Fear of Loss

I have a huge fear of losing people in my life that I care about...by losing I mean them leaving me or not talking to me anymore.
The reason is because I have had so many bad experiences with this happening. How can I get rid of this fear?  

I have tried everything, like thinking positively, but it hasn't been working as well as I want. Even when I start to think I am better, those negative thoughts start coming back again and I start feeling depressed, remembering all my past experiences.

I feel like this holds me back so much and preventing me from having better relationships with people.

I'm not sure if i have any sound advice i can offer to you on what you can do about this.

But my personal view on loss is this... we all run the risk of losing someone, in some way throughout our life, whenever we enter into some kind of relationship may it be romantic or friendship, there's always a chance we could lose them. So for me i take the stance, enjoy what you have with people, regardless, stay in that moment and build memories and be happy, if we start avoiding people because we're scared of losing them, we only end up lonely and isolated.

sorry i have no better words or advice Roxy x

Hey Roxy  I have the same fear, though only for romantic relationships (but that's enough). It's one of the main reasons I balked before even starting one last time.

I was actually talking about love in general with a friend a month or so ago, and she said something very striking: the price of love is loss. Sooner or later, you will always lose the ones you love. There is no escaping it. They will die, or leave you, or you will leave them, or you will die. That pain of losing someone you care about is almost inevitable. But once you accept that, the fear actually has no more power. You will lose them eventually, whether that be sooner or later. Michelle Dockery - who played Mary in Downton - just lost her fiancé to cancer. Obviously people also break up. But if we never go into a relationship with someone we care about, we're not saving ourselves from pain. The pain of separation is already there, without us ever having enjoyed being together.

And then of course you can look at it from the perspective of non-duality. We're not truly separate at all. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, we are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness. We're all one. Even death from a certain perspective is an illusion, because time is one (everything actually exists simultaneously - block time - it's only our perception that has time moving forward). Everything is always there; you are everybody. Nothing is ever lost, nothing is ever gained.

And then there is the multiverse......if that theory is correct (in any version!), then somewhere out there you're having all the relationships and friendships you ever could have had, and all the people dying too soon are still alive. And this is always and in eternity, for there is really no time. Isn't that beautiful?

Pema Chodron says that fear usually means we are clinging to something. Usually ourselves. When there is no "me" left, there is nothing for it to lose. I've come to realise that thinking about my own death is extremely helpful. Someday I'll be dead. Somewhere out there, I already am dead.

I'm dead. I'm dead. From that perspective, what is there to lose?

Hey Roxy
I used to get those fears a lot, especially because I lost so many people in my life, my family, my mom, all the break ups and I still get those fears about my children. 

One thing I have noticed is that you can't avoid loss at one stage or another and you can't force people to stay with you,  people come and go, relationships come and go, but you will survive. It may be painful in the beginning, but there won't be an empty place forever- new people will come, some even more amazing than the past ones and looking back I can see that had I not let go of the first one, I would have never had the opportunity to meet the second and so on. 

I have learned to trust the flow of life and appreciate every person in it knowing that everything is perfect now and if it changes, it will still be perfect- just different kind of perfect. 

The funny thing is that once you are okay with that uncertainty and accept that everything at any time may change- and it's okay and stop forcing and fearing, the resistance will drop and most likely you won't lose anything.