Heather Bellamy spoke with Psychotherapist Peter Mockford to find out how abandonment can affect relationships and how to deal with it.

Peter Mockford

Many of us have experienced some form of abandonment. Whether it's parents divorcing, a spouse leaving, the death of a loved one, or a friend dropping us, abandonment can leave emotional scars.

Do you now fear abandonment or is it affecting your current relationships, or your mental and emotional health? Heather Bellamy spoke with Psychotherapist Peter Mockford about how a fear of abandonment can affect day to day life and the principles to apply to overcome it.

Heather: What are some of the consequences to our emotional mental health if we have been abandoned?

Peter: First of all we've all been abandoned. The reality is when I was pushed out of the womb, which was nice, warm and comfortable, I experienced abandonment at the very earliest age. I suddenly landed in this world that was probably cold and hostile. The truth is we've all experienced abandonment and we all have routes of abandonment in ourselves one way or another. Some have huge wounds of abandonment though, because they've not been cared for properly when they were very young and even later in life. When you have that, an absolute terror of abandonment gets hard-wired into your system.

Abandonment is one of the worse things when you're young, because if you're abandoned, the great fear that underlies it is that you're going to die. This is because you're totally dependent upon your care giver, your mother or your father, to look after you.

The terror of abandonment is huge and depending on what our early life is like, that terror is mitigated and held by the mother, if she is the main care giver. That security is then absorbed by the child because he or she can see that mum's holding that fear and that's okay. The problem comes when mother doesn't do that, because then the fear of abandonment is left to run riot and that can have a dramatic impact.

Heather: What would some of the symptoms or consequences look like?

Peter: For somebody who is terrified of abandonment, they would be very clingy. They will always be the kind of person who tries to make it right for other people, so the environment is safe. They would put a lot of energy in to try and make it okay and not think much about themselves, because they are so busy trying to make it safe.

Heather: Do different people have different thresholds for abandonment of what would affect them?

Peter: We all have different degrees. It all depends on our upbringing and on our later lives. Some people, the fortunate few, don't really have a fear of abandonment. They've had very secure upbringings and into later life. However often people will experience and have had different degrees of abandonment that can be easily triggered.

Heather: If you have had that secure upbringing, but encounter abandonment when you're an adult, will abandonment always have a consequence in how it affects you?

Peter: Abandonment always has consequences. The difficulty if somebody has undergone a lot of abandonment when they were young, is that it triggers that trauma. So if you lose someone in later life like a spouse, then the risk is that it will trigger that deeper sense of abandonment. That trauma then replays. If somebody has processed the abandonment, due to good parenting, then they will still feel the pain of the abandonment and loss. However, because it doesn't trigger the depth of trauma, they will process it much more quickly and it will cause much less anxiety and fear.

Heather: Can you struggle with the fear of abandonment if you have never been abandoned, but your parents were? Can they pass on that fear of abandonment, even if they have not left you?

Peter: The answer is yes. There was a bit of research done recently that was publicised on the BBC. It stated that trauma, and abandonment counts as trauma, can be passed down genetically.