Fear of Abandonment

That single finding explains why the language people reach for is the language of injury, and why abandonment has been a staple of poetry and literature since ancient times. The system processing the event is the one that processes damage.

What counts as abandonment

Makino and colleagues lay out a range far wider than the word implies. Being turned down by somebody. Watching a friendship end. Being frozen out by a group, or cut off from family. Or nothing more than going unnoticed in a passing conversation.

Their second observation is the one worth carrying. People react strongly when they perceive rejection, and a great deal of human behaviour is influenced by the desire to avoid it. The fear operates in advance and continuously, on people who are not currently being rejected by anybody.

The state itself is described as feeling undesired, left behind, insecure or discarded, cut off from a crucial source of sustenance, arriving either suddenly or by erosion.

Why the perception matters more than the event

Perception of rejection can have a lasting effect on how a person acts, and can impair the ability to establish and maintain close relationships.

The consequences named run in both directions: relationship avoidance and relationship dependence, alongside irrational beliefs and depressive symptoms. Both responses follow from the same fear and neither looks like the other from outside, which is why avoidance and clinging appear in the same literature.

What the rat pup studies showed

Separation stress has been studied extensively in psychology and neurobiology, and is described as a universal response to separation across the animal world.

The experimental design is simple. Rat pups are separated from their mothers for a period, and their distress vocalisations and stress hormones are measured. What matters is what happens later: as those rats mature, their reactive behaviours and stress hormones are re-examined and shown to bear a striking resemblance to the depression, anxiety, avoidance behaviours and self-defeated posture displayed by humans known to have suffered earlier separation trauma.

That is a mechanism demonstrated across species, and it is a stronger form of evidence than most entries in this catalogue can offer.

What the human version adds

Because of the neocortical component of human functioning, people are slow to grasp the potential repercussions of losing a primary relationship. The future stops being legible, and the sense that arrives with that is of a hole with no way up out of it.

The further items on the list are recognisable enough to be uncomfortable:

• being unusually upset at parting from somebody, or from an animal, which is where the childhood version, Separation Anxiety Disorder, begins
• worrying past all proportion that harm will come to a person left on their own
• dreading solitude
• feeling it in the body before a separation that has been scheduled
• needing, at every hour, to know where a partner or a family member is

Why people blame themselves for being left

Where the loss is caused by the other person's voluntary withdrawal, the common response is to feel unworthy of love. People blame the rejection on themselves.

That is the most consequential sentence here, because it converts an event into a verdict. Somebody left, and the person left behind concludes something about their own value rather than about the departure.

Why abandonment is not a diagnosis

Maladaptive thoughts and behaviours of this kind are sometimes present in the context of psychological disorders, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, depression and anxiety disorders among them.

And not everybody who experiences emotional abandonment meets criteria for any of them. Such people may function within normal limits despite the emotional difficulty, and the material states that these feelings should be considered by a mental health professional only alongside all available information and the diagnostic criteria before conclusions are drawn about anyone's mental health.

That caution is worth reproducing exactly, because abandonment language circulates online attached to personality disorder labels, and the source it derives from says explicitly that the experience is not a diagnosis.