabotage in our primary
relationships and in achieving long range goals. Another earmark is a tendency
to compulsively reenact our abandonment scenarios through repetitive patterns,
i.e., abandoholism – being attracted to the unavailable.
Another factor of
abandonment post trauma is for victims to be plagued with diminished self
esteem and heightened vulnerability within social contexts (including the
workplace) which intensifies their need to buttress their flagging ego strength
with defense mechanisms which can be automatically discharged and whose
intention is to protect the narcissistically injured self from further
rejection, criticism, or abandonment. These habituated defenses are often
maladaptive to their purpose in that they can create emotional tension and
jeopardize our emotional connections.
Victims of abandonment
trauma can have emotional flashbacks that flood us with feelings ranging from
mild anxiety to intense panic in response to triggers that we may or may not be
conscious of. Once our abandonment fear is triggered, it can lead to what Daniel
Goleman calls emotional hijacking. During an emotional hijacking, the emotional
brain has taken over, leaving its victims feeling a complete loss of control
over their own lives, at least momentarily. If emotional hijacking occurs
frequently enough, its chronic emotional excesses can lead to self-depreciation
and isolation within relationships, as well as give rise to secondary
conditions such as chronic depression, anxiety, obsessive thinking, negative
narcissism, and addiction.
Post Traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) is a so called “disease” of the amygdala – the emotional center
of the brain responsible for initiating the Fight Flee Freeze response. In
PTSD, the amygdala is set on overdrive to keep us in a perpetual state of
hyper-vigilance — action-ready to declare a state of emergency should it
perceive any threat even vaguely reminiscent of the original trauma. The
amygdala, acting as the brain’s warning system, is constantly working to
protect (overprotect) us from any possibility of further injury. In the post
trauma sequelae related specifically to abandonment, the amygdala scans the
environment for potential threats to our attachments or to our sense of self
worth.
People with PTSD of
abandonment can have heightened emotional responses to abandonment triggers
that are often considered insignificant by others. For instance, depending on
circumstances, when we feel slighted, criticized, or excluded, it can instigate
an emotional hijacking and interfere in, and even jeopardize your personal or
professional life.
36 Characteristics of
post traumatic stress disorder of abandonment
This list is meant to
be descriptive, rather than exhaustive of the many issues related to the
abandonment syndrome.
1. An intense fear of
abandonment that interferes in forming primary relationships in adulthood.
2. Intrusive insecurity
that interferes in your social life and goal achievement.
3. Anxiety with authority
figures.
4. Tendency toward self
defeating behavior patterns that sabotage your love life, goals, or career.
5. A tendency to
repeatedly subject yourself to people or experiences that lead to another loss,
another rejection, and another trauma.
6. Intrusive reawakening
of old losses; echoes of old feelings of vulnerability and fear which interfere
in current experience.
7. Heightened memories of
traumatic separations and other events.
8. Conversely, partial or
complete memory blocks of childhood traumas.
9. Low self-esteem, low
sense of entitlement, performance anxiety.
10. Feelings of emotional
detachment, i.e. feeling numb to past losses.
11. Conversely, difficulty
letting go of the painful feelings of old rejections and losses.
12. Difficulty letting go,
even when we know the relationship cannot meet our basic needs
13. Episodes of
self-neglectful or self destructive behavior.
14. Difficulty
withstanding (and overreacting to) the customary emotional ups and downs of
your adult relationships.
15. Difficulty working
through the ordinary levels of conflict and disappointment within your adult
relationships.
16. Extreme sensitivity to
perceived rejections, exclusions or criticisms.
17. Emotional pendulum
swing between fear of engulfment and fear of abandonment; you can alternate
between ‘feeling the walls close in’ if someone gets too close and feeling
insecure, love starved – on a precipice of abandonment – if you are not sure of
the person’s love.
18. Difficulty feeling the
affection and other physical comforts offered by a willing partner – “keeping
them out” or “pushing them away; evidence of emotional anorexia or emotional
bulimia.
19. Tendency to ‘get
turned off’ and ‘lose the connection’ by involuntarily shutting down
romantically and/or sexually on a willing partner.
20. Conversely, tendency
to feel hopelessly hooked on a partner who is emotionally distancing.
21. Tendency to have
emotional hangovers ‘the morning after’ you have had contact with an ex or
someone over whom you have felt pain.
22.Difficulty naming your
feelings or sorting through an emotional fog.
23.Abandophobism – a
tendency to avoid close relationships altogether to avoid risk of abandonment.
24.Conversely, a tendency
to rush into relationships and clamp on too quickly.
25.Difficulty letting go
because you have attached with emotional epoxy, even when you know your partner
is no longer able to fulfill your needs, or even when you know your partner is
not good for you.
26.An excessive need for
control, whether it’s about the need to control the other’s behavior and
thoughts, or about being excessively self-controlled; a need to have everything
perfect and done your way.
27. Conversely, a tendency
to create chaos by avoiding responsibility, procrastinating, giving up control
to others, and feeling out of control.
28. A heightened sense of
responsibility to others, rescuing, attending to people’s needs, even when they
have not voiced them.
29.Tendency to have
unrealistic expectations and heightened reactivity toward others such that it
creates conflict and burns bridges to your social connections.
30. People-pleasing –
excessive need for acceptance or approval.
31. Self-judgment;
unrealistic expectations toward yourself.
32. Fear response to
people’s anger, which unwittingly sets you up to being “controlled” by them.
33. Co-dependency issues
in which you give too much of yourself to others and feel you don’t get enough
back.
34. Tendency to act
impulsively without being able to put the brakes on, even when you are aware of
the negative consequences.
35. Tendency toward
unpredictable outbursts of anger.
36. Conversely, tendency
to under-react to anger out of fear of breaking the connection and also out of
your extreme aversion to ‘not being liked’.
The impact of
abandonment trauma can be mitigated by abandonment recovery – a program of
therapy techniques designed to help you overcome abandonment and its aftermath
of self sabotaging patterns.
Please see additional
articles that help you explore whether you are on the abandonment trauma
spectrum, offer practical help, explain why some people are more prone to
getting post traumatic stress disorder of abandonment than others, and the Five
Phases of Abandonment and Recovery which provides hands-on help for people
across the abandonment spectrum—those with post trauma and those without. The
workbook is helpful in guiding you through the abandonment therapy techniques
step by step, teaching you self help tools for each of the five phases specific
to abandonment grief and trauma.
