Sunday, July 24, 2016

Is FAB ruining your life?

Fears of abandonment (FAB)arise from instability in the early years of a persons life. This instability contributes to insecurities. These insecurities manifest in multiple ways including anxiety, defensiveness, giving up, people pleasing, clinging including stalking, and substance abuse and other mood altering behaviors.

Fears of abandonment is the basis for many of the symptoms that make it possible for mental health professionals to diagnose a person with a personality disorder. A personality disorder is described as repetitive patterns of behavior that are dysfunctional and maladaptive so as to decrease the life satisfaction and fulfillment of the person with the disorder and the people that person has relationships with.

Fears of abandonment can take over a person's life and tell her/him that the world is a unstable place where people wind up leaving you alone to fend for yourself physically, emotionally, socially, mentally, and even spiritually. The fears of abandonment have convinced the person that without connection, acceptance, and belonging with the special other, the person will die.

Fears of abandonment will convince people that they shouldn't fall in love and become attached  because they will be devastated if they lose the relationship.

Fears of abandonment can create jealousy and paranoia when the person experiences the loss of their partner's attention and/or loyalty whether real or imagined.

Fears of abandonment can become stronger and more insistent when there is a physical and/or emotional separation from the person the sufferer is attached to.

Fears of abandonment make a person believe that no one will ever be committed to them and loyal and they are doomed to a life of loneliness and insecurity.

Fears of abandonment can be so tricky and devilish as to make the person accuse others of not being loyal and faithful, thereby pushing and driving them away, and bringing about the very situation of abandonment and rejection they feared. This is called a "self fulfilling prophecy" when the very thing the person feared is brought about by  his/her own self sabotage.

How can one manage FAB to decrease and maybe even eliminate its influence on one's life?

To be continued

1 comment:

  1. The racism, sexism, xenophobia, and bigotry heard at the Repbulican Convention influences heavily the fears of abandonment experienced by certain Americans. The chants of "lock her up, lock her up" and even one New Hampshire Republican delegate who stated that Hillary should be shot and killed indicate the triggering of dysfunctional scripts of anger at perceived abandonment of Americans by Hillary which in their minds amounts to treason. This overcompensation mechanism to manage their anxiety triggered by FAB is a sign of a mental illness shared by a fairly large segment of the American population who are drawn to the promises of Donald Trump to take care of them and keep them safe.

    Will this folie au deux continue to infect and spread in the body politic?

    ReplyDelete