Sometimes, all of us can meet someone we fall in love with and after a while we realize that this person isn´t good for us. The reasons might be for example that the person isn´t totally available beause he/she is married (with a person, work, or some other addiction), live abroad, change moods often etc. The point is that the person in unavailbale and give us a feeling that we are on the verge on being left. We move between feeling hope and happiness to feeling grief and hopelessness. Since the psyche hates feeling out of control this situation is extremely draining. Now, if we comes from a background where we have had parents with whom we have formed a secure attachment (I will talk more abou attachment later), we probably won´t put up with this situation for too long, simply because we have learned to take care of our needs and be nice to ourselves.
But if we have had a background where we have felt some kind of abandonment (a parent died, the primary caretaker (often the mother), was hospitalized often, the parent had some kind of addiction and changed moods often or simply had big mood swings that were unpredictable , the parent divorced or had big fights, etc.), in some cases we form an abandonmnet schema which makes us either choose relationships that are destructive for us or we take the roll as being the ”leavers” in relationships and we are haunted by the feeling that we will always be lonely.
If wyou find ourselves in a destructive relationship once, it might be a coincidence, but if you look back and realize that there is a pattern, yu might check if you have a abandnoment schema. A schema means your unconscious innermost thoughts you have about yourself. If those thoughts are (I will be abandoned and I will always be lonely), you often create a self fulfilling prophesy. Remember that I have earlier sais that the psyche acts on what feels least painful at the moment and those stategies often form a vicious circle which can leads to a selffulfilling prophesy.
Jeffrey Young, the founder of Schema focused therapy ( it is like cognitive behavior therapy with more focus on the background and how the destructive patterns that affect our lives here and now) were formed, have found different schemas that we form depending on our background and our temeperament. He describes them with Janet Klosko in their fantastic book ”Reinventing your life”, which I warmly recommend you to read. I think it is one of the best psychology books that have been written.
Young means that the abandnoment schema is preverbal (you got it it before you could talk, which psychologically means that you had even less control over the situation) and that is the reason why this is one of the schemas that leads to paralyzing anxiety. To understand what kind of anxiety you can think of how a child react in a crowd when it loses sight of its parents.
To be continued….