The title is probably strangely worded, but I'll explain.
When I (30M) was about 3, my father abandoned me and my mother. My parents were never married (as far as I know, my birth was an "accident"), and one day I guess my father just got fed up and left. I have only vague memories of me asking my mom where he was and praying he'd come back. Eventually, my mom met the man who'd become my stepfather, a great guy in most respects. They got married, got good jobs and we moved to a better city.
As things got better, I kinda "forgot" about my biological father. When I was 9, my mom gave me the news that my father had died a couple of months before in a shootout (he was a cop, and we lived in a very dangerous city back then). I remember feeling more reflexive than sad. I even said something along the lines of "well, it's okay, I now have X(stepfather) as a dad".
Today, despite having lived a mostly cushy life, I am kind of a mess psychologically. I have recurrent depressive episodes and I have a very unhealthy pattern of attachment with other people. I am extremelly shy and introverted, but I feel secretly desperate for attention and intimacy. On the rare occasions I manage to build a deeper connection with someone, a sudden fear begins to kick in and start to feel suffocated. If I don't sabotage my relationships early on by desperation, I do so later by aloofness. *Fear*, however, is always constant in every stage of any relationship I find.
As I got older, I began to associate this pattern with fear from abandonment stemming from the event with my father. However, what is weird to me is that today this event makes me feel nothing at all, it's as if it happened to a different person. Even as a kid, when I discovered he'd passed away, I don't remember grieving or feeling sad, it was as if a stranger had died.
Can something I barely even remember still hold so much impact my relationships with people to this day?