The Fear of Abandonment
Someone’s hands brought you into the world. Someone’s arms held you and communicated to you that you were safe and cared for.
God designed parents (or our earliest caregivers) to receive us in their hearts and model to us what God is like. Fathers and mothers are given the responsibility to love, nurture, care for, and protect us. And to teach us to know God. A good supply of this provides a base of physical and emotional security in our lives. However, no family is perfect. Inevitably every person on this sinful planet will experience the pain of rejection—the feeling of being unwanted or excluded. Equally painful is the feeling of abandonment.
To be abandoned is to be left or deserted by someone significant in your life—whether physically or emotionally. When this happens as a child it can be traumatic and can instill deep fears of experiencing that pain again. If it’s not dealt with, abandonment issues can recur throughout one’s life, manifesting in a variety of ways. One person may have deep trust issues with people. Another may live in fear of relationships and withdraw. Others tend to be over-sensitive and highly critical of others, taking on behaviors that push people away rather than risk being hurt in the relationship. However the fear of abandonment manifests in one’s life, the end result is loneliness, frustration, and confusion.
Sadly, many people get wrong ideas about God because of pain that they go through in life.
When we experience abandonment from significant people in our life, it programs our view of God in a faulty way to think that he, too, will abandon us.
God did not intend for us to live in fear of abandonment! No matter what has happened in your life, you can be sure that God can heal that pain. And he promises to always be with us. “God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” Hebrews 13:5b
You can be freed from fear of abandonment by learning to trust in the surety of God’s love. God can walk you through a time of grieving what you have lost and give you hope to move forward in a life of knowing him as your heavenly Father who will never leave you or forsake you. If you need Christian counseling in this area, get it! It’s worth the work to break through and experience that God is a true father who will love, nurture, care for, and protect his children—and never walk out on you!
“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”
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