Self-Abandonment

By Dr. Margaret Paul
December 31, 2006

If you feel alone, empty, anxious, depressed, hurt, angry, jealous, sad, fearful, guilty or shamed, you are abandoning yourself. In this article, discover the ways you might be abandoning yourself.

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The Encarta(r) World English Dictionary defines "abandon" as: "to leave somebody or something behind for others to look after, especially somebody or something meant to be a personal responsibility."

As adults, our own wellbeing is our personal responsibility.

Do you abandon yourself, instead making others responsible for you, and then feel abandoned by others when they leave you or don't take responsibility for you?

As an adult, another person cannot abandon you, since they are not responsible for you. We can abandon a child, an ill person or an old person - someone who cannot take care of themselves. But if you are a physically healthy adult, you can be left, but you cannot be abandoned by others. Only YOU can abandon you.

What are the ways you might be abandoning yourself?

Judging Yourself

How often do you judge yourself with comments to yourself such as:

"You are not good enough." "You are inadequate."
"You are stupid." "You are an idiot."

"You are ugly." "You are not attractive enough."

"If you fail you are not okay."

"If someone rejects you, you are not okay."

"It's all your fault that...."

"You will never amount to anything. You are a failure. You are not reaching your potential."

...and so on.

Just as a small child feels alone and abandoned when a parent is harsh and judgmental, so our own inner child feels alone and abandoned when you judge yourself. Self judgment not only creates inner feelings of aloneness and emptiness, but it also creates feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, hurt, fear, guilt and shame. Then what do you do when you have judged yourself and created all these painful feelings?

Ignoring Your Feelings

When you feel alone, empty, anxious, depressed, hurt, angry, jealous, sad, fearful, guilty or shamed - what do you do? Do you attend to your feelings, exploring what YOU are telling yourself or doing to cause them? Or do you avoid them with some form addictive behavior, using food, alcohol, drugs, nicotine, TV, work, shopping, Internet, sex, anger, blame, and so on to avoid them?

When you ignore your feelings and instead turn to addictive behavior, you are again abandoning yourself. Once you have abandoned yourself, it is very common to project this self-abandonment onto others and feel abandoned by people or by God. Yet, as a physically healthy adult, the feeling of abandonment is being caused by you, just as most of your other painful feelings are being caused by you.

Making Others Responsible for You

Once you judge yourself and then ignore the pain you have caused, it is quite likely that you then turn to others for the love and approval that you are not giving to yourself. Your inner child - the feeling part of you - needs love, approval, and attention. When you abandon yourself with your self-judgments and ignore your feelings, the wounded child part of you turns to others for the love you need. Because the child part of you is desperately needy for love, you likely become manipulative to get that love - getting angry and blaming, or becoming overly nice or compliant and trying to do everything right. You have handed your inner child away to others for adoption, hoping another person will give you the love you so desperately need. You become addicted to approval, attention, and/or sex.

The more you make others responsible for giving you the love, attention and approval you need, the more your inner child feels abandoned, leading to more addictive behavior to fill the emptiness and avoid the pain of your self-abandonment.

The way out of this is to start to practice Inner Bonging - paying attention to your feelings, putting your attention inside your body instead of always focusing outside. The moment you feel badly, consciously decide that you want responsibiity for causing these feelings and then notice what you are thinking or doing that is causing your pain. Your painful feelings that come from your thoughts are your inner guidance system's way of letting you know that what you are thinking is not true, and is not in your highest good.

Ask the highest part of yourself, "What is the truth?" Notice how you feel when you attend to your feelings and tell yourself the truth rather than judge yourself, ignore yourself, and make others responsible for your feelings.

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Comments

Author	Comment	Date
Phyllis St. Louis Missouri	And let me add my favorite self-judgment "You are not doing Inner Bonding well enough." What a fun paradox, like a Zen koan :-)	02/26/2007 10:44 AM
bridgeweavera Brenham Texas	Do you ever catch yourself adding, "And since it's your fault, now you have to just live with it"? I find that when I first start exploring what is causing upset feelings within me, I often discover some thought I presumed I had exorcised long ago. That's when I tell myself, "Well, you just haven't kept up your healing, your spirituality--you haven't been doing your inner bonding well enough." Then, as if in punishment, I feel like stopping the process because "You've just been dumb, that's all." And I discount my present feelings. Not to mention my feelings about being ridiculed by myself! Very often the process aborts right there, with me discounting myself and swallowing even the new feelings. But sometimes I manage to tell myself, "Hey! That's discounting me!" Then I can go into another layer, and explore why I am presently discounting myself. As long as I don't accept that initial discounting, I have little trouble going on, all the way to some healing awareness--usually, self-forgiveness. Now if I can get better at following through on Loving Action! How good that will make me feel! (but not to pressure myself!)	05/08/2007 05:47 AM
ChloeS Fontana California	Wooo, good one. I have had a lot of false belief voices popping up too. Your opinion doesn't matter. Your feelings don't matter. What you want doesn't matter. All in the voice of my father. I hadn't remembered hearing those words, until I became aware of them in my own head yesterday, but once I heard them.. the memories flooded back of how often he said them. I hear them a lot when I am discounting myself.	05/10/2007 02:57 PM
mentalfloss Portland Oregon	I can see where I tell myself those same false beliefs. That my opinion doesn't matter, my feelings don't matter, what I want doesn't matter. No one explicitly said those words to me... but no one said much of anything in regards to my feelings and opinions and wants. My mom often ignored me and was in her own dark depressed world. I'm seeing this to be a huge struggle for me now. I don't speak up for myself because I tell myself I don't matter. I don't say what I want because a lot of the times I don't know what I want, although I am getting better at it. I tend to just roll with whatever someone else is doing, or I'll do something on my own. I feel uncomfortable a lot of times saying what I want because I have this uncomfortable feeing and hear myself saying it doesn't matter what I want, they don't care. So that is when I find conflicts to be horribly difficult for me.. because I feel like my opinions and wants won't be giving any thought. So why bother? I feel a lot of my power is gone. I've abandoned myself. I struggle so much to not do this, and to tell myself that my feelings, opinions, and wants do matter. I'm not sure how to keep moving forward. I realized the other day I have not been working on the inner bonding process as often as I was. so I will start again. I've had several issues that have come up that I need to work on.	05/28/2007 08:15 AM
Phyllis St. Louis Missouri	Dear Mentalfloss There are several good columns somewhere on the site about setting boundaries. It sounds like that is what you are learning to do. Again, I want to emphasize that your spouse does not have the power to make your opinions matter. Only you do and you do it by setting good boundaries on the inside and on the outside. It is your actions that make your opinions matter. I do want to say something about the struggle you are in. The answer lies in working on creating a new part of yourself, the loving adult, who is not in the struggle at all. This part of you knows that all of the suffering is occuring because there are wounded children inside who are just trying their best to make life work. This part is compassionate and non-judgmental and can fill up with God's love. This part knows that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, that you are totally worthy of God's love. So the way out is not to get control over giving yourself up, it is to work on growing this new part. The old parts cannot do the job. Hugs Phyllis	05/28/2007 09:30 AM
ChloeS Fontana California	Bless you Phyllis, I have found this to be so very true. I struggled with it very hard, but once my loving adult started to make her presence known, it has become much easier. She is the calm voice in the storm of feelings coming from my wounded child. The last few weeks I have felt so much lighter and happier. Each day its gets easier to let go of the voice screaming for approval and validation, and listen to my guidance.	05/28/2007 09:51 AM
mentalfloss Portland Oregon	Ok so I need to work on growing this new part. How do I do that? You say that it is my actions that make my opinions matter.. what do you mean by that? I've struggled for many years with boundaries.. My awareness begun in 2002 of boundaries... since then I still struggle with them and feel scared to set boundaries with some people especially with my husband, sister in law, and people I work with... and as I write this.. myself. I feel this is the reason why I do not have any friends that are here in town because I just cannot handle the times when people do things I don't like and just not feeling comfortable around people much. I'd rather be alone. The only time I'm around others is at work and when I do family things... otherwise, I'm home with my husband and sister in law.	05/28/2007 05:43 PM
Phyllis St. Louis Missouri	Dear ChloeS I congratulate you. As I have written, it took me 10 years of IB and the pain of a marital break up before I "got" what a loving adult really was. You have reached the blessed place. How wonderful!! Hugs Phyllis	05/28/2007 09:24 PM
Phyllis St. Louis Missouri	Dear Mentalfloss You have perfectly described what it is like to be unable to set boundaries and the reason for it, usually, is that the fear of abandonment, including other people getting mad, is so great that you will tolerate being treated badly rather than stand up for yourself. However, the wounded part of you that is trying to stand up really can't do it. She is too young and too abused and beating her up for not doing it makes everything worse. So, how do you develop a loving adult? More than I can answer here, but I can say a couple of things. One, is that you need to work on finding a source of love-a spiritual connection, the feeling of being loved. You need to find a doorway to that without any preconceived notion of what it will look like. In Margaret's books there is a detailed meditation for creating a spirit guide. This is an imaginary being who embodies all of the qualities you need. It is the "as if." Except that often, if you work with this imaginary "as if" being, it becomes quite real as a source of love and guidance. You may need to work with a facilitator to find out what the barriers are, the wounded beliefs, that keep you from allow love it. Secondly, in creating a loving adult, you need to practice what some traditions call the "witness." Having a part of you that is not caught up in the drama and can simply observe it. I call this zooming out. If you try to access your loving adult and you are still having negative emotions and are still upset, you know that this is still a wounded child and you zoom out further. Kind of the "Cliff notes" verions, but there are columns you can read on the site, plus the books of course, that will help you. Ultimately, again, you probably need to have some sessions with a facilitator to get more of a handle on this. Hang in there! Hugs Phyllis	05/28/2007 09:34 PM
cloude9 HARRISONBURG Virginia	If "we" have been taught to blame ourselves for everthing, even the slightest miscue i guess, therapy, workshops, IB, loving your IC (iner child) will never leave room for real growth for us unless we quiet the voices from the past, stop being mean to ourselves (plenty of others have done that) and embrace our IC for the truly lovable spirt she/he is.	06/17/2007 05:41 AM
pgentilini New Gloucester Maine	I have a re-occuring dream that my parents and other family are sitting at the kitchen table. I know someone is coming to kill them all and I'm yelling and screaming for them to run because someone is coming to kill them....they never even flinch.....they act as though I am non-existant...no one can hear me. I have had this dream for over 10 years, I just found out what it meant a few months ago. Can you hear me now?!	09/06/2007 03:30 PM
EmilyAgnew Rochester New York United States	Dear Mentalfloss, I want to add something to Phyllis's reply to your question, specifically the one about your actions making your opinions matter. If you were caring for a young child, and they said they were hungry, and you said, "Oh sweetie, I'm hearing you are hungry!", but didn't give the child a snack, the child would get the message that her needs didn't matter. Similarly, for your Inner Child, if you say to yourself, "I don't like how so-and-so treats me! He pushes me around!", but then you don't take any action to change the situation, you are effectively telling your child--your core Self--that she doesn't matter to you. Loving action is the key. It sounds like your Inner Child is not trusting you to take care of her around other people, to the point that she would rather be alone, even though that must be lonely for you sometimes. It has taken me a while to understand this, but I now perceive that if I am irritated at someone else, it is ALWAYS because there is some way I am not taking care of myself around them. It is a big relief every time I remember this, to the point that I almost welcome being irritated now, as a cue that there is something I need to do to take care of myself! I wonder what is coming up for you reading this, if you'd care to share it. Emily	09/12/2007 11:14 AM
bridgeweavera Brenham Texas	pgentilini, I cannot tell what your tone is here, so besides being a portrayal of the truth of your childhood reality (they wouldn't listen to you to save their life!), is there another factor, like revenge (can you hear me now? no? then die!), or anxiety because you feel a responsibility you cannot live up to (i cannot save them), or just grief over the situation, or the satisfaction of understanding? Or something completely other? Like I said, I can't tell, and it arrests me every time I come across this post. I have to confess, the question at the end almost sounds like you're asking whether WE can hear you now, though I gather that you are just saying that's the meaning of this dream. If it were my dream, I'd have to ask that now of myself: do I hear me now?	09/12/2007 05:51 PM

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