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He Promised He Would Always Love Me by Connie H. Deutsch Forty years ago, most of the adults who disappeared were men, and there weren't that many of them. Ten years later, we started to hear that women were also running away from home and the number of missing adults was now somewhere in the region of 150,000 people a year. It was at that point that I started thinking about those missing adults who left home without anyone knowing that there had been elaborate plans in the works, sometimes for years, to disappear without a trace in the hopes of never being found again. It became more real to me when one of my clients told me she had a strong desire to run away and start over somewhere else where no one knew her. The startling thing about this was that she was a successful professional in her late thirties who had never been married, had no children, no major responsibilities, no credit card debt, wasn't in trouble with the IRS or the law, didn't suffer from depression and had no history of mental illness. I tried to imagine myself in a similar situation and I couldn't. Where would I go? What would I do to earn a living? Where would I find someone who could get me a fake ID and social security number? What would be involved in the planning of this great escape and most of all, how would my loved ones deal with it? Would they feel guilty for not realizing that I had been planning it? In the end, I couldn't imagine myself doing that to the people in my life or ever being desperate enough to disappear without the hope of ever seeing them again. And yet, that's exactly what happens when people leave home voluntarily, without a trace, and with no substantive reason to explain their decision to the people who are important to them. They might leave behind a spouse, children, parents, friends, and a whole host of people who thought they knew the person so well. For sure, they certainly leave people feeling very guilty. For those who have been abandoned, there has to be the feeling that they had done something wrong, that they didn't look hard enough to see if the missing person had been unhappy, depressed, in trouble at work or with the law, or a myriad of other causes that they should have seen and helped the person to deal with. As of this past year, 2010, the statistics for missing persons in America has reached a whopping 900,000 people a year, about 2,300 people a day. Even if the count is a little off, that's still an amazing number of people who voluntarily disappear off the face of this earth without a trace. Who are these people and why do they run away? I can't explain why large numbers of people left home when times were good but it's easier to see the reasons for it now that times are bad. There is so much unemployment, credit card debt, houses being foreclosed, food shortages, unhappy relationships, feelings of too much financial and emotional responsibility, and general feelings of there being no way out of their misery, that it's easier to see why people run away from home and leave others to deal with the burden of cleaning up their mess. It's at these times that one can relate to Henry David Thoreau's description in "Walden," that "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." And even though it explains why increasing numbers of men and women are choosing to run away from their responsibilities and the promises they made, one has to feel compassion for them for feeling they had no other choice, and that the path they chose was the only way out for them. And of course it is heartbreaking to see those who are left behind have to deal with the aftermath of abandonment and of the guilty feelings that are bound to accompany their loss. Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver. She is known throughout the world for helping clients find workable solutions to problems that are often complex and systemic in nature and part of a corporation's culture or an individual's pattern of behavior. Connie has hosted her own weekly radio show, been a weekly guest on a morning radio show, done guest spots on radio shows around the country, and appeared as a guest on a cable television show. Connie wrote a weekly newspaper Advice Column for sixteen years and has been invited to speak at local colleges and given lectures around the country. She also wrote the scripts for a weekly financial show on cable television. Connie is the author of the books, "Whispers of the Soul" and "The Counseling Effect," and is the co-author of an eBook, "Getting Rich While the World Falls Apart" which is being offered as a free download on her website. She has also written and produced two CDs on Meditation and Relationships and has done coaching on customer service and employee relationships. Her website: http://www.conniehdeutsch.com/ See more of her articles by clicking here ConnieHDeutsch Articles
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missing people, abandonment, desperate, leaving home, running away, fake ID, desertion, guilt, economy, unemployment, financial problems, unhappiness,
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