The Moment of Self-Abandonment
The day started with an innocent message from her boss: “Sorry for the last minute change but the 10 o’clock meeting has been pushed forward to 9, please come by my office at 8.30 to discuss.” It was 7.30am and Anna had just come out of the shower. She knew the last minute changes were typical for her boss, she received a similar message a few times a month, and she had convinced herself she’d accepted this, yet, in this moment, she felt a sudden rush of energy to her head with intense tension on the temples. She needed to hurry up. 10 minutes to get dressed and put on make up. No breakfast to catch the train in time. Besides, her stomach felt tense and tight, she couldn’t swallow anything. She called the neighbour to ask if she could walk the dog, hopefully she’d be available. She watched her mind speeding up as she was going through the list of things that had to be done and she wouldn’t finish. The familiar feeling of guilt crept up and joined the tight knot of anxiety in her upper belly.
When she got to the office, her boss looked confused seeing her rush through the door. “What do you need, Anna?” — he asked. She was puzzled. “You asked me to come earlier, you sent me a message this morning” — she answered with a weak voice. “Oh, right, sorry — it’s been moved to next Tuesday at 9am” — he said with his eyes glued to the laptop in front of him. Anna was standing in the doorway as she felt a burning heat rising up her neck and her heart trying to jump out of her chest. The tension in her head was growing bigger, the room seemed darker, as if there was a sudden blackout and all the lights went off. She couldn’t move. She wanted to say something but she didn’t even know what. She'd forgotten where she was and why. There was a faint feeling of 'I should do something,' but it felt disconnected from her. Her hands and arms suddenly felt very heavy and cold, her mouth was dry. “Anything else?” — her boss couldn’t hide his irritation as he looked up at Anna. At that moment, all she could do was just to turn her head mumbling “Sorry”, and force herself to walk out, though she wasn’t really sure how she did that. A colleague stopped her to say “hi”. She got her focus back. The incident was over. She wouldn't think about it again.
When Anna first told me that story, it didn’t have all the details I am including now. We uncovered them together after she started the session: “I’m good, really good, there has just been this silly incident at work and I feel embarrassed even to tell you this, it’s so small and unimportant…”. Anna was, by most measures, successful. But she often felt guilty for not being grateful enough for what she had, not energised enough to do more. She did everything ‘right.’ And yet something felt off. Like her life wasn’t entirely hers or it was a trial and the real thing was still about to come.
Anna felt embarrassed about her reaction to her boss’s behaviour — on the one hand, she thought this shouldn’t have affected her that much, on the other hand — she wished she had been more assertive and demanded more respect. Quiet resentment grew toward her boss, alongside guilt and self-criticism for not standing up for herself.
The threads of her emotions and thoughts were tangled into a knot — when she pulled one, the other would get tighter, they appeared indistinguishable and inseparable. Analysing her behaviour and logically disassembling her decisions was helpful only to an extent. Anna understood this situation hurt so much because it showed her pattern of behaviour that quietly led to her resenting herself and making her feel stuck and without a way out. She understood that this was a moment of self-abandonment. When she tried to apply her friend's advice — "You should just say no" or "You should be clear about your boundaries" — it led to even greater self-doubt. Her boss wouldn't respond favourably to her newly acquired assertiveness. She'd end up feeling worse about herself, more withdrawn and anxious.
Self-abandonment is a tricky one to detect. Often it comes in disguise: the inner restlessness gets overridden to chase another fad in self-help world; the moment of helpless freeze is judged as ‘inadequate’, ‘immature’ or simply ‘a failure’; the creative energy gets arrested by the pressure of productivity and performance.
The most erosive and harmful ways we abandon ourselves are often not big decisions and grand gestures. They're the small, repetitive instants of "I'll think about it later" when something hurts. The moments when we minimise our experience and dismiss it as ‘unimportant, irrelevant, exaggerated.’
Anna realised how she repeatedly abandoned herself in ways that seemed insignificant and small, yet they were solidifying a sense of detachment from herself and lack of self-trust. She noticed how she would reject her own emotions and override her needs when she felt under pressure and when she felt any disagreement or conflict might result in — according to her — being rejected by the other person. She started paying attention to the micromoments of numbness and freeze in her body and learnt how to recognise them as they were about to happen. She became curious about herself in ways that allowed her to gently keep herself company when her body felt like ‘disappearing.’
These realisations didn’t come easy and were not obvious at first. Anna was aware that the same pattern needs to be discovered again and again as each moment required a different response, so only her moment-to-moment awareness would reveal how she acted out that pattern.
To understand self-abandonment, we need to put aside intellectual definitions and generalisations that describe the results of this pattern in our lives and focus our attention on the momentary, lived experience as we are sensing it in our bodies. Self-abandonment happens when we deprive ourselves of the right to have needs and desires which might be uncomfortable for those around us. It is a moment when we judge our biological responses as moral failures — we condemn our sadness, we are ashamed of our anger, we hate our longing. It is also a moment of forcing ourselves to be different from who we are in the moment, ‘getting over’ a feeling, being ‘more of’ something else.
Anna began truly recognising the pattern of how she self-sacrificed not because someone pointed out to her that she was a ‘people pleaser’ but because she started paying attention to how she responded to her own emotions and sensations moment-to-moment, and how her body reacted to certain people and circumstances. She noticed how she minimised her experience in our sessions and became curious about it as she knew those moments held the key to her loving herself more.
Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to slow down and — before the familiar judgment of not having boundaries arrives — ask some questions: What makes saying ‘no’ feel dangerous? Where else does it show up in my life? And allow the answers to come slowly, without rushing to any expected answer. This patient, curious, and open attitude toward understanding our own experience might be the most liberating, most revealing, and most challenging work we can do for ourselves. Not knowing is an uncomfortable space.
Anna's recognition didn't solve the pattern. But it gave her something else: the possibility of noticing the moment before she disappeared.
Sometimes, that's enough to begin.
