Mental health symptoms can mask many different root issues. Although clients often come into therapy expressing issues with anxiety and depression, a common issue that can be hidden underneath these symptoms is chronic self-abandonment. Self-abandonment, or self-neglect, refers to consistently minimizing or suppressing our emotional and often physical needs. This often results in feeling burnt out, resentful, neglected, depleted, unseen, etc. Not fun stuff to feel, right? But why would we do this to ourselves? Why would we stop taking care of ourselves in the first place?
The long and the short of it is that we abandon ourselves because we have been taught to. The most common reason I see people abandon themselves is to keep others. Somehow, someway, they learned that the only way to avoid being abandoned is to abandon themselves.
The “somehow, someway” usually starts in childhood (surprise, surprise) with how our caregivers (whoever was in charge of our survival) interacted with us. Many of us learned that keeping our caregivers stable, happy, and/or appeased was the only way to create some semblance of safety and predictability. For example, caregivers who are quick to anger or react unpredictably create anxiety and a sense of unsafety in children. To cope with this, many kids often find a way to appease their caregivers and keep them calm or pacified. Sometimes they become the overachieving “good kid,” sometimes they become the jokester, and sometimes they become the withdrawn child who spends all their time outside the house or in their room. Whatever the iteration, the child learns that what is more important than their own feelings and experiences is to make sure that the caregiver is okay. They tend to learn that their own needs are unimportant, inconvenient, and will ultimately lead to their abandonment. So it is better to minimize those needs in order to keep their caregiver around.
This then carries over into their adult relationships. These children grow up into adults who believe that the only way to keep people close is to abandon their own needs. They ask for very little. They hide their hurt or their anger. They defer to what the other person wants. They struggle to take care of themselves across the board. Although they are adept at detaching from their feelings in the moment, needs do not just go away because you ignore them. Over time, people who struggle with self-abandonment tend to feel burnt out, misunderstood, and lonely.
The tricky thing about self-abandonment is that it creates a self-perpetuating cycle. The more you neglect your needs, the more devalued they become. The more devalued your needs become, the more unimportant you feel as a person. The more unimportant you feel as a person, the more you neglect yourself. Rinse and repeat. The good news is that this is a cycle that can be corrected because it is not true. It just takes a lot of practice and relearning that we do not have to abandon ourselves to keep others.
This is the how and the why of self-abandonment, but check in next week for how to stop the cycle of self-abandonment.
Until next time,
Dr. Jess
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