Hi, I’m a quiet borderline and never really understood the concept of “abandonment issues”. Yes of course I feel afraid people I care about will leave me or hurt me all the time, but when I think back to when I was little and the trauma I endured to get this way, I’m not sure what caused my fear of abandonment.

The biggest recurring traumatic events I experienced as a girl were when my mom suddenly got mad, she would threaten/try to lock me in the laundry room. But my mom’s English wasn’t very good and that’s also what she called “washing clothes”. And I was 3 so whenever she said that, I thought she meant she was going to drown me. And this went on for years, so for years I thought my parents wanted to kill me whenever I didn’t eat my vegetables or didn’t play the piano perfectly. Is this a form of abandonment?

Besides this, my mom would threaten to lock me outside, send me to the orphanage, adopt my cousin instead. I get that those are classic abandonment threats, but they were never as traumatic for me as the laundry room incident so I always wondered...

Thank you!