How Do I Stop Abandoning Myself?
What it means to stay connected to yourself in relationships without becoming emotionally cut off from others
One of the more painful things that can happen in relationships is slowly losing touch with yourself while trying to stay connected to someone else.
This often doesn’t happen all at once. It can look like constantly accommodating, suppressing certain feelings, over-focusing on another person’s emotional state, or becoming so preoccupied with preserving the connection that you stop fully listening to yourself. Over time, this can become a deeply ingrained relational pattern.
Many people learned early in life, often without realizing it, that staying connected to others required some degree of self-abandonment. Perhaps there was pressure to accommodate, to stay agreeable, to suppress certain feelings, or to prioritize the emotional states of other people above their own.
These adaptations are understandable. Children naturally organize themselves around attachment needs, they learn what helps preserve connection and what threatens it.
But patterns that once helped us maintain closeness can eventually create a different kind of suffering in adult relationships.
A person may become highly attuned to others while remaining disconnected from themselves. They may sense everyone else’s feelings very clearly while struggling to recognize their own needs, limits, or emotional reality in real time.
And because this pattern develops gradually, many people don’t initially recognize it as self-abandonment at all. It can simply feel like being caring, empathic, accommodating, or relationship-oriented.
But caring about others and staying connected to yourself are not opposites. In fact, healthy relationships depend on both.
If this dynamic feels familiar to you, my Healing Insecure Attachment course explores these patterns in much greater depth, including practical ways to build a more secure and grounded relationship with yourself and others. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.
In the rest of this article, I’ll explore how self-abandonment develops, why it often persists even in adulthood, and several practical ways we can begin rebuilding a more trustworthy relationship with ourselves from the inside out.
