Abandonment syndrome (issues): how many times as children did we suffer from missing someone, perhaps our mother leaving home to go to work?

A great deal of research has shown that such cases can also have repercussions as adults, creating the scaffolding for what is known as the abandonment syndrome.

What is Abandonment Syndrome?

Abandonment syndrome refers to a set of uncomfortable feelings – from simple annoyance to anguish and depression – brought about by real abandonment, betrayal of affection or emotional deficiencies.

Following the great Jean Piaget – whose books invade my home thanks to my father who is a professor of pedagogy – everything could stem from something he called the ‘permanence of the object’.

At a very early age, the child realises that it is not self-sufficient and that it is dependent for everything on the (adult) object, which both exists and does not exist. In other words, when the child can perceive the mother’s presence, he is reassured because he has learnt that she takes care of him. If, however, the mother ‘disappears’, that is, moves out of the child’s perception, then crisis, anguish, arises and the child cries, until either he is reassured by the mother, or he realises that the person remains even if he does not see or hear her; that is, until he overcomes one of the early childhood phases and enters the next.

This great fear probably remains in the memory, and the emotions may awaken even as adults, when the object, towards which an emotional dependence has been structured, ‘disappears’.

It is interesting to recall that elderly people abandoned to themselves (and in this time of economic and social crisis they are increasing exponentially) and mother-girls abandoned by their family of origin may also suffer from this syndrome.

What are the causes of abandonment syndrome?

The determining causes are dramatic events such as the death of one of the parents, violent family quarrels, lack of care, coldness of the mother.

But also events that are actually normal (but experienced as highly traumatic by the subject) can lead to the symptoms of the syndrome, such as the birth of a baby brother.

Such events bring about two conditions in the subject:

• the incomplete building of self-confidence;
• the more or less conscious conviction that it is only by delegating responsibilities and problems to another that one can get by, which creates in the subject the perception that it is right and preferable to depend on others to overcome life’s adversities.

What are the symptoms of abandonment syndrome?

Children suffering from this syndrome may present psychomotor delays, ease of becoming ill, abulia (inability to make decisions and carry out actions), periodic bouts of anxiety, jealousy and aggression.

More generally, this syndrome manifests itself with emotions and behaviour that can range from simple discomfort to the blackest despair, to feeling deprived of a part of oneself, to losing the pleasure of living: without a certain person who has abandoned him or her, the subject reports that his or her life no longer has any meaning.

What can it lead to?

Abandonment syndrome usually induces three types of behaviour: constructive, expectant, or – in the worst case – destructive (self and/or hetero); it depends on how it manifests itself.

In the most severe cases abandonment syndrome can lead to depression and this, unfortunately, can lead to suicidal thoughts and suicide.

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Source:

Medicina Online