Preparing for protests is how you keep your boundaries intact.

Protests are often encountered when you draw boundaries with people who are used to controlling you. They are adult temper tantrums. They are designed to minimize your point of view, provoke your self-doubt, or build alliances against you.

Sometimes, the emotionally immature person will choose something that they once comforted you for and use it to tear you down. Nothing is quite as stunning as your closest advocate turning into your accuser.

These protests are almost certain to provoke an abandonment experience for you. As you prepare yourself mentally, be aware that many of the unpleasant emotions they comforted for you may come flying back with a vengeance. The temptation to reinitiate a codependent existence can be overpowering.

Other friends and family may let you lean on them, and that’s great. Let them do their jobs as friends and family by being there for you. But you will derive immeasurable benefit from having a neutral observer who wants to support you and teach you the skills to comfort yourself. This is where having a coach or therapist becomes indispensable.

In the past, instead of sitting with discomfort and developing a constructive relationship with difficult emotions, you leaned on your attachment figures. You leaned especially hard on those who trained you to need them, like friends, coworkers, and primary caretakers. Addressing and bringing constructive change to a dysfunctional relationship can be like a social earthquake.

You will need every health strategy in your repertoire to keep from transforming back into a people-pleasing milksop. You may feel tempted to reach out to a toxic attachment figure, reconnect with long gone love-objects, or return to the local dive. This is relapse.

Relapse is not a failure, but neither is it your goal. You are not at rock bottom anymore. You have taken responsibility for your independence and reclaimed your right to live your own life. You have had this feeling before, and you survived. You will survive this time, too. Eventually, it will be so far in the past you won’t recognize yourself when you look back on it.

When that wave of loneliness, fatigue, panic, claustrophobia, anxiety, depression, or whatever washes over you, remind yourself that your emotions are all valid and acceptable, but none of them are unique. They have all been experienced by countless others throughout history, and have no special or divine value. None of them will last.

Eventually, they will no longer drive you to reaction. They may push you to the edge, but not over it. You may find yourself with your cell phone in hand, ready to call up the comrade to your codependency, but you won’t hit the little green button.

It won’t be a matter of willpower, but of fatigue. Repeating old patterns won’t solve any problems, only drag them out. So what’s the use? Why suffer a second longer? Are you generating any feelings of motivation?

Protests from attachment figures are emotional abandonment in real-time. Maybe they aren’t going to leave, kick you out, or scream, but instead engage in emotional warfare to regain control of their interactions with you and reestablish the lack of boundaries that benefits them.

Love-bombing, withdrawal, and guilt are very common because they are easy to do. They are hijacked by their subconscious codependent reactions and taking you along for the ride. All of this is psychological violence. This kind of abandonment can happen at any age and will be just as painful at 50 years old as it would be at 5.

Susan Anderson categorized the experience of abandonment in her book The Journey From Abandonment to Healing. After thirty years of clinical research, she guarantees that not only will you move on, but you can predict exactly how it’s going to go.

If someone bails out of the role they play in your life, or refuses to acknowledge you, your boundaries, or the nature of their influence in your life, thank them. Their sickness just made you strong, and set you free.

Recovery is immunization against people like them, so you can proceed to enjoy your life with no fear of repeating the past. Even though there is a near-universal taboo against disconnecting from one’s parents, research suggests that parental estrangement can sometimes be the healthiest choice.

If you find the abandonment pain lingering, Robert Leahy says in The Jealousy Cure that the most effective skill for calming one’s mind is the “boredom technique.” Find the shortest, simplest worst to capture your pain and repeat them over and over. “My dad disowned me.” “My dad disowned me.” “My dad disowned me.”

Eventually, you will get bored with it, and it won’t cause a strong reaction. Or any reaction. Eventually.