“Stay with me until I fall asleep. That’s all.” I hear some version of that constantly from people who keep falling in love too hard, too fast. It sounds like a small ask, and on the surface it is. A few minutes. A warm body in the room. Nothing promised, nothing signed.
Then the light goes off. You lie down and, for no reason you can name, something behind your ribs turns cold. It feels as if you would be all right if only someone were with you, so you reach for the phone and scroll for anyone still awake. You stop on the name of a person you know abuses you. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Tonight none of that matters. If that person will only come and be with you, the night becomes bearable.
This isn’t poor judgment. It isn’t judgment at all. What is making the choice is a fear from infancy, from long before you could judge anyone.
Grown on the outside, unfinished on the inside
Here is how I understand falling in love too hard, too fast, over and over. Psychologically, someone who loves like this has not yet been fully born as a person. Their body was born, but inside they never finished separating from their mother (or whoever first cared for them) and standing on their own as a separate self.
After physical birth, a child gradually learns, “I am a separate person, and I remain myself even when my caregiver is not beside me.” This is not one event. It grows out of an experience repeated many times: the child moves a little away, gets upset, comes back to the caregiver, and finds that nothing has been lost. The caregiver is still there, and the child is still the same child.
When that process is left unfinished, the body still grows up and the person learns to do adult things, but being apart from someone can still feel like a danger to life itself. When a partner is away, it doesn’t feel like ordinary distance. It brings back the old terror of a small child left without the one person who keeps them alive.
I kept wondering what that would feel like from the inside. What is it actually like in the mind of an adult who was never fully born as a self?
Fairbairn, a psychoanalyst who laid the groundwork for object relations theory (the study of how our earliest relationships go on shaping the way we relate to people), described how the self splits when a child’s early needs keep going unmet. One part functions: it goes to work, keeps appointments, and talks normally at lunch. Another part is still waiting for what it needed as a child and never got. Split like this, the self never comes together as one whole “me.” That is why a capable adult can still feel unsure who they are and live in constant fear of being left.
If you never developed a stable inner sense of being held and protected, you have no memory of safety to draw on when someone leaves. You may know in your head that you can cope, but your body has never learned, through experience, that people who go away come back.
And life does what life does: it doesn’t go your way, and it doesn’t tell you what’s coming. You have to live in it day after day, not knowing who you are, empty inside, afraid underneath, with nothing solid at your back.
Everyone fears being left. This is not that.
A bit of worry about being dropped is normal, and everyone has some. Do they actually like me, or are they just being polite? Nobody gets through a month without a version of that thought, and it means nothing.
What I’m describing is a different animal. Anxiety is far too small a word for it. This is closer to terror, and at some moments it becomes panic, a state you simply cannot get through on your own.
That terror is what sits under the late-night call to the person who hurts you.
Letting go costs more than staying
When being apart from someone sets off terror, stopping the terror becomes more urgent than judging the other person’s character. That is why you may call someone who has abused you even while knowing exactly what they will do.
So it stops mattering to you that this person abuses you, or that they have no love to give you. If they will be there beside you, that is enough. Who they are, and how they treat you, stops being the question. The people who love you look on and cannot understand why you stay. But you are not holding on because the person is good. You are holding on because the moment you let go, the full terror comes down on you at once.
Out of sight, gone
A second problem is tangled up with this fear of being left.
Somewhere in a decent childhood, a child builds a quiet certainty that the people they love do not stop existing when they leave the room: “Mom is in the kitchen. I can’t see her, but she’s still there.” Psychoanalysts call this object constancy; in their language, an “object” is a person we are attached to. Once you have it, you never notice you have it.
Without object constancy, a person who is out of sight feels gone. Your adult mind may know that they still exist and may come back tomorrow, but your feelings react as though the relationship has ended for good. That is why facts like “they’ll be back tomorrow” often do nothing to calm the body.
Because what you can’t see feels gone, the request I began with comes out so specific, and so small. While someone is in the room, you can see that they are still there. Just stay until I fall asleep — that’s the whole thing. Not forever, not a promise, not a ring. Stay in the room until my eyes close.
The dark is not the problem
I hear this one constantly, too: “I can’t sleep by myself. Lying there alone is unbearable.”
Ask who that fear belongs to. It belongs to a baby alone in a dark room, when the one person keeping it alive is not there. It is not the dark that frightens the baby; it is being alone in it. For something that small, that is the end of the world — and there’s nothing irrational about it. A baby has no reasoning to fall back on, only the bare fact of being alone.
Some adults still feel exactly this fear, at full strength, in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. Picture a woman in her forties lying alone in the dark and feeling what that baby feels. The fear never grew up with the rest of her.
So the people around her are baffled. “Just go to sleep,” they say, not unkindly. But for her, those hours alone in the dark come close to panic. What she wants isn’t complicated: somebody warm, with their arms around her.
Auditioning people to fill a hole
One person to be there with you. That is the entire requirement, so you go looking, and you will use whatever works.
You fish for attention in places you don’t even want it. You post something you know will get a reply. You answer the message from someone you’d already written off. You leave a door open to a person you would never pick in daylight. If someone seems likely to accept you and stay by your side, who they are stops mattering.
It shapes the big decisions too. Most people choosing a partner to build a life with ask about the life they would share. What do we both want? Could I stand to grow old next to this person? When this fear is in charge, those questions never get asked. Only one question counts: can this person take away the empty, low feeling of being alone? Somebody can fail every other test and still pass that one.
The child on the station floor
There is also a flat, emptied-out feeling that comes over you when you are alone. It comes from the same place as the terror: the separation from your first caregiver that was never finished. Your sense of who you are never came together as one whole. Without a stable sense that you are still yourself when nobody else is there, being alone can feel like losing yourself. Having someone beside you can make a night of terror bearable, but it does not make this feeling go away, because what is missing is inside you.
Here’s the picture I keep coming back to. A packed station at rush hour. A very small child has lost the adult they came in with. They’re sitting on the floor screaming while strangers step around them.
The child can’t reason it out. All the child knows is that the one person who keeps them alive is not here. From down there on the floor, the world has ended, and it stays ended.
That child’s despair and fear are what fill these nights. The station scene is more than a comparison. The same despair and fear are carried whole into a grown body that gets up and goes to work in the morning.
The fear belongs to a baby, not to the adult you are now
Tonight the light will go off and the cold feeling in your chest will arrive on schedule. Before your hand finds the phone, stay where you are for a moment and ask what is really frightening you. It is not that there is no one to hold on to. It is that a small child who was once left alone is still sitting inside you.
This fear comes from a very early stage of life, so adult reasoning does not reach it. Telling yourself, “This is ridiculous; I should be able to sleep alone,” only adds shame; it does not make you any safer. Instead, respond the way you would to a frightened child. Put into words what is happening. Notice the fear in your body and let it be there, without running from it. And do not put your safety in the hands of whoever answers the phone first.
If these nights have started to bring thoughts of hurting yourself, tell a doctor instead of carrying that alone.
The station is still loud, the child is still down on the floor, and strangers keep stepping around them. That child is the one sitting inside you. Instead of going out to find just anyone, sit down on the floor beside that child.
References
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock. — the central ego (the part of the self that goes on functioning) and the splitting of the self.
- Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books. — separation from the first caregiver, and object constancy.
- Masterson, J. F. (1976). Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult. New York: Brunner/Mazel. — abandonment depression: the flat, emptied-out feeling that comes when you are alone.
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Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board