There’s a pattern I see in so many women I work with. Smart, compassionate, capable women who are running on fumes not because they don’t know how to care for themselves, but because they’ve been taught to abandon themselves in order to be loved, accepted, or “successful.”
Self-abandonment isn’t always loud. It doesn’t necessarily come with sirens or chaos. More often, it’s quiet so quiet, in fact, that many of us don’t even realize we’re doing it.
It looks like saying yes when your body screams no.
It looks like dimming your truth so someone else can shine.
It looks like holding back your wild because you’ve been told you’re too much.
It’s sneaky and conditioned and sometimes rewarded.
Self-abandonment happens in the micro-moments:
- When you override your intuition because you don’t trust it.
- When you betray your body by ignoring its signals for rest, pleasure, or pause.
- When you mold yourself into someone you think the world will find more acceptable, more lovable, more successful.
At its core, self-abandonment is a loss of relationship with yourself.
Over time, self-abandonment drains you of your clarity, your joy, and your power.
And yet, most of us were conditioned to do it. We were taught to be good, to be liked, to be selfless, to be pleasing. We internalized the message that our needs were too much, our feelings were inconvenient, and our voice was better softened or silenced.
But the cost?
Is disconnection. Exhaustion. Resentment. A life that might look full on the outside but feels hollow on the inside.
Reclaiming yourself starts with noticing the patterns of self-abandonment not with shame, but with compassion.
It starts with asking:
- Where have I left myself?
- What parts of me have I ignored, suppressed, or sacrificed to survive?
- And what would it mean to return?
Because healing doesn’t come from becoming someone new. It comes from coming home to the one you’ve always been.
When you stop abandoning yourself, everything changes – your relationships, your energy, your joy, your power.
Because the most important relationship you’ll ever have is the one with yourself.
So I’ll ask you, gently but honestly:
Where are you still leaving yourself? And what might shift if you stayed?
Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash