The Age of Abandonment

When some of us hear the word community we think of Instagram. We think of Reddit. Or abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities, nothing real or solid. Which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done

I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it. I see so much abandonment pain. We are reparenting ourselves. We are self-soothing. We are healing our inner child. Nobody is asking why. Please will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love,

Our identity, our meaning, our purpose, as humans, was always our ties and obligations to others, and now we are trying to do it all alone, trying to figure out who we are alone, and we’re nobody alone, no wonder we’re confused. And for many of us life has become about trying to heal or hide this thing, shoving it down, this basic human need to bel

The feeling we’re left with, God. How to describe it? It’s the feeling that nobody has our back. That we can’t trust anyone. That this world is terrifying and we are powerless, but if we attach to anything for support, we will be abandoned. I see it everywhere ; it cuts to the core of this generation**.** Difficulty trusting people, hypersensitivit

But the real reasons? We don’t want to know. We stick with young adults aren’t settling down because they can’t get on the housing ladder, or because wokeness is brainwashing them, because if we go any further, past that, down below, we might get too close to the truth. The hard truth. Like the fact that for many girls, the first man to break their

Throughout history our ancestors built customs and institutions to bind us together and then, one by one, we kicked them down. We killed God, we mocked marriage, we attacked the family, we uprooted neighbourhoods, we debunked every last myth and story. And we kept going and going, until we got here, with our sad little divorce parties. Until we got

By age 14, nearly half of first-born children in the UK no longer live with both their mother and father.

All this to say, being abandoned is not trivial. Not only having divorced parents, but being cut off from community, from culture, from all sources of support. Maybe it means more to you than you are letting on. Feel it, grieve it. Then turn that disappointment into determination. Nothing’s guaranteed, but we can take the pain and put every inch of

That’s the thing about attachment—you need to depend to be independent. You need a stable base to venture out. Something to rely on to take risks. Some stability to cope with chaos. Otherwise you can’t explore with confidence. If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic. You will stay stagnant, afraid to move. Maybe t