What does abandoning yourself mean?
Well it means saying yes when really you feel no, it can also be described as people pleasing, playing small or giving away your power. It’s when you override the protestations of your inner voice and allow yourself to be overly influenced by others opinions, evaluations and verbalisations. Or it’s when you give yourself up to avoid rejection or the fear of it. Turning to a myriad of mild, or not so mild, addictions is another all too common way of avoiding painful feelings and therefore abandoning yourself. Many of us are guilty of some or all of these at some time or another, but for many it’s become a deeply ingrained habit, or worse still a way of life.
So what does it cost us? Well continuing to abandon yourself is deeply corrosive to your self worth as you are not only giving yourself the message ‘I don’t trust myself’ but you are also compounding it with ‘what I think and feel doesn’t matter, even to me’.
Ultimately, continuing to abandon yourself will leave you dis-empowered and resentful.
If you have abandonment issues from childhood then this subconscious wounding unfortunately increases the likelihood of abandoning yourself in adulthood – we often do to ourselves what was done to us – until we bring our attention and healing to this. The reason for this is twofold: firstly the subconscious seeks out what is familiar, no matter how uncomfortable and painful, in an attempt to resolve it and secondly if there are unresolved childhood abandonment issues self worth will have already been eroded, meaning you are much less likely to trust and listen to yourself, until you do the work to do that.
If we have been abandoned then we can also look to others to provide that sense of security we are missing. Whilst others love obviously feels wonderful, no matter how much someone loves you as long as you continue to abandon yourself you will struggle with feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.
It’s not possible to change a habit of self-abandonment overnight, we are, after all, always works in progress, but we can set the intention of beginning this today. It’s the ultimate act of self-care.
The great news is that with the right work you really can move from a place of abandoning yourself to honouring yourself. Working with the subconscious mind to heal old abandonment wounds is fantastically liberating and means you can begin operating much more from your wise adult self rather than the abandoned hurt and despairing inner child. If you combine this with a consistent practice of finding your own ‘voice’ and listening to and acting upon that, you will root into your own personal power, which will transform your life in ways you have not yet even imagined possible.
