Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of Abandonment

I suffer from this every day and night, it started in my childhood, became severe 4 years ago, but hit me with intense hours of mental agony and physical pain last year. I didn't even know i had P.T.S.D. as well!

 

P.T.S.D. of Abandonment

"The intense emotional crisis of abandonment can create a trauma severe enough to leave an emotional imprint on individuals’ psychobiological functioning, affecting their future choices and responses to rejection, loss, or disconnection.  Following an abandonment experience in childhood or adulthood, some people develop a sequela of post traumatic symptoms which share sufficient features with post traumatic stress disorder to be considered a subtype of this diagnostic category.

As with other types of post trauma, the symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder of abandonment range from mild to severe.  PTSD of abandonment is a psychobiological condition in which earlier separation traumas interfere with current life.  An earmark of this interference is intrusive anxiety which often manifests as a pervasive feeling of insecurity – a primary source of self sabotage in our primary relationships and in achieving long range goals.  Another earmark is a tendency to compulsively reenact our abandonment scenarios through repetitive patterns, i.e., abandoholism – being attracted to the unavailable.
Another factor of abandonment post trauma is for victims to be plagued with diminished self esteem and heightened vulnerability within social contexts (including the workplace) which intensifies their need to buttress their flagging ego strength with defense mechanisms which can be automatically discharged and whose intention is to protect the narcissistically injured self from further rejection, criticism, or abandonment.  These habituated defenses are often maladaptive to their purpose in that they can create emotional tension and jeopardize our emotional connections.

Victims of abandonment trauma can also have emotional flashbacks that flood us with feelings ranging from mild anxiety to intense panic in response to triggers that we may or may not be conscious of.  Once our abandonment fear is triggered, it can lead to what Daniel Goleman calls emotional hijacking.  During an emotional hijacking, the emotional brain has taken over, leaving its victims feeling a complete loss of control over their own lives, at least momentarily.  If emotional hijacking occurs frequently enough, its chronic emotional excesses can lead to self-depreciation and isolation and give rise to secondary conditions such as chronic depression, anxiety, obsessive thinking, negative narcissism, and addiction.
Post Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disease of the amygdala – the emotional center of the brain responsible for initiating the Fight Flee Freeze response.  In PTSD, the amygdala is set on overdrive to keep us in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance, action-ready to declare a state of emergency should it perceive any threat even vaguely reminiscent of the original trauma. The amygdala, acting as the brain’s warning system, is constantly working to protect (overprotect) us from any possibility of further injury.  In the post trauma related specifically to abandonment, the amygdala scans the environment for potential threats to our attachments to our sense of self.

People with PTSD of abandonment can have heightened emotional responses to abandonment triggers that are often considered insignificant by others. For instance, depending on circumstances, when we feel slighted, criticized, or excluded, it can instigate an emotional hijacking and jeopardize our personal or professional life.

Below, are some of the other issues related to post traumatic stress disorder of abandonment:
30 Characteristics of post traumatic stress disorder of abandonment
This list is meant to be descriptive, rather than exhaustive of the many issues related to the abandonment syndrome.  

1. An intense fear of abandonment that interferes in forming primary relationships in adulthood.
2. Intrusive insecurity that interferes in your social life and goal achievement.
3. Tendency toward self defeating behavior patterns that sabotage your love life, goals, or career.
4. A tendency to repeatedly subject yourself to people or experiences that lead to another loss and another trauma.
5. Intrusive reawakening of old losses; echoes of old feelings of vulnerability and fear which interfere in current experience.
6. Heightened memories of traumatic separations and other events.
7. Conversely, partial or complete memory blocks of childhood traumas.
8. Feelings of emotional detachment, i.e. feeling numb to past losses.
9. Conversely, difficulty letting go of the painful feelings of old rejections and losses.
10. Episodes of self-neglectful or self destructive behavior.
11. Difficulty withstanding (and overreacting to) the customary emotional ups and downs of adult relationships.
12. Difficulty working through the ordinary levels of conflict and disappointment within adult relationships.
13. Extreme sensitivity to perceived rejections, exclusions or criticisms.
14. Emotional pendulum swing between fear of engulfment and fear of abandonment; you alternate between ‘feeling the walls close in’ if someone gets too close and feeling on a precipice of abandonment if you are not sure of the person.
15. Difficulty feeling the affection and other physical comforts offered by a willing partner.
16. Tendency to ‘get turned off’ and ‘lose the connection’ by involuntarily shutting down romantically and/or sexually on a willing partner.
17. Conversely, tendency to feel hopelessly hooked on a partner who is emotionally distancing.
18. Tendency to have emotional hangovers ‘the morning after’ someone has triggered your abandonment feelings.
19. Difficulty naming your feelings or sorting through an emotional fog.
20. Abandophobism – a tendency to avoid close relationships altogether to avoid risk of abandonment.
21. Conversely, a tendency to rush into relationships and clamp on too quickly.
22. Difficulty letting go because you have attached with emotional epoxy, even when you know your partner is no longer able to fulfill your needs.
23. An excessive need for control, whether it’s about the need to control others’ behavior and thoughts, or about being excessively self-controlled; a need to have everything perfect and done your way.
24. Conversely, a tendency to create chaos by avoiding responsibility, procrastinating, giving up control to others, and feeling out of control.
25. Tendency to have unrealistic expectations and heightened reactivity toward others such that it creates conflict and burns bridges to your social connections.
26. People-pleasing – excessive need for acceptance or approval.
27. Co-dependency issues in which you give too much of yourself to others and feel you don’t get enough back.
28. Tendency to act impulsively without being able to put the brakes on, even when you are aware of the negative consequences.
29. Tendency toward unpredictable outbursts of anger.
30. Conversely, tendency to under-react to anger out of fear of breaking the connection and your extreme aversion to ‘not being liked’."

Today’s Trauma

During the initial stage of abandonment called shattering, the word trauma is used frequently.  In fact, feeling abandoned by one’s primary love object is in and of itself a trauma, not post trauma.  It is a legitimate initial trauma.

When faced with an abandonment crisis, whether it is the result of a recent breakup or an accumulation of abandonment wounds stemming from cyclical past losses and heartbreaks, or whether it stems from loss of a job, loss of a friend, or loss of one’s home or health, people describe feeling the rug pulled out from beneath them and shattering their dreams as traumatic.

In the throes of abandonment trauma, we experience many of the same symptoms as victims of other types of trauma such as rape or physical attack. A difference is that abandonment is not always recognized as a legitimate form of trauma, yet the shock, numbing, disorientation, outbursts of anger, sleep and appetite disturbance, agitation, increased risk-taking, etc. are all symptoms of trauma.  Another difference is that abandonment is not a single event like a train crash, but a sustained type of trauma whose stress builds momentum as we grapple with the ongoing rigors of the abandonment grief process.

What goes into making abandonment a traumatizing event?

The emotional volcano of abandonment unleashes a torrent of primal emotions that overwhelm us.  Molten lava spews from the rock bottom of our emotional core ripping up through our freshly opened abandonment wound.  No wonder the event is traumatizing!  Technically speaking, being rejected by one’s love object triggers primal abandonment fear – the fear of being left by one’s source of vital sustenance.

Abandonment, our first fear, is in response to being expelled from our mother’s womb.  This sensation is stored in the amygdala – the site of emotional memory responsible for conditioning the brain’s fight/freeze/flight response.  The emotional memory is intact enough at or before birth to lay down traces of the feelings and sensations of birth trauma as well as some prenatal antecedents. These primitive feelings can be reawakened by later events, especially those reminiscent of unwanted or abrupt separations from our attachments.

In adult abandonment, these primitive sensations become activated, creating terror and panic.  As the old infantile urgencies emerge into the current crisis, it precipitates a symbiotic regression in which we feel unable to survive without our loved one.  We become suffused with the intense stress of helplessness, especially as we try to compel our loved one to return but remain unsuccessful in doing so. This failure to compel can cause us to judge ourselves as having experiencing this ‘limited capacity’ is sufficiently traumatic to produce a fault line in the psyche which renders us more vulnerable to break down emotionally when faced with problems in our relationships.

Another trauma-inducing factor is the stress of losing our background object. A background object is someone on whom we have come to rely for myriad needs that we take for granted, such as the need to belong.  We don’t realize how important our background object is to our sense of security until the object is gone.  Unbeknownst to us, the relationship served as a mutual regulatory system, not only emotionally, but physically.  As members of a couple, we became external regulators for one another. Multiple psychobiological systems helped to maintain each other’s equilibrium. We were attuned on many levels: our pupils dilated in synchrony, we echoed one another’s speech patterns, movements, and even cardiac and EEG rhythms.

As the emotional and bio-physiological effects mount, the stressful process is heightened by the knowledge that it was not we, but our partner who chose withdraw from the bond, leaving us to suffer intense emotional responses that are easy to misinterpret as evidence of being weak and lacking attachment-worthiness.

Signs of Abandonment’s Current Traumatic Stress    

When individuals are in the shattering phase of abandonment trauma, it is within normal range for them to have the following responses: shock and disorientation, depersonalization, de-realization, emotional collapse and despair, collapse of self confidence, panic, symbiotic regression, disordered sleep, separation anxiety especially upon awakening, dysregulation/disorganization, reality distortion, self neglectful behaviors, increased use of substances, spurts of explosive rage, withdrawal, fatigue, agitation, and suicidal ideations.
As the trauma cycle progresses, individuals go on to feel depressed, agitated, and emotionally labile. They experience intense yearning for the lost object, diminished self esteem, pervasive separation anxiety, obsessive thoughts about the circumstances of the breakup and the possibilities for reuniting, feelings of neediness, desperation, and overreliance on others alternating with periods of self isolation."