Thank you very much @subliminalguy. I actually figured this feeling out and this is very core. When feelings like this come up, which isn’t that common these days, I ask “when did I feel like this last?”.
I do have a long history of abandonment, but some of it is just life, not really abandonment. People move. You move and lose friends. As you get older people die. I experienced the death of a loved one when I was quite young. And then right afterwards my family moved me to a completely different State.
Then a month later my Mom and her family kicked out my father and then she divorced him. Then a month later my Mom went to work and I never really saw her for almost a year. I had to make new friends at school obviously, so I “lost my old friends”. All of this in just a few months. I didn’t have a sibling to talk to, to try and figure things out. I was an only child until I was 12.
Jump forward to today. I lost the love of my life instantly due to a drunk driver (the other person, not my partner) a couple years ago. My best friend has stage 4 cancer. I think the one that’s kind of hitting home is a close friend of mine just lost her mother. My Mom is knocking on the door of being 80. Deep down, I have that same feeling I had when I was a little boy and everything hit at once.
I’m not afraid of being alone. Hell, I did just fine. But I don’t like the abandonment. Really, a lot of it is perceived abandonment, and I know it. But it’s coming from those feelings as a little boy that just never got healed. I survived and moved on and even thrived at times.
But I don’t like the feeling of perceived abandonment. That’s the fear. That’s what I’m afraid of. l don’t want to feel the unresolved fear of abandonment I had as a little boy during that time.