Adult Separation Anxiety - Roy Waidler

Roy Waidler

Adult Separation Anxiety - Roy Waidler

Roy Waidler

2020, Adult Separation Anxiety - Roy Waidler

visibility

…

description

3 pages

link

1 file

Children often have strong anxious feelings when their parents aren't in the immediate vicinity - but most quickly learn that Dad and Mom aren't gone forever. Some children are less fortunate, and when a small child experiences a catastrophic loss of a loved one - parent, sibling - the "lesson" can be totally debilitating if it passes unchecked into adulthood. See also: https://www.academia.edu/41948393/I_Want_My_Mother_A_Quick_Guide_to_Separation_Anxiety_-_Roy_Waidler

Adult Separation Anxiety Roy Waidler I was able to name my biggest psych problem: Separation anxiety. This is common in young children, but most learn quickly that Daddy and Mommy aren't leaving them forever. Then there are people like me, who had a BAD separation incident or ten, and it carried over - as it does for an unspecified number of people in the US - meaning, there were no statistics that I could find. You do not want it. Trust me. I know, through some piecing together of information that I gleaned over the years, how it started. Some months after I was born, my mother had what she would forever after call her "nervous breakdown." In practical terms, my father found her curled up in a fetal position on her bed, and wouldn't respond to anything he said or did. When a doctor was called, he had her shipped off to one of the local institutions. I don't know how long she was gone. It also meant that he had to get my grandmother - my mother's mom - to take care of me. She was a cantankerous old drunk who had little patience with, or love for, small toddlers. I used to ask regularly, probably every day, when Mommy was coming home. One day, I pushed the old girl too hard, and she locked me into a dark bedroom and let me scream myself hoarse. I don't recall what happened next, but it set the pace for a lot of my life. Item: When I was six, I met a girl whom I liked immediately. Her name was Joanie, and after seeing her for every day at school for several months, one morning she came up to me with tears in her eyes. "We're moving away. My father's job is sending him to some place in Ohio." I didn't, couldn't understand - but I freaked. Item: As I grew up, an older neighbor girl whom I adored often took care of me. When I was ten, and she was twenty, she died of a sudden massive heart attack. Item: When I was thirteen, I met another girl and we fell in love. She died a week later when her drunken mother hit a bridge abutment at 65 miles an hour. This one is especially painful for me. The years went by. Every time that I would meet someone about whom I gave a damn, in one way or another, they would leave my life forever. Part of it can be blamed on the apparent emotional clinginess I would have toward someone. Those who have never experienced this tend to see people like myself as manipulative. I knew an older woman, some 25 years my senior when I was eighteen, who had made life miserable for her entire family with wanting to know where they were every second of the day; and when her husband told her that he was filing for divorce, she threw herself down a flight of stairs. She lived, but it didn't endear her to them. She would often comment to anyone who cared to listen, "I can't take being alone." Although I thought she was simply awful, in a way, I knew what she meant. This is what it's like: If there is someone about whom you care, it can quickly get unbearable when they're not around. It quickly devolves into, "I want you here!," just like a little kid would. Naturally, in real life, that's not always possible. Some years ago, almost thirty in fact, I fell for a girl; she went to Minnesota with her family for the Christmas holidays. She was there for ten days, and we talked by phone every night. But one night, she had walked out and disappeared into the streets of the Twin Cities. For a month, with the police actively looking for her, there was no trace of her. All I could think of was the huge hole I felt inside. I was barely able to work, or take care of my kids when I had them. I didn't sleep, and took all kinds of drugs to give me an hour or two of quiet. They didn't help. Picture it: a 41-year-old man, reduced to near-helplessness because he could not stand the separation. Yet......helpless I was not. Entrained, or entranced, by this infantile panic, I felt helpless, and wallowed in my misery - until the day that she miraculously showed up back here in New Jersey. I still experience it sometimes. Only now, I can deal with it. I know when I'm starting to get panicky. And the people in my life are aware that I suffer - and I do - with this, but they know I'm fighting it. Do things. I think that one of the reasons that I'm creative is because making cool things distracts me from it.

Log In

Adult Separation Anxiety - Roy Waidler

Sign up to get access to over 50M papers

Sign up for access to the world's latest research

Related papers

Related papers

Related topics