- Why do I always end up with bad relationships?
I will now give an example of what can happen in a relationship when you have an abandonment schema:
You have seen a gorgeous person on your evening and there has been an instant attraction from both sides (10 on a scale fron 1-10). You start a passionate relationship and you can´t think about anything else. A big problem though that you try not to think about is that your partner is married and she/he is only available in an unpredictable way. You can get a call anytime and a suggestion about where to meet and this makes it hard for you plan your life. But since you feel madly in love you cancel other things that you have planned when your partner calls and after a while you start making less plans with people so that you can be available whenever your partner calls. You feel helplessly in love and even though you might know somewhere in the back of your head that this isn´t good for you, you feel helpless and you can also get angry at people who try to tell you that this person isn´t good for your needs and that he/she will probably not leave his/her wife/husband.
If you continue to keep on like this for a while you´ll probably feel anxiety, anger, despair most of the time and the longer this keeps on going while you´re hoping for your partner to divorce, the the worse you´ll feel. If you have an abandonment schema you´ll probalby have a hard time pulling back from a relationship like this. Feeling that you partner is available sometimes but never knowing when is probably a situation something that you in some way are used to from your childhood. You feel great sometimes but if you analyze how often it will probably be around 5-10 percent of the time. The rest of the time will be filled with negative feelings. You feel like you don´t know if you´ll be abandoned or not but you think that if you endure some more time you´ll finally be together with your partner.
In the end (if your partner doesn´t live his/her h usband/wife, there is a risk that you´ll continue like this until you feel so that you are so overfilled with anxiety so that you can hardly function. When you are out from a relationship like described above it is not unusual to think ”relationships are not for me and I´m better off alone”. This can go on until you feel you are strong again and then it´s not unusual to repeat the whole procedure with someone else.
This was an example of how the abandonment schema can put you in a viscious circle, there are more ways to react in a relationship out of having this schema. If you recognize yourself in what I have described above, the good news is that there is a way to get out of the vicious circle. I will write more about that soon.
To be continued…