Breaking Up with Self Abandonment

Continuing the journey.......what does it mean to 'turn up for ourselves'?

I wrote a post on Substack last year about how self abandonment has been a huge part of my history and how I was moving away from that as a way of operating. It is an ongoing journey.

I used my running trainers as an example. I always look at my girls shoes and trainers and replace their shoes when they get too small, there are holes or no more tread. I looked at my trainers and realised I had had them since early 2020 and they were completely worn down with literally no tread. No wonder it was painful and uncomfortable walking/running in them. So I got some new ones and that felt good. As with most things dealing with something in one area of your life doesn’t mean it goes away in other parts of your life.

Replacing the trainers was easy for me, shifting my patterns is more complex.

I have noticed that addressing things that are external to me (like buying something when I need it or saying no to an arrangement that doesn’t work) are easier for me than tackling my internal processes, like my relationship with food and sleep. I have learnt to people please less with other people, but when it comes to people pleasing some of my own parts (or self states) I am sometimes driven by some younger, defiant parts and sometimes I just say ‘fuck it’ and do what they want. One of my teachers, Stephen Terrell, says that working with developmental trauma is all about healing our relationship with ourselves. This helps me have compassion with myself as I grapple with my internal processes, reparenting and how complex and back and forwards my progress can be.

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Relationship patterns

I used to abandon myself in most relationships, and extensively in some. I was continuously overgiving and putting myself in situations which were unhelpful for me. With boyfriends my main purpose was to make sure they were pleased with me rather than ever pondering ‘am I getting my needs met here’ or ‘do I actually even like how it feels to be with them’ or ‘do they interest me’? Active unkindness, dismissal and being ignored were explained away by me, even though they hurt deeply.

It took me years in therapy to be able to have a healthy adult love relationship, to understand what it even is, how people treat each other in a loving partnership and how relationships actually operate. Insecure attachment and abandonment wounds make relationships complex and painful to navigate, particularly on the dating front.

With female friends people often said I ‘gave such good advice’ or was such a ‘good listener’, this was connected to my need to be useful, to be helpful, to be wanted. If I wasn’t providing some sort of service then was I valuable as a friend? This was mostly operating unconsciously until I unpicked this all in therapy, making conscious what drove my behaviour. I can still get stuck in this now though.

I had some friendships where I felt almost continuously frustrated because I got hardly any air time, and I found it extremely difficult to speak up or put boundaries down. One friend, who I am no longer in touch with, was in a continuous cycle of breaking up and getting back together with a boyfriend for nearly 7 years. And for those 7 years that was what we talked about. I never came out and said what I thought because I was too busy trying to be ‘nice’. And I didn’t ask for what I needed, which was to also have some time to share and be listened to, because I was scared. I was also often resentful because I had no space, had not stood up for myself or put down boundaries. It doesn’t seem to make sense does it? Reciprocity was not present and we can all sense that on a nervous system level, even if we don’t consciously speak it.

It does make sense though. My underlying pattern was - I will be ‘nice’ or do what I think you want me to because then you will stay. It is a form of control and underneath it all I was abandoning and ignoring myself.

I have significantly healed this in the relationship space with others.

What do you notice about your own friendships and relationships?

Food patterns

If you have listened to ‘Grow Yourself Up’ you will have heard me talk about my relationship with food a bit. I could describe myself as a food addict, a compulsive overeater, a binge eater, a comfort eater or as having disordered eating but none of these labels really capture the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is this: I did not get my needs met in childhood, I was raised by people who had a lot of their own trauma and lost a baby very early in their marriage (and in my life, when I was 3) and my pain was not held, seen or tended to. My parents were dealing with that, all their own trauma and generational trauma and each had their own unhelpful coping strategies. They also probably thought that we, as children, would not be impacted (this was 1979). There was very little coregulation and pain leaking out all over the place. So I learnt to tend to my emotional pain with food and at various points in my life this has got more out of control, depending on what else I was trying to manage at the time.

In my 20’s I largely gave up bread and pasta, that was in the early 2000’s when carbs were demonised and everyone had done the Atkins diet or was trying the Dukan diet. I never did those but I did my best to not eat white carbs, because I felt better in my body when I did that (you could argue this was disordered eating masquerading as healthy eating). Similarly, with sugar and alcohol I felt better when I did not have them (or had just a little bit). Both of these substances feed anxiety and particularly with drinking I could always feel an impact. I am now sober and having a new look at my relationship with sugar and carbs.

In my 30’s my tricky relationship with food became more evident, especially after some traumatic events. Alongside working on my food in therapy/groups I could more clearly see how I used food in times of stress/need/sadness and also to celebrate.

My 40’s have been dominated by parenting and food has been a constant companion on the journey. I have used it to give me capacity when I had none and also to dull down my sensitivity and tend to my sensory needs. I am really interested in the role food plays in this way. Anyone else? English breakfast tea and chocolate are a big part of how I survived early motherhood. Previously, I had time and space to exercise and my nervous system was not as frazzled as it has been in parenting. Throw in the pandemic and now perimenopause and I am really being called to look at how I abandon myself with food. What is she even on about you may ask? Very simply - I eat things that don’t make me feel good and even have an actively adverse impact on my body (hello younger parts using an old coping strategy), with things like inflammation, gut issues and joint pain.

I should not consume gluten as I have an autoimmune condition, it contributes to inflammation and I have an intolerance to it. And yet sometimes I do. Also, somewhere along the way I rejected the message about ‘carbs being bad’ that we are fed as women and instead thought ‘Fuck the patriarchy, I will eat what I want’. I am not debating the merits of carbs here, for me I definitely need to eat them.

What I am saying is that I have lost some of my discernment around what is loving for ME and MY body. What I eat makes NO difference to the patriarchal society we live in and yet somehow I feel that I am resisting my patriarchal conditioning if I eat pizza. And maybe I am AND WHO IS THIS SERVING? Certainly not me.

And yes, this may sound like an awful lot of navel gazing and I have all sorts of privilege that allows me to ponder this.

In the quest to love myself better examining how I nourish myself is a huge thing. Does this resonate for you at all?

Work Patterns

2024 has been an interesting year of being confronted with my patterns and seeing the ways that, mostly because of habitual stress responses, I tend to overwork. I started the year realising how habituated to chronic stress I was. I saw how I continued to perpetuate the cycle by taking on more things, doing more work and not giving myself enough time to rest and just BE. When I am stressed, overwhelmed or overworked, more work feels like a resource for me.

I know it sounds really counterintuitive, and it is certainly counterproductive, AND this is the pattern many of us have. In sympathetic? Great, lets really double down and be EVEN more in sympathetic.

I have done A LOT to change that this year and will write more about that in a separate post.

So…..continuing the break up with self abandonment I am turning my attention to my food much more closely. One of my sisters said she is going to try and do some version of mild keto (don’t ask me what that is) and suggested we be accountability partners. So what I am committing to is this:

I am going to plan my meals

I am going to eat things that make me feel good in my body.

It is my tendency to want to make grand, sweeping, spectacular change. And I don’t stick to it and it doesn’t last so am going for some more achievable goals and going to use forward planning to support myself.

I am going to be lovingly telling myself this:

The fleeting taste of anything with gluten in it with salted butter (divine) is not going to ease my pain or bring me into more gentle contact with myself. Instead, it serves to create another problem, contribute to inflammation in my body and add to the allostatic load that my system is carrying. I am going to try to remind myself of this each time I want to eat things that hurt my body.

We need to be well resourced and nourished and lovingly tended to to change the world. In short, we need to turn up for ourselves, it is ultimately essential if we hope to turn up for others.

Where are you self abandoning? What small shifts can you make?

New Journal Prompts for Grow Yourself Up will be in the next post.

Sending you love, go gently into your week. Cath xxx