How often have you heard these words in your lifetime: self-love. There’s different ways to say it and many similar concepts: self-esteem, self-worth, self-confidence, self-respect. Self-love is a really necessary foundation in life. You gotta love yourself well before you can love others well. You gotta love yourself to feel safe and centered in this world. You gotta love yourself to be able to set boundaries and say no to the things that don’t serve you. Self-love helps to build your identity on a rock; anything less is an unstable foundation. I think we can all agree on its importance. But there’s a little known enemy of self-love. It’s called self-abandonment. Let’s talk about it.
Self-abandonment is, just as it states in the name, a process of abandoning oneself, usually in favor of someone or something else. Obviously we can’t physically abandon ourselves, so this would be a mental, emotional and/or spiritual abandonment. Here’s a more thorough definition of self-abandonment, courtesy of AI: “Self-abandonment is a pattern of rejecting, suppressing, or ignoring parts of oneself, including needs, desires, and boundaries, often in favor of prioritizing others or avoiding discomfort.” It is essentially the act of prioritizing external factors (other people’s needs, expectations, or desires) over one’s own internal experience.
The thing to keep in mind here is that self-abandonment requires a person to be outwardly focused: on the people, the situations, and the dynamics around them. I believe that self-abandonment is at the root of unhealthy coping mechanisms such as people-pleasing and codependency. These often develop in childhood, in response to dysfunctional and chaotic family environments. These environments typically don’t create spaces where children can safely share their own feelings and needs. So in order to feel safe, many children learn that it is best to ignore their needs and to prioritize the needs of those around them. They learn to suppress big emotions that are not well received, or that they fear will add to the chaos around them.
Instead of being able to cultivate a sense of inner safety, these children will search for their safety externally. They become hyper focused on their surroundings. They look for shifting moods in others and clues that a metaphorical storm may be rolling in. For example, if they can sense a parent’s bad mood coming, they might be able to do something to stop it or to cheer the parent up. Or they might try to isolate themself in their bedroom, staying quiet and out of the way until the storm passes. In either case, their focus is on what’s going on around them rather than their inner experience. They are in survival mode, so they don’t have the luxury to stop and do an internal check. They don’t have the ability to identify that they feel afraid, or worried, or sad, or lonely. Even if they could, who would they tell? Instead, they learn to suppress and repress. It is better to stay detached and hypervigilant. When a child has learned that safety cannot be reached within, they will reach outward, trying to manage things and control people. They will find a way to keep the peace at all costs. Because if things are calm around them, then they can temporarily breathe and find a little serenity inside too.
Self-abandonment can become a protective coping tool, in which a person learns to dismiss their needs, feelings, and inner experience in an effort to please others, keep the peace, and feel safe. But as is the case with most survival mechanisms, self-abandonment may help a child survive a dysfunctional environment, but it will not serve the child well beyond that. Part of growing up, becoming an adult and maturing, is shedding the coping skills that no longer serve us, and replacing them with ones that do. Change is possible with awareness and a willingness to do the work. As with any change, it will be a process complete with setbacks and gains, pain and hope, discomfort and joy. But if you have recognized in yourself a tendency to self-abandon, there is no better path to walk than the one that leads back to you. And by you I mean all of you- the authentic, complex, uncensored, very real you. The you that is attuned to your internal experience and brings that experience fully into each present moment.
So what exactly does self-abandonment look like in action? Really, anytime you are ignoring your gut feelings, saying yes when you want to say no, neglecting your own boundaries, putting your own needs last, and prioritizing other peoples’ happiness and comfort over your own, you are self-abandoning. Here are some specific examples:
- Imagine someone does or says something that you don’t like or that hurts your feelings. You want to gently confront them and let them know how you feel. But you talk yourself out of it because you are worried that they will react badly or become upset. You convince yourself that you are overreacting to what they did or said and it’s not that big of a deal. You move on and sweep your feelings under the rug. It seems easier to abandon yourself and your feelings than to address the conflict and discomfort of the situation.
- You’ve had a long, exhausting week at work. You come home Friday night ready to relax and have some alone time. Your friend calls and asks to come over because he/she just got into a fight with their spouse. Everything in you wants to say no so that you can rest and take care of yourself, but you immediately override that feeling so that you can be there for your friend. You push past your physical, mental and emotional boundaries because you don’t want to risk disappointing your friend or being seen as selfish and uncaring.
- You’re in a meeting at work and your coworkers are talking about a problem that needs to be fixed. You already have a lot on your plate and really don’t have the ability to take on any more responsibilities. Instead of making your boundaries clear or waiting for others to step up, you find yourself volunteering to help. You want others to see you as a team player, even if it means more work for you.
Can you see how in all of these examples, the person is overly focused on external factors that end up overshadowing their internal experience? The person neglects their feelings in order to avoid an uncomfortable situation, or to make someone else happy, or to be perceived in a certain way. The more a person strives to meet outward expectations, the less they will be able to tend to their inner wants and needs. Over time, it is this bypassing of the inner self that will slowly erode self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-love.
This is why returning to the self, and the inner experience, is so important for breaking the habit of self-abandonment. If we are going to embody any quality that starts with the word self-, then we have to know who we are from the inside out. A strong sense of self can only be built from within, apart from outside opinions and influences.
So how do we stop abandoning ourselves? How do we stop choosing this thing that erodes our ability to love and care for ourselves? In Part 2, we’ll talk about how to make healthier choices, ones that honor the self and build up our self-esteem, self-worth and self-love.