Self-Abandonment Will Only Cost You Everything

On learning to stay (not with him; with me)

I was on an Amtrak heading home from Vermont when I realized I’d done it again.

The night before, I’d ended the relationship I thought was forever. And now, as the train rocked through the countryside, the fog of love was lifting. The truth appeared before me with dazzling clarity.

A therapist once said to me: the body cares only about your survival. It’s smart enough not to show you what you’re not yet ready to see, what might be dangerous. What would surely destroy you. It waits until you’re safe.

Waves of realizations came over me, one after another, little injuries he’d inflicted that I’d completely overlooked when I’d had the “love goggles” on. With each one, I felt heat flood my body, like a rush of shame for not seeing.

Or maybe, for seeing but not registering.

Or, worst of all, for seeing and registering and not taking action.

I allowed the knowledge to wash over me, every painful example, and I typed each one into my notes app. I was deeply familiar with my notes app at that point, having turned to it time and time again over the course of the year-long relationship, venting my frustrations and sadness and anger at his inconsistency, his hot and cold behavior, his dismissiveness, his criticisms, his gaslighting, his emotional manipulations.

And yet somehow, I hadn’t registered that he wasn’t the one to blame.

I was the one who had harmed myself.

Because I had, until this moment, chosen to stay.

The Pattern

I learned how to leave myself at an early age. I remember being asked my opinion on things as a young child, and struggling to come up with the answer I thought would be most pleasing. “Which shirt do you like better?” my mom would ask as she got me dressed in the morning, and I’d struggle to give the answer I thought she wanted to hear, the “right” answer that would make her love me the most.

I’d learned to equate love with being who someone wanted me to be.

Self-abandonment occurs when you suppress, or reject, or ignore parts of you, in favor of someone else. Your wants, needs, and desires get pushed aside so someone else can be happier or more comfortable. When you self-abandon, you implicitly tell yourself that someone else matters more than you. Someone else’s preferences, desires, and voice matter more than yours.

If you grew up in a home where love was inconsistent, or in which you needed to keep yourself small in order to stay safe from an abusive parent, or in which there was emotional neglect, or in which your needs were simply inconvenient or unwelcome, then you learned to stay safe by accommodating other people.

Your nervous system learned a lesson: Who I actually am is not safe. Who I actually am is wrong. The only version that gets love is the one they want me to be.

So you adapted. You became a shapeshifter. You learned to read the room, to be hypervigilant to other people’s moods, opinions, and facial expressions. You figured out exactly what each person needed and you became that, over and over, relationship after relationship.

This was, in fact, a brilliant coping strategy.

The problem is, your nervous system never got the update that you’re not a child anymore.

So now, decades later, you’re still running the same program. Still shape-shifting. Still leaving yourself to keep love.

The Cost

At first, it feels like compromise and you actually feel good about yourself. You’re the kind of girlfriend that doesn’t mind when he’s inconsistent, or when he makes a snarky comment about you, or when he acts aloof. You’re secure enough to handle his seeming ambivalence. You know he’ll come around. You’re the kind of woman every man wants to be with.

But over time, the costs compound.

You lose access to your own desires. When you’ve spent years molding yourself to others, you forget what you actually want. Someone asks what you need and you freeze. You’ve been so focused on them that you have become a stranger.

You lose trust in yourself. Every time you override your instincts to keep someone happy, you send yourself a message: Your feelings don’t matter. Your instincts are wrong. Do this enough times and you stop hearing your inner voice altogether — because why listen to something you’ve been taught not to trust?

You attract partners who take. When you show up as someone with no needs, no edges, no boundaries, you attract people who are happy to take advantage of that. Then you wonder why you keep ending up with takers.

You feel hollow even in connection. You’re in a relationship, but you feel lonely. Of course you do. The person they’re in a relationship with isn’t actually you. It’s the version of you that you thought they wanted.

The Truth

In this particular relationship, I withheld my needs because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that the relationship couldn’t sustain them.

My role in this relationship was to hold his needs, to accommodate his moods, to help him regulate his chaotic inner world. So when he pulled away, I pretended I didn’t mind. Once he’s in a better place emotionally, everything will be perfect, I told myself. And I took it upon myself to help him get there.

When I did speak up for my needs, it ended in a fight, with me being the one to apologize. I understand now this is a classic emotional manipulation tactic, but at the time I genuinely felt like I’d made a terrible mistake. Not just that my needs were wrong, but also that I was wrong for having them.

A few months before the end, as I started to slowly open my eyes, I typed this sentence into my notes app:

This relationship only works when I don’t have needs.

I stared at it. I even told my best friend about it. And then I stayed for three more months.

The Breaking Point

We were driving home from dinner, the highway dark, the car silent as I gazed at my hands in my lap.

There was a natural opening in the conversation for me to say the thing I’d been needing to say. Something about the long-distance aspect of the relationship, the unsustainability of it, about feeling like after a year together maybe we should get on the same page about a future together.

I knew he expected me to let it pass, to preserve the safety of the status quo. To be easy. To be the version of me he could tolerate.

I felt my heart racing. I noticed tightness in my chest and throat, the familiar sensation of words being pushed back down. And I decided to stop abandoning myself. It didn’t come from my mind though; it came from a deeper place in me, a part that held a deep knowing that it was time. A part that had maybe always known.

So I took a deep breath and said the thing I needed to say.

I knew the relationship wouldn’t survive my speaking my needs. And I decided that would be ok. I was finally safe enough within myself to risk letting this man go. I finally reached a point where I’d rather be alone than continue to leave myself.

As the words left my lips and I heard his silence in response, my whole body lit up. I felt my heart start to race, the familiar panic signals throughout my body screaming, Danger. Don’t do this. But this time, instead of figuring out what I should do next to make him want to stay, I stayed with myself. With my body. With the sensations I’d been running from my whole life.

Coming Home to Your Body

The pattern of leaving yourself lives in your nervous system, not your conscious mind. It’s a primal response, encoded into your body at a young age when it was just about survival. So the healing has to happen there too.

I call it “coming home to your body.” It’s not complicated. But it asks something of you that might feel radical after a lifetime of self-abandonment: It asks you to stay.

To stay with the uncomfortable sensation instead of numbing it or distracting yourself. To stay with your truth instead of molding yourself to accommodate someone else. To stay with yourself instead of selling your needs for the appearance of love and acceptance.

This is the practice that changed everything for me. It took me decades to get there, because I was so afraid of facing the possibility of being alone. But slowly, breath by breath, I learned to be someone who stays.

Not with him, but with me.

Staying with yourself means being willing to lose the relationship in order to keep yourself.

This was the hardest part. But it was also the most liberating.

You Can Learn This

If you’ve spent years abandoning yourself, you might not even know what “staying” feels like. That’s okay. This is learnable.

Here’s a simple practice I use myself and that I teach all my clients:

Pause and place your hand on your chest or belly. This interrupts the automatic pattern. It brings you back into your body.

Ask: What am I feeling right now? Not what am I thinking or what should I do. What am I feeling? In my body? Name the sensation. Tightness. Heaviness. Fluttering. Heat. Get in the habit of just noticing the sensations in your body. Notice they’re just sensations, and they pass.

Ask: What do I actually need? Not what do they need. Not what should I do to smooth things over. What do you need? Maybe you need space. Maybe you need to speak. Maybe you need to leave. Let the answer come from your body, not your strategizing mind.

Make one small choice that honors that need. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It might be taking a breath before responding. It might be saying “I need a minute.” It might be not texting back right away. It’s just one small act of staying with yourself.

That’s it. Do this once a day. Then twice. Get in the habit of doing it, so that it’s a resource for you in the hard moments.

Over time, your nervous system will learn something new: I can stay with myself. I can trust myself. I don’t have to leave to survive.

The Other Side

When you learn to stay with yourself, you stop attracting partners who benefit from your self-erasure. Not because you’ve figured out the “right” dating tips or memorized all the red-flag lists, but because your body no longer recognizes chaos as home. Your body no longer seeks safety externally, because you’re providing it for yourself. And unavailable people start to feel unattractive and kind of gross.

You stop losing yourself in love. You bring your whole self into relationships—the real one, with needs and edges and opinions—and you let that be enough. The people who can’t handle it leave. You release them, serene in the knowledge that they’re not your person.

You start trusting yourself again. The inner voice comes back, and it becomes your compass.

If You Recognize Yourself Here

You learned to abandon yourself because once, it kept you safe. It helped you survive. It was the smartest thing your nervous system could do with what it had.

But you’re not that child anymore.

You have a body that can hold more than you know. You have a nervous system that can learn a new way. You have the capacity to stay with yourself, even when it’s hard, even when it’s terrifying.

And if you lose a relationship because you decide to stop self-abandoning, you’re not losing anything that’s worth keeping. You’re losing a structure that only exists due to your self-erasure.

And believe me when I tell you, life is so much better on the other side.

Some things to take with you:

• Self-abandonment in love isn’t a character flaw. It’s an old survival strategy that no longer serves you.

• You cannot think your way back to yourself. The pattern lives in your body, so the healing happens there too.

• Staying with yourself is a practice, not a destination. It happens in moments rather than grand gestures. And it’s a habit you can build over time.

• Your body already knows what you need. Learning to listen is the work.

PS If you’re not sure whether you’re self-abandoning, here are some common examples:

• Realizing the relationship only works when you have no needs

• Feeling tolerated, rather than cherished and adored

• Justifying why you’re in the relationship

• Feeling like you have to walk on eggshells

• Freezing when he asks your opinion, your want, or your need

• Staying for potential rather than reality

• Wanting to fix him

• Saying yes to things you don’t want

• Apologizing when you’ve done nothing wrong

• Laughing off insults, criticisms, or dismissiveness in the name of being “easygoing”

• Tolerating inconsistent, hot and cold behavior

• Treating his opinion as more valuable than yours

• Letting it go when he goes days without contact

• Suppressing your needs to avoid a fight

What matters isn’t only what happens during the good times, but what happens when your needs or boundaries show up. That’s where the truth of the relationship often lives.

PPS If you recognize yourself in this, you’re not alone. This is the work I do with clients. Message me, and let’s talk.