In my youth I had a slew of relationships that “fell apart” after two or three months. Almost every one of those relationships fell apart because people couldn’t tolerate my neediness and constant demand on them to make me feel loved and secure.
Deeply addicted to getting others to make me feel better, if only through a phone call or even a momentary glance, I failed to “guard my heart” and set myself up for even more pain.
I believed my feelings of safety, worth, and love had to come from someone else. You can only imagine the inner dialogue that was going on in my head as I in a very frenetic way sought that nurture.
I eventually realized that this sense of panic was being caused by the lack of nurture of my childhood, which brought about my own self-abandonment. I constantly abandoned myself by judging myself, ignoring my feelings that came from my self-judgments and then handing responsibility to others to make me feel better. When others didn’t come through I turned to pornography or food to soothe me. I lived with that anxiety, that sense of panic, because I had never developed that “sense of well-being” that comes from early attachment (nurture) with my mom.
The result was years of tears, anger, constantly pulling on others to get love.