What does fear of abandoment mean and how can I trigger it?

***** TRIGGER WARNING ****

Fear of abandonment is a concept that very foreign to me. In that I completely don't understand how someone can be afraid of abandonment. What exactly is it? What do you BPD feel when triggered.

Lately, there's a girl at work who I know has BPD and I've been trying to trigger her fear of abandonment. This is a girl that I know have an emotional attachment to me even though we aren't dating. A few things I have done are:
-Deliberately walking away when I see her 180 deg flip turning the other direction
-Sometimes just start running away if I see her walking by too close.
-Making a lot comments that I'm leaving/quitting my job soon.
-Start clearing out my desk space so it seem like it's empty
-Putting my things into a cardboard box whenever she is near

I was hoping for some type of emotional outburst. Maybe rage. But the best reaction I've been able to get out of her is she walking away and go sit down on the floor almost like she was about to cry. Then when I try approaching her she just stormed out and said to leave me alone. Her trigger for this episode was that someone mentioned my name to her then a few minutes later I show up.

Could she just be trying to hold her emotions in during the day until she gets home to let it out or something?

So far I've determined her huge rages are due to feeling of rejection. How come abandonment doesn't trigger the same intensity of rage?

Why on earth would you do such a thing? With any luck this girl will have the sense to steer clear of you. But keep behaving like that I am pretty sure she will.

Remember Ronni wrote:Why on earth would you do such a thing? With any luck this girl will have the sense to steer clear of you. But keep behaving like that I am pretty sure she will.

What exactly is the problem? I'm not doing anything that is hurting her.

Maybe I read it wrong, but sounded to me like you were deliberately trying to trigger someone with BPD. Playing with someone's feelings like that hoping for some sort of emotional outburst, observing that on at least one occasion she looked like she was going to cry. It sounds exactly like you're trying to hurt her.

Jinxu,

Why do you want to trigger her? And by the way, you do realize that deliberately triggering someone means putting someone to unnecessary emotional turmoil, do you? How would you feel if someone tried to bully you?

ADHD-HP wrote:Why do you want to trigger her? And by the way, you do realize that deliberately triggering someone means putting someone to unnecessary emotional turmoil, do you? How would you feel if someone tried to bully you?

I want her to admit her feelings and throw herself towards me. I think triggering her "deepest" fear would be the best way to go. People have tried to bully me. I didn't care.

Why do you think that I am hurting her? I have only seen her almost cry once and there is no confirmation it was due to me. As far as I can tell she is holding it together.

that's actually kind of a potentially dangerous thing to do (if she actually is bpd and has a strong fear of abandonment), I've read some of your other posts and it seems you don't have the best ability to empathize with people emotionally which isn't a bad thing but logically you should know that putting someone with BPD in a situation like that is a really crappy thing to do, especially since you don't know the danger you could be putting her in.

she told you before to leave her alone, if she tells you again, don't say we didn't warn you.. you never know if she could split black on you completely and grow tired of the games you're playing with her.

you're treating this situation like you're both 8 year olds and you have a crush on the girl you saw on the playground and you haven't quite yet learned how to express that in a way that doesn't involve metaphorically pulling her hair. just ask her on a date or something

jinxu wrote: As far as I can tell she is holding it together.

Your behavior, whether she has BPD or not, is unkind. She is a person, you are attempting to hurt her.

jinxu wrote:I want her to admit her feelings and throw herself towards me. I think triggering her "deepest" fear would be the best way to go.

Why do you think that anyone would want to be with someone who makes them feel bad? That seems a bit backwards. Generally people want to be around people who make them feel good - like perhaps they are KIND to them.

jinxu wrote:People have tried to bully me. I didn't care.

What does this have to do with her?

jinxu wrote:-Sometimes just start running away if I see her walking by too close.

I suggest you do her a favor and just keep running.

jinxu, its a very DANGEROUS game your playing here, you are deliberately bating for a reaction, i read you want to trigger her ...but into what ?

rage ?
mental breakdown?
Suicide ?

What is your endgame here?
into loving you ?
(that's not going to happen, not this way)

If your not in a relationship you will not trigger her abandonment, she is not "co-dependent/dependent on you, you are just a guy at work she kinda likes, so i would go find yourself a new play toy and leave the girl alone...bullying her for a "reaction" is seriously ###$ up, unfair and unsafe

I want her to admit her feelings and throw herself towards me. I think triggering her "deepest" fear would be the best way to go.

This will in fact give the opposite result, you need to learn a bit more about BPD

1) I don't "fear" something I don"t have a dependency on ...

So codependency is part of what's needed to trigger? That's good to know.

I don't know how attached she is yet. But I have noticed at the least some kind of emotional reaction in her. I suppose the reasons why is I needed to see if she did have feelings as she tend to hide it. The the other reason is my need to manipulate just you guy have needs to be bpd.

Did you know the opposite of love isn't hate. The opposite of love is indifference. I figure if she didn't care then she wouldn't have emotionally reacted. Now she may hates me but after hate there is always a return to love. What goes down will go up. And likewise what goes up must come down. That's the love-hate cycle in a nutshell isn't it? Nothing can stay constant forever. The law of the universe state that everything must be in a constant state of change.

This is my sociopathic version of bpd's push pull cycle. I pushed hard. Now I need to pull.

Also relax, the worst thing I could do to her would be to tell her I have a new gf. In the past I notice that generated strong rage.

I put up a picture of an ex-gf once to see how she would react. I think she raged but was holding it inside.

-- Sun Jul 24, 2016 10:26 am --

czmun wrote:you're treating this situation like you're both 8 year olds and you have a crush on the girl you saw on the playground and you haven't quite yet learned how to express that in a way that doesn't involve metaphorically pulling her hair. just ask her on a date or something

The number 8 is her lucky number. MIne is 27. We have a connection with our lucky numbers in that we see a lot of signs where our lucky number show up together. Like the universe gives us sign that we are meant to be together.

That was how our romance started. I show her a picture I took at work that had our lucky numbers were together and beside it was her initials.