Self-abandonment: how I work with people who lose themselves.

Self-abandonment is a clinical term, and it describes something you’ve experienced a lot. You probably experience some form of it every day. It’s the feeling when you’ve lost yourself, in your life in general, or in a particular moment.

It’s a hard-sounding word. It might even sound accusatory. But when we stay with it, it’s vulnerable. You don’t lose yourself out of choice. You lose yourself because you had to. A part of you wasn’t safe to be seen, or heard, or felt, and so you had to walk away. That was, once, an important, life-saving skill.

My work is about exploring what it might be like to let it go.

What is self-abandonment?

Self-abandonment is when you have to hide, or disconnect from, part of yourself. It might be the part of you that wants something from someone — like help, or a listening ear. It might be the part of you that feels wronged. It might be a part of your personality that you feel is undesirable or unlikeable. Self-abandonment is what happens when you don’t voice that part of yourself, or pretend it isn’t there. You might also think of this as masking — covering up how you really feel, or what you really want to do, in order to be likeable, compliant or perfect.

What self-abandonment might look like

At work, this might look like working overtime because your boss asked you to, even though you’ve already done extra hours this week. It might be that the thought of your boss being disappointed is too much to bear. Or it might go the other way — the thought of not impressing your boss, of getting that imagined gold star, is so far outside of your experience, it feels unimaginable.

With the people you love, it can look like always being the easy one. You are agreeable, low-maintenance, happy with whatever. You are also, quietly, never asked what you want — and by now, you might not have an answer ready if someone did.

You might have lost yourself to an addiction. The thing you want to stop but can’t. You might find yourself able to keep it together for your work, or maybe your friends and family, but alone, you can’t. You can put on a show for others, but you abandon yourself when you’re alone.

When you might have first learned to abandon yourself

You might have grown up queer, and had to hide a part of you that felt dangerous to make known. You got so good at doing that that now, living in the big city, as an adult, it’s an instinct that has been quite hard to shut off. There are times when part of you stays hidden, and you’re not sure that serves you anymore.

Or there is trauma. Something terrible that shouldn’t have happened. You lost part of yourself then. You had to jettison it, to keep the life-raft afloat.

Or you might have lost your direction, your life’s North Star. The future feels scary, because of politics or climate change, and you’re struggling to see the beauty in the every day. What value is the life that you lead in the face of existential collapse?

There are a million different flavours of self-abandonment, and none of the above might be yours. But if you notice that sometimes you’re not acting like you, that you don’t like you, or perhaps you no longer know who “you” are — I think we’d work well together.

How we repair self-abandonment

The antidote to self-abandonment is self-discovery. Together, we will explore who you are in the different facets of your life. You will get to know who you are. And so will I, hopefully.

You might want to start in your day-to-day. What is happening in your life, and how are you responding to it? This might feel like catharsis. It might feel good to get things off your chest and to have someone to listen, to really listen to what you’re saying. As I am listening to you, you will also be listening to yourself. We might discover some themes and some patterns, and we might want to explore what they mean.

You might also want to go back into the past. You might want to explore the key relationships that made you who you are today. The moments where you felt bathed in love, and the moments when you did not. We will explore whatever feels right, without judgement or shame. We will, if you’re ready to, connect back to who you were, then.

You might want to stay in the here and the now. Our relationship may become central to the work. You might notice the ways in which I annoy you. I might notice, perhaps, some ways in which you might be expressing something towards me that has, so far, gone unspoken. Whatever happens between us is information. I will show up every week, and so will you. Whatever happens, we will talk about it. And in doing that, we might learn what happens, or what happened, in other areas of your life. What happens between you and me is a petri dish. We can explore in our relationship what might be possible in others.