When merging love is lost, there is left in its place a vacuum, an emptiness, a hole in the being. Merging love of essence is a fullness—something is there. It is a delicate, soft fullness, a substantial presence. So its loss leaves an experience of an absence, a lack, that is acutely and painfully felt by the child. When an adult feels this emptiness or hole, it is usually experienced as an incompleteness, a lack, a deep deficiency.
This deficient emptiness is too painful for the child to endure. It is felt both emotionally and physically as painful. It is also experienced as a threat to the newly forming structure of the ego. This structure is still too weak and fragile to tolerate such loss, which happens right at the beginning stages of ego formation. The ego still needs the experience of gratifying symbiotic union for its wavering and fragile cohesion. To let itself feel fully the experience of loss of the merging essence, which is to the child’s mind the complete loss of the “good mother,” will be too shattering. The child still experiences the need for the “good mother” for his very survival, both physical and psychological, so really feeling the loss will bring in a great anxiety: the fear of total annihilation and dissolution. – A. H. Almaas, Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 3