Dear Tony:

I decided to come back to your thread a month and a half after my last post to you, to share with you what I learned recently about separation anxiety from recent communication with other members, and to look further into it. If you are feeling good right now and you don’t want to lose that good feeling sooner than you have to, please postpone the reading to a later time. Of course, you always have the option to not read at all what is to follow.

What I learned recently is that children who experience intense separation anxiety in regard to a parent (or parents), forget over time how badly it felt, memory becomes vague and limited, the vividness is gone.. we forget. Fast forward, when we experience that same intensity of separation anxiety as teenagers and adults, in regard to a girlfriend/ boyfriend- we imagine that it is the first time we felt this way.

But this forgetting of the separation anxiety in childhood is not really forgetting: as adults we keep re-experiencing the same separation anxiety over and over again. The way to stop re-experiencing it is to.. remember more/ process what happened, so to lessen the fear that took hold in us, so that there is less of that fear to spill into our current adult lives.

Even as adults, we forget our earlier adult experience of separation anxiety. In Nov 2015, at 29 years old, you wrote: “Up until a week ago, I was fine, confident, happy go lucky. All of a sudden.. I now find myself feeling so insecure, helpless and weak… It is funny thinking about how confident I was 1 week ago, and then somehow crumbled”- having communicated with you for a while, I believe that the “so insecure, helpless and weak” has been the predominant emotional experience you had as a child, which you’ve been re-experiencing as an adult, and that the “fine, confident, happy go lucky” emotional experiences have been moments in time, refreshing break from the ongoing anxiety.

We forget: our memory of our own emotional experience of a week ago is not reliable. Our memories of how we felt as children is significantly unreliable.

“It is funny thinking about how confident I was 1 week ago, and then somehow have crumbles and destructed by thoughts generated by myself in my own head”- the emotional memory of the years of childhood is stored in our brains and it gets activated repeatedly: we re-experience our childhood.

Still Nov 2015: “Three and a half years ago, I went through a break up with my then girlfriend… it really broke me in a way that I had only heard of from others.. I felt I was destroyed overnight… It hurt in a way I didn’t really know existed”- you forgot that you already “heard” that pain, felt it, knew it in a very personal way, as a child.

Continued quote: “I was mentally strained and anxious about basically everything. Months went by and I slowly got back to my feet… After about 1.5-2 years I was pretty much reinvented.. I had the closure and I moved on”- you moved on from that relationship, but not from the separation anxiety of childhood. The childhood emotional experience will be re-activated in small ways every day, and less frequently- in bigger ways.

March 2016, you shared regarding a new relationship: “about 3 weeks ago, we finally called it to an end.. And so yesterday, I turned 30. I’m a teacher and so it was a great day at school with gifts, well wishes and just awesome vibes from students, colleagues, friends and family. But later in the day, I suddenly broke down when I was alone. I suddenly felt so empty  and hollow. Sure I had all these people around me but all of a sudden, what am I living for? Achieving? I’m so alone! It was overwhelming. As if my break up left me all alone.. I suddenly felt so alone”-

– notice that you used the qualifier suddenly three times in the quote above: you were surprised, not understanding that at some time on the day of your 30th birthday, you were no longer experiencing the here-and-now, but the there-and-then: your childhood separation anxiety.

Let’s look further into that childhood experience of separation anxiety: “broke down.. empty and hollow.. so alone!.. overwhelming.. all alone.. so alone”- this so-alone experience is not about an adult having some time alone in the day, there is no tragedy in that. This so-alone experience is about a child believing that alone, separated from his mother, he is in danger of death.

There is no tragedy and no danger when an adult is alone, he/ she can fend for himself, seek shelter, find food..  but for a young child,  to be left alone is a death sentence because he cannot fend for himself, cannot/ does not know how to find shelter and food.

Whether it is a young child separated from his parent or a young deer or a young coyote finding himself alone, his parent/ social group gone- nature instills in the child an intense, life-or-death fear so to motivate the child to look for his parent with all his focus, all his strength..  the parent is his only chance to live.

Back to the quote: “I never realised how I’ve become so desperate… I know I should keep focusing on my life and move forward, to not fear this ‘forever alone'”- nature instills in the young, separated (or about to be separated) a fear that feels like it will last forever because nature wants the young animal to be fully  and desperately motivated to find his parent. That “forever alone” feels so intensely terrible for the child, that he will do anything and everything possible to find the parent he lost.

What I learned recently is that a child can experience this intense separation anxiety when his parent never really left him. All it takes is an ongoing threat of losing the parent. If after all is said and done the parent is still there.. it doesn’t retroactively resolve the anxiety, not when the threat of losing the parent lasted long enough to take hold.

At soon to be 35, you shared on Jan 2021 in regard to your mother: “a few years back, when she had a straight forward infection that needed a bit of treatment. A case I’ve seen numerous times as a volunteer paramedic, I knew exactly what would happen and how it would be treated. Yet, I completely lost myself. I freaked out, I panicked, I asked irrational questions I knew the answers to myself, and I could not stop obsessing about it until my mother had recovered”-

– as a paramedic, when you encounter a stranger who suffers from infection.. it is a stranger, not someone you are emotionally attached to. If that person dies from his or her infection, your life is not in danger. But if your mother dies from infection, the child in you believes that your life without your mother is in danger, and he freaks out, panicking.

“when my mother would go out grocery shopping without me, I’d often wait in the lounge looking outside waiting for her to come home”- your separation anxiety took hold by the time you were waiting for her to come home from shopping, your heart beating fast, your breathing shallow, feeling light headed, scared.

“I remember when my grandpa was sick… I realised my mother had secretly flown back without me. She was gone for a month, and being a mummy’s boy, that certainly was extremely challenging”- it must have been a torture of a month, a month that felt like forever. Interesting how we use euphemisms, such as mummy’s boy, to substitute for accurate description, such as a boy scared to death without his mother.

Separation anxiety in childhood is about an ongoing fear, and fear is the most powerful of all emotions. When it takes hold in childhood, when it is Formed into our brains during our childhoods, aka our Formative Years, it gets activated during adulthood again and again in different contexts and to different extents. But there is hope because accessing and processing that emotional memory disarms it over time, and we can gradually relax into the here-and-now, no longer held hostage by the there-and-then.

anita

Dear Tony:

You are welcome. Do take your time re-reading and considering my previous post. For now, I have a couple of comments regarding your reply:

(1) “perhaps some childhood mental trauma. Perhaps it wasn’t even trauma”- we tend to think of trauma as something involving blood and gore, and you have such images I imagine, being a volunteer paramedic, and/ or watching certain TV shows and genres of movies. But young children get traumatized every day while there is no blood or broken bones to indicate the trauma. Young children feel an intense, uncompromising attachment to their parents, and a threat of permanent separation from a parent, a threat that does not end soon enough, is a trauma for a child.

(2) “being able to see that pattern, is definitely a leap forward. Not saying that it won’t happen again”- it will happen again for sure. Being able to see/ becoming aware does not undo the physical, neuro-chemical processes involved in that emotional memory, the memory that gets activated in small and big ways. Awareness is only a beginning in the process of healing.

anita

Dear Tony:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words. I am glad to read that you will stay in touch!

anita