Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (12 page)

There is another difference: Dependent people often have a number of people lined up as backups in case their main person leaves. They have someone immediately available to take the person’s place, or they find someone new, and quickly form another dependent relationship. Few lonely people have dependence underneath. Dependent people do not tolerate the loneliness. Most dependent people are quite talented at finding someone to take care of them. They go from one person to another, with rarely more than a month between.

This is not necessarily true of people who fear
emotional
abandonment. They can be alone for long periods of time. They might withdraw from close relationships out of hurt and out of fear of being hurt again. They have already faced the loneliness as children, and they know they can survive. That is not the issue. It is the process of loss that is devastating.

It is having that connection, and then losing it, and being thrown back into the loneliness one more time.

When we talk about the origins of lifetraps, we focus primarily on features of the child’s
environment.
We know quite a bit about the dysfunctional family environments—such as abuse, neglect, and alcoholism—that seem to promote individual lifetraps. We downplay the contribution of
heredity
, in part because researchers know so little about the role of biology in determining our long-term personality patterns. We assume that heredity must make its mark in terms of our temperament, which in turn influences how we are treated as children and how we respond to that treatment. But we rarely have any way of guessing how a child’s temperament influences the development of specific lifetraps.

Abandonment is an exception to this general rule. Researchers who study infants have observed that some babies react far more intensely to separation than do others. This suggests that
some
people may be biologically predisposed to develop the Abandonment lifetrap.

The way we respond to separation from a person who takes care of us seems at least partly innate. Separation from the mother is a vital issue in a newborn’s life. Throughout the animal world, infants are totally dependent on their mothers for survival, and if an infant loses its mother, it usually dies. Infants are born prepared to behave in ways designed to end separations from their mothers. They cry and show signs of distress. They „protest,“ as John Bowlby called it in his classic book,
Separation.

Bowlby wrote about infants and young children who were temporarily separated from their mothers. The babies were placed in nurseries along with other children. Observation of these children revealed three phases of the separation process, displayed by all the babies.

BOWLBY’S THREE PHASES OF SEPARATION

1. Anxiety
   
2. Despair
   
3. Detachment
   

First the babies „protested,“ as we have noted, and exhibited great anxiety. They searched for their mothers. If another person tried to comfort them, they were inconsolable. They showed flashes of anger at their mothers. But as time passed and their mothers did not come, they grew resigned and settled into a period of depression. In this phase they were apathetic and withdrawn. They were indifferent to attempts to connect with them emotionally by the staff. If enough time passed, however, the babies came out of this depression and formed other attachments.

If the mother then returned, a baby entered the third phase, detachment. The baby was cold to the mother and did not approach or show interest in her. As time passed, however, the baby’s detachment broke, and the baby became attached to the mother once again. This baby was likely to be clingy and anxious when the mother was out of sight—to have what Bowlby calls „anxious attachment“ to the mother.

Bowlby says this pattern of anxiety, despair, and detachment is universal. It is the response that all young children have to separation from their mothers. Furthermore, the response occurs across the animal kingdom. Not only human infants but infants of all animal species generally display the same pattern. Such universality of behavior strongly suggests a biological predisposition.

You might recognize the similarity between Bowlby’s separation process and what we have called the cycle of abandonment: anxiety, grief, and anger. Some people, like Lindsay, seem born with the capacity to experience this cycle of emotions to an uncommonly strong degree. When a separation occurs, the anxiety, grief, and anger that they feel are so intense that they are unable to soothe themselves, and they feel totally disconnected and desperate. They can distract themselves from the feeling for only a short time. Without the person there, they cannot make themselves feel calm and secure. Such people are extremely sensitive to losing the ones they love. They connect deeply to other people—this is one of their gifts—but they cannot tolerate being alone.

People who are born with a tendency to respond to separation so intensely and who are unable to soothe themselves in the absence of a loved person are probably more likely to develop the Abandonment lifetrap. But this does not mean that everyone who has the biological predisposition develops the lifetrap. It depends in part on the early childhood environment.

If you had stable emotional connections as an infant, particularly to your mother but also to other important people, then even if you are biologically predisposed you may not develop the lifetrap. And certain environments are so unstable or filled with such loss that even if you are not at all predisposed you may develop the lifetrap.

Nevertheless, it is likely that the more a person has the biological predisposition, the less trauma is needed to activate the lifetrap, and we might look in vain through the past for the reasons that justify its intensity.

THE ORIGINS OF THE ABANDONMENT LIFETRAP

1. You may have a biological predisposition to separation anxiety—difficulty being alone.
   
2. A parent died or left home when you were young.
   
3. Your mother was hospitalized or separated from you for a prolonged period of time when you were a child.
   
4. You were raised by nannies or in an institution by a succession of mother figures, or you were sent away to boarding school at a very young age.
   
5. Your mother was unstable. She became depressed, angry, drunk, or in some other way withdrew from you on a regular basis.
   
6. Your parents divorced when you were young or fought so much that you worried the family would fall apart.
   
7. You lost the attention of a parent in a significant way. For example, a brother or sister was born or your parent remarried.
   
8. Your family was excessively close and you were overprotected.
   
9. You never learned to deal with life’s difficulties as a child.
   

Certainly, loss of a parent at an early age is the most dramatic origin of the lifetrap. This was the origin for Abby. Perhaps a parent became ill and had to be away from you for a long time. Perhaps your parents divorced, and one parent moved away and gradually forgot you. Death of a parent, illness, separation, and divorce are all in the same category of important relationships that end in separation. Loss of a parent is particularly devastating in the first years of life. Generally, the earlier the loss, the more vulnerable the child, and the more potent the lifetrap is going to be.

How deeply the loss of a parent affects you depends upon a number of other factors. Of course, the quality of your other intimate connections is important. Abby, for example, had a loving and stable relationship with her mother that helped sustain her and worked against the strength of her lifetrap. Her lifetrap is circumscribed. She reenacts it only in her romantic relationships with men. If you are able to establish a connection with a substitute for the lost parent, such as with a stepparent, that can help as well. And it can help if the lost parent is restored to you in some way, such as when an ill parent recovers and comes home, or separated parents reunite, or an alcoholic parent becomes sober. Many kinds of experiences can help heal your lifetrap. However, the memory of being abandoned still remains. If you have had a large amount of healing experience, it might require dramatic events to trigger your lifetrap, such as the actual loss of a loved person. If you lost a parent at a young age, you are acutely aware of what it can mean to suffer loss, and the prospect of being thrown back into that pain is frightening.

This is the crux of the difference between the Abandonment lifetrap and the Emotional Deprivation lifetrap. With Emotional Deprivation, the parent was always
physically
there, but the quality of the emotional relationship was consistently inadequate. The parents did not know how to love, nurture, and empathize well enough. The connection with parents was
stable, but not close enough.
With Abandonment, the connection once existed and it was
lost.
Or the parent would come and go
unpredictably.
Unfortunately, for some children, their parents were
both
emotionally inadequate and unpredictable. In this environment, which is quite common, children will usually develop both the Emotional Deprivation
and
Abandonment lifetraps.

Aside from the loss of a parent, another origin for Abandonment is the absence of
one
person who consistently serves as a maternal figure for the child. Children whose parents have no time for them, who are raised by a succession of nannies or in a succession of day-care centers, or who are raised in institutions where the staff constantly changes are examples of this origin. Particularly during the first years, the child needs the stable presence of one caretaker. The caretaker does not necessarily have to be the parent. However, if there is constant turnover in who serves as that person, it creates disruption. To the child, it can seem like living in a world of strangers.

The next origin is more subtle. You may have a stable mother figure, but there may be instability in the way she
relates
to you. For example, Patrick’s alcoholic mother could be very loving and connected one moment, and then totally indifferent within a matter of a few hours. And Lindsay’s mother, perhaps reflecting the same biological predisposition as Lindsay herself, was subject to intense mood swings. She was physically there, but the way she related to Lindsay was unpredictable.

LINDSAY: My mother was there for me, or I should say she was present. Sometimes she was happy and excited and interested in me. Other times she was deep in depression, laying in bed all day and not responding, no matter what I did.

This origin reflects the moment-to-moment interactions that pass between mother and child. If these interactions are unstable, then the child can develop the Abandonment lifetrap.

Patrick’s mother was not abusive when she drank. She was indifferent. It is not necessarily abusive parents who give rise to the Abandonment lifetrap. If you have a parent who, because of drug abuse or temper problems, was alternately loving and abusive, you may or may not have developed the Abandonment lifetrap. It depends on whether you experienced the abuse as a loss of emotional connection. To a child who can get little else from a parent, even punishment can be experienced as a connection. Abusive parents can be either connected or withdrawn. This explains why Abuse and Abandonment are not necessarily the same issue.

There are other childhood situations that foster the development of the Abandonment lifetrap. Perhaps your parents were continually fighting, and you felt the family was unstable and might dissolve. Or perhaps your parents divorced and one or both remarried into families with other children. You may have experienced your parent’s involvement with the new family members as an abandonment. Or perhaps your parent withdrew attention and nurturing from you to give it to a younger sibling. Of course, not all new births in a family are traumatic for the older child. These events do not
always
create the lifetrap. It depends upon the degree of disconnection. To create the lifetrap, the events must trigger powerful feelings of abandonment.

Often, a child who feels abandoned by a parent will follow that parent around. The child will shadow the parent, watch the parent, stay near the parent at all times. To an outside observer, it might seem as though the parent and child have a strong connection. In fact, the connection is not strong enough, so the child must always keep the parent in view to make sure the connection is still there. Maintaining the connection with the parent can become the most important thing in the child’s life and can sap the attention the child has for other people in the world.

Finally, as we noted before, the Abandonment lifetrap can arise from an overprotective environment and become mixed with Dependence. The dependent child fears abandonment. This is what happened to Abby with her mother.

ABBY: After my father died, my mother didn’t want me to leave her side. She was afraid something would happen to me, that she would lose me, too. I always wanted to be near my mother. I remember I didn’t want to go to school, and I’d rather be home than out playing with friends.

Abby’s need to be close to her mother undermined her autonomy. She was not free to explore the world and develop confidence in her ability to take care of herself. She stayed dependent on her mother for guidance and direction. In truth, this was probably what her mother wanted as well. Her mother could not face another loss.

Other children respond to the loss of a parent by becoming more autonomous. Since no one is taking care of them, they learn how to take care of themselves.

If you have the Abandonment lifetrap, your romantic relationships are seldom calm and steady. Rather, they often feel like roller coaster rides. This is because you experience the relationship as perpetually on the brink of catastrophe. Lindsay expressed what it was like for her in an image in therapy. She was talking about a fight she had had with Greg, which had ended in typical fashion—with her pleading and him being cold and aloof.