What to Do When Your Partner Is Showing Signs of Abandonment Issues

Relationships can be tricky even at the best of times. This is true for romantic, platonic, or family relationships. Many of the most frustrating behaviors in relationships can be signs of abandonment issues, and signals that the person you’re trying to love has past hurt inside of them. If you can find the balance of giving grace to people while building healthier boundaries, even the most insecure of relationships will have a fighting chance to flourish.

The Pattern of Abandonment

Maybe your new relationship started great, but now they’re acting weird, and you’re wondering what shifted. Perhaps that new friend with whom you clicked so well at first has recently started getting clingy and annoying. It has become an issue, and maybe you would cut them off if you didn’t feel so bad about doing that.

For example, maybe you want to build a healthier relationship with your mother, but you’ve realized that means you will have to call her out on a few things. It might help if you understood how her abandonment issues affected her parenting style, and by default, you.

Abandonment trauma breeds cycles of behavior where one damaged person neglects or rejects those closest to them. They, in turn, pass the damage onto others. This can lead to walking out on meaningful relationships without closure, or squeezing the life out of relationships because they’re afraid of being abandoned.

This pattern continues until someone sees the signs of abandonment issues and intervenes. No one is doomed to repeat the past or live as a victim of it. It takes work, gentleness, and wisdom to change course.

We can’t fix people, and we shouldn’t try. We can, however, be a better support for them, be patient with them, build better boundaries, and model healthier attachment in the way we treat them. In the process, we might realize signs of abandonment issues in our own lives and be forced to confront them. Sometimes, for us to love others better, we must work to resolve something in us that has been damaged for a long time.

Common Signs of Abandonment Issues in Relationships

Abandonment trauma and neglect go hand in hand. Many parents are loving and supportive only when they have time to be, but absent and emotionally distant the rest of the time. In this way, they are neglectful without realizing it, and cause abandonment trauma without meaning to.

This results in a person with abandonment trauma being constantly anxious about being left, ignored, or not cared for by the person they care for the most. This can lead to toxic behavior, and a lot of clear signs for those who can see them. Here are some signs to look for.

Things move quickly with them

You’ve just met them, and you don’t even know their middle name or birthday month, but they are already talking about the future. Not only is fast behavior like this disconcerting, but it is a sign of someone terrified of being forgotten and overlooked.

You might be guilty of this yourself. You may feel as if you are constantly holding yourself back from saying, “I love you,” or wanting to define the relationship. This is one of the clearest and most common signs of abandonment issues.

The person feeling this way needs to hear this: You have inherent worth and deserve to be seen, understood, and valued by others. Your experiences in the past of being overlooked and undervalued were unfair, and they caused significant damage. Now you must find your self-worth outside of the way that others treat you, whether they show you love or not.

You’re not “too much,” you’re not unlovable, and your desire to be loved is one of the most valid things. You must sit with these thoughts as often as possible, and let them into your soul as deeply as you can.

They panic over seemingly small things

People with abandonment trauma are overthinkers and worriers, sometimes to the extreme. A subtle shift in mood can cause them to panic, just as an unanswered text message can feel like a dreadful confirmation of someone’s disinterest.

Then they get stuck with another question: do they confront the issue even if it means they will come across as neurotic, or do they repress their anxiety even though it feels overwhelming? Either thing might result in being rejected and abandoned, just as they feared.

There are few things as painful as being undervalued, especially when it happens at a young age. People with abandonment trauma have determined that they are forgettable and that their needs are not a priority for anyone else. That’s an incredibly heavy thought. It’s no wonder that they are hyperaware of every shift and change in the relationship.

The way for them to break out of their anxiety and overthinking is to be reassured and to build their tolerance to discomfort. Be kind when they ask for reassurance because it probably took courage for them to speak up. Encourage them to sit with their discomfort as they wait for replies or question your mood, though. They need consistency and kindness, and they need to develop stronger methods of coping.

They’re either the first person to walk away or they remain in toxic relationships

One of the easiest ways to see signs of abandonment issues in people is to look at their previous relationships and identify any patterns of repeated behavior.

Perhaps they tend to stay in relationships where they are consistently treated poorly, used, and taken for granted. Maybe they always end the relationship before it’s had a chance to develop. The first person is more comfortable being alone, while the second is terrified of being alone, but both show clear signs of abandonment issues. Both of these people need to face their fears.

The person who is afraid of being alone needs to spend more time alone and to develop competence in caring for themselves. They need to find hobbies and interests outside of their relationships, and make friends with people who will be honest with them.

The person who struggles to commit must learn what rejection truly feels like, so they can stop doing it to others. They must also learn the joys, struggles, highs, and lows of being in a committed relationship, whether it’s romantic or not.

Healing Attachment Trauma

When you find yourself in a relationship with someone who has abandonment issues, you have a delicate role to play in their healing. You are not their healer, nor is the relationship. Your role is to provide healthy companionship and support. We all have some healing to do, and we all need company and compassion as we heal.

When you can see the signs of abandonment issues in your loved ones, you will begin to notice your own issues. Loving someone is like looking in the mirror: you see things you never realized were there, and some things you would rather ignore. This is what keeps us humble, grounded, kind, and intentional. No one is perfect, but we’re not meant to be. We’re all on a journey of getting better and loving better, and the rest we figure out as we go.

Confronting your abandonment issues is hard to do alone, and sometimes even harder to do in a relationship. This is where counseling comes in. It’s easier to examine the issue with someone who is not only trained to help but who doesn’t have an attachment to you beyond being compassionate and professional.

Please consult our online catalog of counselors to find someone suitable, or speak with our reception team, who can help.