Coping With and Learning From Abandonment Fear in Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has at its center abandonment. Those diagnosed with BPD have a tremendous and often all-consuming fear of abandonment. They feel or perceive the threat of abandonment in many everyday relational situations. Along with this intense fear of abandonment people with BPD have an equal and intense inability to effectively cope emotionally with this fear of abandonment in ways that would be healthier for relationships. Often people with BPD being very triggered by their fears of abandonment are triggered into emotional dysregulation that leaves them struggling with often repeated flooding of feelings from the past that are re-experienced in the here and now.

Darren Walker writes: “As a BPD sufferer I am walking the path to recovery and making real progress. One step forward and three steps back. I am on a backward step right now which I see as integral to my learning. I feel that I am now at a point where I have dealt with lots of issues, and know myself a little better. But I still always stumble with, what for me is the core issue, the anxiety of abandonment.

One step forward and one or two or three or more steps backward is a common experience in the process of recovery from BPD. It might be helpful to think of the process as a spiral one rather than a backward and forward one. It is one of visiting repeatedly a fixed point or center while constantly receding from or approaching it.

At that center, when it comes to BPD, is unresolved abandonment. Each time anyone with BPD approaches that fixed point or center – the fear and feelings of unresolved abandonment trauma – there is the opportunity to learn more and to understand more which is an incremental spiraling around that even with the feelings arising again and/or old behavior can still mean a continued moving forward. It is through the continuous triggered emotions that one has the opportunity to choose to learn to build competency and then mastery of these very emotions over time.

Working to recognize and understand triggers creates new awareness. It sounds like you are well aware of the importance of paying attention to your triggers. Gaining insight and awareness via these triggers coupled with the practice of tolerating the feelings they produce, mindfully and without judgment, active engagement, or reaction from a willing and radically accepting attitude is the work of the process of change that is at the heart of recovery from BPD.

I think that you are working to learn to better cope with the anxiety of abandonment and that what you describe as “stumbling” with it is actually you slowly learning to build some competency with those emotions. That “stumble” as you call it is a very positive experience if you look at it from the point of view of all that it seeks to teach you.

Being triggered back to old patterns that you clearly understand don’t work for you anymore and that still continue to persist is an indicator that there are still aspects of your past experiences of abandonment that need resolving and healing. You continue to re-experience, in the here and now, the feelings that you felt with your BPD mother in the past when you are triggered.

Logical thinking can be helpful of course. It is most helpful after experiencing a trigger and cycling through the emotions. When one is triggered to strong emotions in BPD often one’s ability to employ logic is compromised by the sheer intensity of those emotions. Using deep breathing techniques and slowing yourself down with these triggered emotions is important. It is a very effective way to manage and cope with the symptoms that the distressing feelings of the fear of abandonment create. Breathing, mindfully radically accepting and sitting with your feelings without judging them or actively engaging them is partially going to help you to continue to work at lessening the distress and power of these triggered emotions.

I would suggest that you may doubt how well you are doing based upon how you may be judging yourself for still having the feelings that you do. This self-doubt may well be directly related to past experience in conjunction with attaching to the feelings associated with the schema of your unresolved abandonment and what is for many their abandoned pain. Your uncomfortable and intense feelings when you are triggered by your fear of abandonment really can’t make you feel anything. It is what one thinks that leads to how one feels. It would be important to become more aware of what you are thinking about as you experience what you’ve identified as the experience of being made to feel certain ways based upon what has triggered you. You are re-feeling something from the past that has already happened. Questioning whether you are getting anywhere or not based upon how you feel is understandable but not logical  when one is feeling intense emotion and will not provide a dependable perspective. That coupled with negative self-talk can lead you to feel that you are not making progress when really you are.

I think that it is evident in your question and your awareness of what is triggering you back to these feelings and/or the anxiety of fearing/being abandoned that you really are confronting this issue. If there is a point at all missing it may be a matter of delving a little deeper, in therapy, to actually resolve the outstanding issues being triggered from your experience with your BPD mother in childhood.

It sounds like there is some aspect of that experience with your BPD mother in childhood that you are still connected to and that you continue to re-attach to this schema of abandonment fear and anxiety to actually get in touch with so that you can find more resolution. At the heart of this schema, along with the issues around abandonment likely also are other issues that require your attention. Chief among them, trust issues. Trust of Self and trust of others.

The journey in recovery from BPD is one that centers on the Lost Self In BPD – Need and Search For Identity and one that sees you evolve from false self to authentic self as you work your way out of the legacy of abandonment in BPD. The point that you may well be missing, as you describe it, may well have to do with still not knowing aspects of your Self to the level that is the depth of your abandonment trauma just yet.

It is important to have professional help and support and/or that of a BPD Coach like myself to help you explore this further using techniques and strategies that will give you an increased aware  and mindful understanding that will enable you to both cope better in the here and now and learn to actively engage the choice points that can mean the difference between following a trigger through its usual course and feelings and/or reactions or effectively detaching from the feelings of that trigger in ways that will teach you how to continue to move forward and learn what it is that the re-experiencing of these triggers to abandonment anxiety or pain are seeking to teach you about you – your authentic self.

It is important to be as patient and kind with yourself as you can be. There is a repetition factor in many aspects of recovery from BPD that requires patience and radical acceptance. It is also important to frame your experience positively and to know that while aspects of what you feel, particularly when triggered to feelings of unresolved abandonment trauma, may feel quite negative, distressing, and/or frustrating, to say the least, how you actually feel in those moments isn’t the most reliable indicator of the progress that you continue to make. The more one can stay in the moment, even the triggered moment, one moment at a time, grounding and mindfully radically accepting that the trigger has valuable information for you and is yet another opportunity to practice new ways of coping, the more one can truly begin and/or continue to gain insight that is needed for further healing.

Each respite won in a given triggered moment is a gateway to and for new and positive possibility emotionally in the unfolding journey that is the road to recovery from BPD.

© The BPD Coach A.J. Mahari and Touchstone Life Coaching September 2, 2009 -  All rights reserved.

If you would like to ask the BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, a question, please email her at bpdcoachaj@yahoo.ca with your question. Please also indicate if you would be okay with your name being used if A.J. responds to your question here. If not, please suggest a pseudonym that you would like your question attributed to.

All responses given by The BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, are meant to convey general information and are not intended to be in anyway a specific recommendation or commentary on any personal life situation. Coaching is not therapy. It is also not a replacement for professional therapy. Coaching can be an effective adjunct to professional therapy for those with Borderline Personality Disorder and/or their loved ones.

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