Self-abandonment as the original betrayal
· 11 min read
The childhood blueprint
Most adult self-abandonment was learned young. A child whose feelings were inconvenient to a caregiver learns to make those feelings smaller and quieter. The child does not do this consciously. The child does it to stay attached, because attachment is survival. By the time the child is an adult, the suppression runs on autopilot. They walk into a room and read what the other person wants before they have registered what they themselves want. Pia Mellody calls this the wound to the inherent worth of the child; the child concludes that their being is less valuable than the caregiver's mood. In adult partnership, this blueprint is reactivated by any cue of disapproval. The partner frowns, and a forty-year-old shrinks like a six-year-old. Recognizing the blueprint is not the same as escaping it. But you cannot escape what you cannot see, so the seeing is step one. The work is to notice, gently, when the old shrink-response fires, and to ask whether this current adult situation actually requires it.Numbness as a wage
When you abandon your signals long enough, the signals get quieter. The body that gets ignored stops shouting. This produces the strange flat affect of the chronically self-abandoning person: they cannot tell you what they want for dinner, what movie they would like, where they would like to vacation. They are not being difficult. The data is genuinely not available to them. They have starved the part of themselves that knows. Numbness is sometimes mistaken for being easygoing or low-maintenance. It is not. It is the wage paid for the long labor of ignoring oneself. Reversing it requires re-sensitization — letting small preferences register again, in low-stakes situations, until the channel reopens. This is slow. It cannot be done by force of will. It is done by curiosity: what would I actually like, if I let myself want something?The mirror-partner problem
A partner who has abandoned themselves becomes a mirror. Mirrors are pleasant for about six months. After that they are exhausting, because the other person never gets a break from looking at themselves. They want a second face in the room. They want disagreement, surprise, friction, an actual someone. The mirror-partner thinks they are being loving by agreeing to everything. They are not. They are denying the other person the experience of meeting another human being. This is one of the cruelest things you can do under the banner of love. It looks like devotion. It functions like absence.The provocation cycle
When one partner has vanished, the other partner often starts provoking — picking fights, behaving badly, doing small destructive things. This is not random. It is an attempt to summon the missing person. The provocation says: I know you are in there somewhere, please come out and be a real second person with me. The self-abandoning partner usually reads this as cruelty or instability and doubles down on their own disappearance, which intensifies the provocation. The cycle ends when the abandoned one comes back into themselves and meets the provoker as an actual second person. Often the provocations stop within weeks. The provoker was lonely, not evil.Resentment as data
Resentment is the body keeping score when the mouth will not. If you find yourself resenting your partner for things you said yes to, the resentment is information: you said yes when you meant no. Resentment is not the problem. Resentment is the symptom that you have been abandoning yourself in this relationship. The treatment is not to suppress the resentment. The treatment is to stop generating it, by saying no when you mean no. Harriet Lerner has written extensively on this: women in particular are trained to convert "no" into "yes" and then to feel guilty about the resulting bitterness. The guilt keeps the cycle running. Permitting the no breaks the cycle.The difference between humility and self-erasure
Humility is right-sized. It says: I am one of many, I could be wrong, I am not the only person in the room. Self-erasure is shrunk. It says: I am no one, I am always wrong, I do not belong in the room. The two states often get confused, especially by religious or moral traditions that praise selflessness without specifying which self is being given up. Giving up a grandiose self is healthy. Giving up your basic right to occupy space, to have preferences, to be visible — that is not humility. That is the abandonment that this article is about.The "good partner" trap
Many self-abandoners describe themselves as "good partners" — accommodating, low-conflict, low-need. This is often presented as a virtue. It is more accurately a defense. By being so easy, you protect yourself from the risk of being a real person who could be rejected. If the partner leaves, you can tell yourself: but I did everything right. The "doing everything right" was the problem. The partner did not get a chance to meet you, only your performance of accommodation. The performance is what failed, not you — because you were never offered to begin with.Re-sensitization through small choice
The way back is small. You do not need a dramatic gesture. You need a hundred small acts of preference. Order what you want at the restaurant. Pick the movie when it is your turn. Say "I do not feel like talking right now." Put on the sweater. The point is not the content of the choice. The point is that the choice was made by you, from data inside you, and acted on. Each small act re-trains the nervous system that your signals lead to action. Over months, the channel reopens. Mellody and Beattie both describe this as the slow work of building an inner self where there had been an outer-facing performance.What the partner notices
When you start coming back, the partner notices, even if they cannot name it. There is more friction in the relationship. You disagree more. You name dissatisfactions you used to swallow. A healthy partner will be unsettled at first and then relieved — they finally have someone to be with. An unhealthy partner will escalate, because the system was running on your disappearance, and your reappearance threatens its function. The partner's reaction to your re-emergence is one of the best diagnostic tests of the relationship. If they cannot tolerate your becoming a person, then the relationship was built on your non-personhood, and the question is whether you want to rebuild it on different terms or leave it.The fear of being too much
Underneath chronic self-abandonment is usually a fear: that the real self, if it appeared, would be too much. Too needy, too loud, too angry, too much. This fear is rarely tested. The self-abandoner concludes in advance that their full self is intolerable and pre-emptively hides it. When they do, in therapy or in a safe relationship, finally let the full self appear, they almost always find it is not too much. It is in fact rather ordinary — a person with preferences and feelings and limits, like other people. The "too muchness" was a story, told by a younger self who once was, in fact, told they were too much by someone who could not handle them.Self-abandonment is not selflessness
A culture that prizes selflessness can make self-abandonment look noble. It is not. Selflessness, properly understood, is the temporary suspension of self-interest in service of someone else, done by a person who has a self to suspend. Self-abandonment is the chronic absence of any self to begin with. You cannot give what you do not have. The chronically self-abandoning person cannot truly give to their partner because there is no one home to do the giving. What looks like generosity is often compulsion — a need to perform care to maintain the attachment. Real generosity requires a real self.The repair is mutual
If both partners are doing this work, the relationship can become something neither of them has experienced before: a meeting of two actual people, with all the friction and surprise and discomfort that involves. The relationship will be louder, more contentious, more interesting, and considerably more alive. It will also be harder, because two real selves rub against each other in ways that two performances do not. Most people, asked in advance, would say they want this. Most people, when they get it, flinch. The flinch is normal. The work is to stay through the flinch, on both sides, and find out what is on the other side of it. Terry Real and Sue Johnson, from different angles, describe this as the only relationship worth having: the one where both people show up.Citations
Beattie, Melody. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself. Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1986.
Mellody, Pia, Andrea Wells Miller, and J. Keith Miller. Facing Codependence: What It Is, Where It Comes From, How It Sabotages Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.
Woititz, Janet G. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1983.
Carnes, Patrick. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1997.
Real, Terry. The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
Norwood, Robin. Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change. New York: Pocket Books, 1985.
Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little, Brown, 2008.
Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Welwood, John. Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Johnson, Robert A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.
Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
◆
Cite this:
Comments
·
Sign in to join the conversation.
Be the first to share how this landed.