Abandonment

Experiencing repeated abandonment across multiple relationships

Not one person who left but a pattern of people leaving. Enough times that you started to expect it. Enough times that you began organizing your relationships around the certainty that people would eventually go. The wound that teaches you not to let anyone too close.

When enough people leave, leaving stops feeling like events and starts feeling like a law of nature. You may guard against closeness, test people, or exit first to control the ending. Those strategies made sense given the evidence. New evidence takes time to accumulate, and people who stay are how it accumulates.

What can follow an experience like this

No two people carry the same experience the same way. These are some of the effects that people with this experience often describe. Having some of them, all of them, or none of them says nothing about how real what happened to you was.

Anxious attachment Holding on hard. C-PTSD When trauma happened repeatedly, over a long time, or at the hands of people who were supposed to care for you, the effects go deeper than a single event. Trust issues Trust that was broken, repeatedly, by people who were supposed to be safe. Depression Not just sadness. Shame Not guilt about something you did. Trauma reenactment The relationship that looks different at the start but ends up in the same place. Fear of being abandoned Not just not wanting people to leave. Loneliness This is different from pulling away.

Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and nothing here decides what is wrong with you, because nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. This page exists so that when you are ready, you can find people who understand it from the inside.

You do not have to carry this alone.

Bridge of Hope Recovery is a free, anonymous, peer-led fellowship for trauma survivors. Meetings run throughout the week by phone, by video, and in person. No cost, no waitlist, no one asking for your real name.

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