How do I come alongside a loved one who is afraid of abandonment?

When we’re looking to love someone who is tentative in receiving love and care, we want to slow down and seek to understand why they might be struggling. There are many reasons why someone might be wrestling with fear of abandonment. They might have been physically or emotionally abandoned in the past. When they were young, they might have experienced the death or the desertion of a parent. Maybe they experienced parental neglect, or perhaps they were rejected by peers or abandoned by a spouse. There are so many ways that people are hurt; each one is going to require a different approach. So we begin by understanding your loved one and how their personal history has shaped their responses. And people have a variety of responses when they are afraid of being abandoned. Some people do not let other people get close to them. And other people might worry obsessively about their perceived faults or what others are thinking about them. Many strugglers work to please the people in their lives so that they don’t take a chance of being rejected and give people a reason to leave them. This is quite an exhausting way to live. There are just so many expressions of fear of abandonment, like feeling crushed when criticized or overreacting to being slighted, feeling inadequate, jealous, suspicious, or threatened. You might even be clingy, or being the first one to break off a relationship. There’s a lot of things that are going on in a person whose heart is struggling in this way.

So I want to say, having said all that, it’s easy to see how challenging it is to love someone who struggles in this way. And yet, I think God’s call to us is quite simple. We love love in a 1 Corinthians 13 way. We see it here clearly in Scripture that “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” We seek to love someone consistently in the hopes of showing them glimpses of Jesus’s love in these ways. And we repent when we fail, and we stick around and pursue a person when they fail us—in the way that Jesus does when we fail him. And so I think what this passage is highlighting is that we are patient. This is a deeply rooted way of life for a struggler, and it’s going to take them time to adapt to a new way of life. We pray because their wounds are deep, and they need the Lord’s healing, and we invite them to talk about their fears. We listen; we don't judge. We listen, we endure with them, we grieve them, we introduce them again and again to the One who will never leave or abandon them, the only One who knows what God’s abandonment feels like. And we make room for their grief and invite them into healing. And we expect as they feel close to us that they will retreat, attack, or reject us, but we love, we pursue, and we endure.