Day 1: Fear of Abandonment - When Connection Feels Fragile.

This post is part of a 10-day series exploring the nine criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), followed by my personal diagnosis story. These posts are educational in nature and rooted in lived experience - they are not intended as tools for self-diagnosis.

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There’s a kind of fear that doesn’t always look like fear.

It might look like texting someone three times in a row, even though they haven’t even read the first message.

It might look like pulling away before they can leave you first.

It might look like over-apologizing, over-explaining, over-giving.

It might look like anger, silence, or a sudden goodbye. Not because you don’t care, but because you care so much it hurts.

This is what the DSM calls “frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.”

But that phrase doesn’t capture the ache of it. The way your body braces for loss before it even happens. The way your mind fills in gaps with worst-case scenarios. the way you try to become smaller, quieter, easier…. or louder, needier, harder to ignore… just to keep someone close.

For many people with BPD, this fear isn’t just about being alone.

It’s about being left.

It’s about the terror that love is conditional. That if you’re too much, or not enough, or just you, they’ll go.

And sometimes they do.

What This Looks Like For Me

I didn’t know I was afraid of abandonment. I thought I was just “clingy". Or “too sensitive”. Or “bad at relationships”. I thought I was the problem.

I didn’t realize that my nervous system was constantly scanning for signs of rejection. That I was interpreting silence as punishment. That I was trying to preempt heartbreak by either chasing people or cutting them off.

It wasn’t until therapy, and later, diagnosis, that I learned this was a pattern, not a personal failure. That my fear had roots. That I wasn’t broken. I was trying to survive.

What Helped (Kinda)

• Naming it. Just having language for “fear of abandonment” changed everything. It gave me a frame. A way to pause and ask, “Is this fear real, or is it old?”

• Safe relationships. People who stayed. Who didn’t punish me for needing reassurance. Who didn’t leave when I panicked.

  • This didn’t come easily. It took me 27 years to learn how not to fully mask around or mirror people. It’s still a struggle, but I do have a select few that I don’t feel like I have to.

• Therapy. Between the actual diagnosis, talking through things, and the introduction to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), it’s all made a substantial difference.

• Faith. The reminder that I am never truly alone. That I am held, even when I feel unlovable.

If You Relate

You’re not too much.

You’re not broken.

You’re not unworthy of love just because you fear losing it.

There’s a reason your heart learned to brace for goodbye.

There’s also hope that it can learn to rest.