Cease to Self-Abandon: Dispel your Illusions of Self-Abandonment
It was my own void that whispered to me, you deserve more! More what? More in my life than waiting for someone else to fix and fulfill my life. When I knew that I had the power to become the person who would never betray me ever again I broke the spell of my own self-abandoning illusion.
The wholeness and fulfillment we long for can only come from the validation of self to the self. Trying to get other people to fill our void is a futile waste of mighty energy, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. Codependency, looking outside oneself for what we need, is endemic in our culture.
NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness describes self-abandonment as: Rejecting, suppressing, or ignoring part of yourself in real time. In other words, you have a need or desire you want to meet, and (often on the spot) you make the decision not to meet it.
We self-abandon every time we choose not to be present. Every time we distract ourselves with something other than the power of our own truth in this moment. Social media, overeating, excessive drinking or even too much exercise can remove us from being in touch with the one precious moment. Shunting our basic needs to the side, to be approved of by anything outside of ourselves. We engage in self-betrayal through the obsession to somehow prove our worth to others.
We learn to self-abandon early in life if our needs and feelings were not mirrored and validated. If our parents and caregivers did not demonstrate that our needs mattered, we interpreted that to mean we should ignore those needs and feelings, particularly if they were inconvenient in our family.
Self-abandonment occurs in families dysfunctioned by addiction, abuse, mental illness, or anything that distracts from the healthy needs of the family members. Addiction and abuse, our own, and that of our parents, is just another form of self-abandonment and our parents likely suffered from the tyranny of self-betrayal as well.
Removing the shame and stigma from our scariest and most unattractive needs and feelings is how we cease to self-abandon. It is a sacred act to tenderly embrace the parts of ourselves that we have long held outside of our own heart with disdain or even disgust: our neediness, our fear, our jealousy, our rage. Finding a way to love those “icky” parts is the key to how we become whole. I jokingly call this “embracing our slime”.
Quieting our mind, we can contact a version of ourselves from childhood or adolescence when we might have experienced some of those raw feelings of shame, unworthiness, and insecurity. Having a conversation with yourself at an earlier age can reveal what you once felt before constructing defense mechanisms to protect your feelings. Learning to bear your previously shunned needs and feelings is a profound act of ceasing to self-abandon.