(M34) Do you ever get rid of the abandonment issues?

6 comments

1. Therapy. Understanding what gives you value or worth (hint: not other people). Healing yourself means removing undue responsibility from your conscious and learning the actions of others are no fault of your own.

   Your fiancée chose you for a reason. Trust that and be yourself. You deserve to be happy!

2. >do you ever really get over that feeling of rampant pessimism internally?

   Yes. But it takes time. You need to have the experience of recovering from enough arguments and mistakes and misunderstandings before you really trust that it’s not all on the verge of blowing up.

3. Given the video game references and the whole issue of having to “learn” how to raise your own kids half the time even though you’ve had these kids for years … I’m going to guess your marital issues did not come out of the blue as some abrupt abandonment from nowhere. I’m going to guess you were told countless times that you weren’t pulling your weight with raising the children and the other things that you were leaving to your ex wife.

   It’s not some big mystery. You won’t be abandoned out of nowhere, you will be told, dozens, hundreds of times if something is a really big problem, before it gets to divorce level.

   You just have to listen and follow through.

4. Look into attachment theory. There are free quizzes online. If you search the personal development school on YouTube you will find a lot of videos. It has been a game changer for me.

5. I have never been in this situation, frankly I have the opposite problem of arrogance rather, but I do have several people in my life that have similar issues to you and here’s what they have told me that has helped them:

   **Journaling** – This is a very straightforward and practical way to help yourself overcome doubts. What you do is at the end of the day, instead of letting the negative thought-spiral remain inside your mind. You write it down. I think even just writing a couple sentences is enough. Like a point for point summary of your fears. It helps to be really specific. Then once you are done, just read your list. What I think you will often find is that your fears sound a little silly and paranoid once you read them on a page or even say them out loud. If it still doesn’t help and you keep panicking, then it could yet help you once some time has passed, it could help you to reflect back on your fears and see how they matched up with reality. Then over time you could perhaps start teaching your emotions what reality is actually like. This is a methodical way of “checking” your negative thoughts. And to start building a sort of “memory” of opposite thinking to your negative thinking. So that over time you will hopefully start to gain a new voice that kicks in everytime the old voices appear, one that speaks more from the mind. The more you can strengthen that voice the more control you will have over your own emotions.

   **Meditation** – A lot of the time our thoughts are responses to our emotions. So if we had some way of bringing our emotions back down (or back up) to neutrality, we could perhaps also stop the negativity spiral before it starts. One way of doing this besides living a healthy and fulfilling life is to count your breaths. Count one on breathing in, and sound out the numbers as clearly as you can in your mind, you can even visualize the number if you’re able to do that, then count on breathing out as well. Rince and repeat. The thought here is that you need to stop thinking about all the negative things or else your emotions will just continue to rise, spawning worse thoughts which again will spawn worse emotions and on and on. The issue is that it’s not really possible to *NOT* think about something, or to stop thinking entirely. The solution is to focus on something else instead. In this case we just use counting, concentrating and being aware of our breathing and visualizing things that aren’t the big bad things we were thinking about before. (also the added oxygen can’t really hurt either).

   This is a trick we can do absolutely whenever, at night, during the day, in traffic, on the phone, while waiting in a waiting room, before a speech, while walking, in bed before we fall asleep, in the middle of a conversation. Absolutely whenever! No one around us will even notice we are doing it.

   If you want to go even further with this you can start counting your breathing when you aren’t panicking or caught in a thought-spiral. Do it when you are really calm and content as well. This way we can try to build a memory of what it feels like to be calm, so that we can visualize that. You can even imagine a warmth moving through your body, as you methodically visit each muscle and intentionally try to relax it and make sure you aren’t straining any muscles. (If you do this often you get less neck, back pain and headaches for free!)

   I think one way that trauma works is that we don’t actually remember the last time the thing happened, instead we sort of remember the last time we remembered that thing. This is on of the ways that I think trauma can grow worse over time.

   But, we can use this to our advantage as well. We can start building a counter-trauma, to make our meditation trick more powerful over time. Sometimes we’re also afraid of being afraid, so the moment we become aware of our feelings, we become even more afraid, because oh no, here we go again with this shit. Having a counter-measure that you can use in the counting your breathing trick can really help with the fear of fear, because now we’re no longer helpless.

   **Acceptance, feelings as advisors** – This might sound counter-intuitive, but it can help, especially for situations where a lot of negative emotions are warranted and not illogical, or for when our chronic negative feelings start becoming better. Sometimes it can help to not fight the negative feelings. But instead focusing on sitting with them and allowing them to be there. If we do something bad, or something bad happens to us, it’s only natural for us to experience negative feelings. Being able to accept that now is a time for sorrow can be a powerful skill to have. How can we be happy, if we are never sad? How would we be able to tell the difference after a while? The fact is that we need contrast in our lives as humans. And what better way to feel like you have mastered your feelings, than to sit through the storm and come out the other end, a little worse for wear, but otherwise unscathed?

   But I must emphasize that if you never see the other side of the storm this is not something you should do. Chronic depression, anxiety and similar things should be fought. Not that you can’t accept those things whilst continuing to fight them. You absolutely can, and I think accepting the reality of having those conditions is vital to effectively fighting them. But I understand that language is complex and I might say something that others will mis-interpret as me saying they should just give up, which is the last thing you should do.

   Another way this could be phrased is the perspective of your feelings as advisors. You can think of your feelings as wise but fickle people in your head giving you advice, much like I’m doing to you now. Sure, it’s great to have purpose, sure, it’s nice to have a goal in life, and making your advisors happy should probably be one of them. But that does not mean you have to listen to your advisors every time, or even at all. You don’t actually have to do any of the things that you feel like doing. You don’t have to make decisions based on your fears. In fact, you should probably treat your feelings as inherently untrustworthy people. People who really need a lot of hand-holding, translation, time and help to be properly understood. Most of the time your feelings will tell you to do what they want rather than what they actually need.

   One thing that I find that helps me immensly is that whenever I want to gauge my happiness with my current situation. I don’t wait for one particular moment and call that my reality. Instead I take small “datapoints” constantly during a week or a month or even longer. Then once I’ve gathered a good spread of how I’ve been feeling the last while of my life, I do an average across all those memories I’ve gathered. And whatever is the average happiness or contentedness with my life, my relationship, my decision or my whatever then that average is what I really truly feel.

   That way I can protect my life from my emotions. I still manage my life through my emotions and towards my happiness, I just don’t let the emotions do the actual running of the show. That does mean that sometimes when someone asks me what I want, I have to answer I don’t know yet, I’ll have to take some time, and I will come back to that person when I do. But most decisions that need to be taken in life aren’t impulsive ones and you usually have more than enough time. This way I’m also not just reacting to life all the time. I’m more proactively affecting the direction my life takes. Though you can never truly fully direct your life wherever you want, there are degrees of control that you can have. This is one way of getting more of that.

   Well, those are three good ways that I know of. Hope any of these help you! Lastly I would like to add that I think you should find a way to communicate all your fears and tribulations to your partner so that they aren’t caught completely off guard if your fears ever were to make you act out in some unsuspected way in the future. But make sure you do so in a way that is as unaccusatory as possible. One way of doing that could be to write a letter about how you feel and the things you fear and why you think you fear them. Write about your past, your present and future and how it makes you feel. Then once you are done just go through the letter and remove or reword anything that could be construed as an attack or accusation against your partner. Reiterate what your partner means to you, the things you like about her and the good things she make you feel etc etc. That way you’ll also counteract any negative connotations that people might have about emotional and vulnerable men, because it will be apparent how on-top of things and mature you are about the whole issue and how prepared you are to handle difficult things in the future. Then of course you simply give her the letter and wait until she is finished reading it. You will seem like the most emotionally intelligent man in existence 😉

   Cheers, and good luck!

6. Others have made lots of good points here, particularly therapy.

   I have a question about the timeline here.

   You divorced in 2021. You dated some people. You got engaged in 2022 and are marrying in 2023. That’s a really tight timeline.

   What’s the rush? Where’s the fire?

   Hurrying into another marriage makes it more likely you will repeat whatever caused the problem last time. I’m not saying the infidelity was your fault – more that you might pick someone else with the same flaws/issues as your ex. Or, hey, maybe you’re making another, different, but still terrible mistake.