Fear of abandonment
in Psychology & Therapy ·
Donna White50 said:I just can't afford to fall apart. And the truth is, I fall apart the second I scratch beneath the surface. And that breakdown looks like this: right now, I'm functional—I handle my life, my job, my kid, my family, I put in the overtime if the job needs it... but the moment I start poking at my emotions, or a bad memory, or even just thinking about them for a second, I turn into a completely different person. I literally crumble. I can't get out of bed, I can't work, I can't take care of my child, my focus goes to zero, I feel empty and drained of any energy, and then the nightmares, the anxiety, and the pure dread kick in...
At 38, with everything going on in my life—especially now with my little one needing me, and after losing my dad without even fully processing it, and with my marriage hitting serious rough patches—I simply cannot allow myself to break down. I can't just say, "whatever, let the emotions and the traumas I've suppressed for 30 years wash over me" and hope the flood clears everything out...
I'd probably end up on heavy meds and stuck in a psych ward...
Right now, I’m basically just operating like a robot—zero emotion, either that or I just completely fall apart. My emotional tank is totally empty... I’m trying so hard not to feel anything at all, which means I’m burying even the good stuff deep down, not just the bad...
The only thing keeping me going is my own brain, honestly. Being smart enough to recognize when things are going south helps, and then I use whatever techniques I can find to chill out and channel the anxiety—it's basically just firefighting at this point...
I know deep down that one day I’m gonna snap like a dry twig and never quite pull myself back together. But what am I supposed to do? Lose my job? Spend years on heavy-duty antidepressants just trying to piece together all these different versions of myself while my kid watches me struggle like this? No way... I just can't...
I was exactly the same way about ten years ago. I couldn't even let my mind drift toward those old childhood traumas or the stuff from my early twenties without immediately spiraling. It was always the same pattern—one minute I'm fine, and the next, I'm drowning in this heavy mix of deep depression and paralyzing anxiety. Just total darkness.
Luckily, I finally figured out how to get the upper hand on it. I had to step back and look at the whole mess objectively—sort of like stepping outside my own skin to view my life from a distance. I forced myself to stare those deepest anxieties and fears right in the face, instead of just running from them. their own I don't know. Maybe it’s just how things go. People always want to point fingers at specific causes, looking for some grand design or a single reason why everything falls apart, but honestly? Most of the time, it's just a mess of coincidences and bad timing. I've spent enough years watching systems crumble to know there isn't always a smoking gun. Sometimes, you just wake up and the world is different, and no amount of digging is going to give you a clean answer that makes sense. It's just one thing after another.I don't care how much pain I was in. I was falling apart inside, honestly, but you couldn't tell. It didn't leak into anything else—not my job, not my social life, nothing. For as long as I spent processing it all and trying to make sense of the mess, I just tried to stay detached. I practiced this weird mental trick where I’d pretend the whole thing was happening to someone else, watching it play out like a spectator. In my head, I’d convince myself that whatever I was going through was actually happening to some stranger out there, usually in an even more brutal way. Just a way to keep my distance. If all those other people managed to weather the storm and stay on their feet, why on earth shouldn't I? 😛
When I’m trying to work through my own fears or deal with some heavy grief, I tend to lean into the darker stuff. It sounds weird to some people, but watching horror movies, blasting death and black metal, or even just reading about true crime and grisly massacres actually helps me process things. I find that leaning into the dark side of the coin—really confronting that grim reality—is what actually helps me get through.
I’ve always been drawn to this kind of thing. Back then—and honestly, even now—it was how I worked through a lot of my old traumas. Things that used to feel like absolute nightmares, the kind of stuff that kept you up tossing and turning. But now? After finally facing them head-on—even if it was just in a virtual sense—everything feels different. true mrakHonestly, all I can say is that they’ve devolved into these totally meaningless little episodes of shallow despair and misery. It's the kind of stuff that's easier to forget than the weight of this laptop sitting on my lap while I type this out.
That’s just how I see it, anyway. Most people lose their minds the second they spot a few drops of blood or hear some old-timer's ghost story about a poltergeist haunting their great-aunt's house back in the late 1800s. Honestly, if they don't want trouble, they shouldn't go messing around with the darkness like that.
Look, facing things head-on isn't about running away—it's actually the exact opposite. facing up to it In every sense of the word—with those demons we all carry around inside us like baggage—it helps. It really does. You just have to find the guts to actually look at things objectively, step outside your own head for a second, and just laugh right in their faces. 😎