The Feeling of Abandonment and Self-Destructive Tendencies
The great scientist Isaac Newton, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and the film star Marilyn Monroe all experienced abandonment in early childhood, and were tormented all their lives by a profound sense of abandonment. Newton eventually developed schizophrenia; Schopenhauer had a very typical bipolar tendency; and Marilyn Monroe suffered deeply from borderline personality disorder. The underlying life logic they shared was: I will eventually be abandoned. It was like a curse—and a self-curse—their lives were wretched, and they were abandoned again and again.
Newton was abandoned by his mother at birth, which left him pathologically reclusive for life. Schopenhauer's mother was enormously talented but deeply disliked Schopenhauer, and once even kicked him downstairs. Marilyn Monroe was also an abandoned child, constantly shuffled among caregivers in childhood; as an adult she constantly changed romantic partners and ultimately committed suicide at the prime age of thirty-six.
As a boy Newton described his own psychology in a poem: "The secular crown—I spurn it as the dust beneath my feet; it is heavy, and at best is mere emptiness. But now I gladly welcome a crown of thorns; though it pricks, the taste is chiefly sweet. I see the crown of glory set before me, filled with blessedness, endless and without bound."
Newton avoided emotional connections with others and shifted his attention onto his scientific work; he used his scientific achievements to soothe his boundless sense of emptiness. But although he achieved astonishing things, he was unhappy all his life, because the sense of abandonment left him unable to trust love between people, and so he remained single. In his old age Newton turned to religion and placed his emotions in God.
Schopenhauer was the famous pessimist philosopher. One of his classic sayings, beloved of pessimists, is: "The best love parents can give their children is not to bring them into this world." Though Schopenhauer's achievements were outstanding, he felt inferior and was in pain all his life; he was addicted to being praised and desperately needed others' approval. In his later years Schopenhauer cut out all the articles in newspapers and magazines that praised him, pasted them together, and read them over and over to fill the bottomless inferiority and emptiness in his heart.
Marilyn Monroe, for her part, constantly sought new lovers, maintaining sexual relationships with multiple partners at once; she had affairs with the Kennedy brothers. She had an almost superhuman hunger to be loved, and she never seemed able to be satisfied. Although she reaped enormous professional success and had countless lovers, in the end she still could not escape the boundless sense of emptiness and chose suicide.
In a sense, Newton, Schopenhauer and Marilyn Monroe all had self-destructive tendencies. Their deeply rooted sense of abandonment led them to live all their lives in the conviction that they would eventually be abandoned, making it hard for them to be self-sufficient and whole like people who were loved from childhood. They could not form normal emotional bonds with others; having been abandoned in early childhood, they found it hard to trust emotional bonds between people for the rest of their lives. They were always questioning others' sincerity toward them and lived in constant dread. Even when they received love, they deeply doubted whether it could last.
On the other hand, they craved love and being loved so intensely. They radiated an extraordinary warmth, though this warmth was always short-lived, gorgeous and fleeting like an epiphyllum. When people first drew near, they were easily moved by this warmth; but as the relationship deepened, the inner sense of abandonment and fear was activated, and they panicked, terrified of being abandoned again. Abandonment was such a searing life memory for them that, whenever a relationship began to settle into the ordinary, they fled quickly, abandoning the other first. They were afraid of sinking once more into the pain of abandonment; that trauma was so unbearable they did not want to experience it again.
In the long course of human history, episodes of abandoning and being abandoned have been countless. Even today there are innumerable abandoned infants. Caregivers die or lose their ability to work because of war, disease or accident; parents divorce and families break apart, destroying the two-parent care structure that should exist; after industrialization, parents are forced to separate from young children because of work; or caregivers themselves have various physical or mental illnesses and cannot give infants proper care; the deeply entrenched preference for sons over daughters in a society's traditional culture...
All of these have objectively produced a vast number of abandonment events, inflicting wounds on the infant heart that are hard to heal, and leaving the person anxious, insecure, inferior and depressed for life. They form traumatic thought patterns from which it is hard to escape on their own.
Under excessive stress people easily develop a defeatist mindset, choosing all kinds of self-destructive behaviors that ruin their lives and health, even their very lives. Even a completely normal person, under enormous life pressure, will occasionally have the fleeting thought that it would be better just to die. People tormented by a sense of abandonment have this kind of thought from childhood; they cannot experience the pleasure of life.
Even if they achieve great things in life, they are still constantly assailed by all kinds of self-doubt; their inner world is always overcast. They are far more prone than ordinary people to alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, dangerous driving, binge eating and vomiting, self-harm, suicide, defeatism and self-sacrifice, and their romantic experiences are always ones they would rather not look back on.
They need to be healed by compassion, tolerance and deep love, but unfortunately such love is scarce in this world. All their lives they keep repeating the traumatic experiences of early childhood, and these traumas leave their inner world perpetually unsettled. They are always troubled by their roiling emotions; to escape the pain they develop all kinds of unhealthy self-protective patterns. The moment they sense they might be rejected, they quickly enter a state of emotional isolation, using anger, avoidance and all kinds of means to avoid new trauma.
Repeated trauma makes their amygdala overactive; their vigilance is far higher than ordinary people's. Unconscious behaviors that a normal person would not notice are sharply detected by them, setting off their alarm system, making them feel the danger of being hurt and abandoned, and they quickly defend themselves by fleeing or lashing out at others.
So to the people around them, they seem sensitive, suspicious, overly neurotic, and prone to making a mountain out of a molehill. But if we carefully recall the details, we find their panic is not without cause; it springs from tiny external stimuli. These stimuli are completely negligible to people who have never felt abandoned, or feel it only faintly, but for them the quality is entirely different. So they always feel they and other people are like beings from two different worlds, with difficulty sharing the same feelings.
People deeply tormented by a sense of abandonment are easily troubled by anxiety. They long to be cared for, so when they do not feel love they become anxious. At the same time they are terrified of being hurt, so when they draw close to others they fall into fusion anxiety, the fears in their subconscious are activated, and they are inexplicably restless. They cannot handle relationships that are too close, because they did not learn this skill in early childhood; their emotions are unstable.
These psychological traits are heritable; their offspring may inherit the same biological characteristics. Generally these abandonment episodes happen to the weak, so they seem to be born believing they are the weak who need to be cared for. All this is written into their genes, stored in the human gene pool and passed down through sexual reproduction generation after generation.
So some people are born with high sensitivity; highly sensitive people are usually smarter than less sensitive ones, and may achieve outstanding things in certain fields. But their fragile inner world means that even when they achieve great things, they find it hard to shake off the sense of abandonment and inferiority. The parents of Newton, Schopenhauer and Marilyn Monroe may themselves have been people with a strong sense of abandonment; this biological trait was passed to their children, and so were their behavioral patterns.
Repeated setbacks are always traumatic; the rate of self-harm and suicide among people with a strong sense of abandonment is far higher than among ordinary people. Statistics show their suicide rate is tens or even hundreds of times higher than average, and they are also more prone than others to crimes of passion. Psychiatrists and psychological counselors usually find such patients difficult to handle.
Humans are a species both civilized and barbaric, both selfless and selfish, both sincere and hypocritical; the society composed of our species contains civilization and barbarism side by side. In human society, abandonment and being abandoned may never disappear. So this sense of abandonment that troubles so many people may keep circulating in the world, producing a great many tragic lives.
Only love, compassion and tolerance can fundamentally alleviate or cure the mental deficiency caused by this sense of abandonment. Social welfare should tilt toward the weak; charitable spirit and charitable acts are also worth promoting. Raising the scientific literacy and sympathy of the public also helps improve the quality of life of those who have lived with a sense of abandonment since childhood. When the emotional swings brought by the sense of abandonment become too violent, medication can also reduce a person's suffering.
At the same time, a person also has a duty toward self-healing. The sense of abandonment may differ only in degree; no one's life is perfect, no one grows up without any hurt, and every one of us has had abandonment experiences to some degree, so anyone may occasionally feel abandoned. It is just that some people's sense of abandonment is so strong that they have internalized it in their subconscious as an instinct.
We live in an imperfect world; a person must have the ability and the will to save himself in order to survive, or he easily becomes someone who is eliminated. But for some people the sense of abandonment is so deep, and their self-destructive drive so strong, that in the end they may be beyond saving and can only go down the extreme road of self-destruction—suicide. This is a deeply distressing social phenomenon, yet it cannot be eradicated; it is one of the many regrets of human society.