We’re Taught to Correct Self-Abandonment With More Self-Abandonment: How being psychologically savvy in relationships can become another way we lose ourselves in relationships

I saw a very popular article recently about all the ways we self-abandon in relationships.

Where did you ignore your gut feelings? Or Ignore the red flags? Where did you tolerate disrespect? Where did you coach them instead of setting a boundary? Where are they not doing their work? Where did you accept less than you deserve?

The problem is, however, that this is still self-abandonment, just now with greater psychological precision and vocabulary.

…notice where the center of gravity still is:

Them.

What are they doing? Shouldn’t they be doing this thing differently? Is what they are doing respectful? Is it compatible? What does this behavior mean? Should I tolerate their behavior? Am I okay with their behavior? How can I get them to understand what I need? How can I get them to be more of what I want them to be? Should I break up with them? Are they my person? 

Putting so much focus on the other person and their behavior, in order to protect ourselves…is more self-abandonment. 

And this can often become mixed into doing a lot of our own personal work at the same time, going to your own therapy, learning about your issues, working on your stuff. So it almost becomes harder to see the ways in which we, at the same time, hyper-fixate on them.

The irony is that when we become fixated on the other person, we have less agency. We end up locating our center in them without knowing, and end up getting hooked in. It then actually becomes harder to respond flexibly, harder to relate well, and, often, harder to leave. 

And sometimes the only way we can leave without a grounded center is through even more intensified other-focus: Their problems. Their issues. Their limitations. They didn’t work on themselves. They didn’t change. They didn’t do the work. They weren’t good at relationships.

We’ve perhaps left them, but we’re still tangled up in them, and we left while still locating ourselves in them.

Not self-abandoning is actually incredibly challenging, and much simpler.

But most of our coping mechanisms are designed to keep us from having to be with ourselves, from having to inhabit our own simple experience, something that can be intolerable until enough capacity is built. So everything, even the best healing stuff, can become another way to avoid doing that. 

We even may be very clear, at least unconsciously, a reaction entangled with wanting it to be different. So it’s still focused on them and even unconsciously a hope that if we share it, they will do something differently. Instead of staying inside our direct, unhooked, self-possessed experience, while in relationship to them.

Even “trust your gut” can masquerade as an internal orientation while remaining external to us. My intuition tells me you're bad news. My gut is telling me not to trust you. The “gut” becomes a messenger from somewhere a little outside ourselves, that delivers knowledge to us—information about the outside, the person or world and what I should do.

Heeding that information can be very important at times. And using it to get curious about where you are in relation to what you're perceiving is an incredible use of intuition. 

But often, these experiences are used to bypass our own inhabited, direct experience: I feel unclear around you. I have an especially hard time staying grounded around you. I don’t want this. I don't like something about how I feel with you. This allows me to locate myself and choose, instead of trying to interpret a feeling for information about you and what I’m supposed to do.

So many of us psychologically aware and sophisticated folks become excellent evaluators of others. But that isn't relational, sitting outside our own selves and outside the relationship, with a clipboard, an open intuition channel, and a list of shoulds.

The movement toward our own non-self-abandonment is towards intimacy with our own direct experience while relating to others, no matter how activating they are to us. But in turn, that can make others less activating, and we, less hooked into them.

One of the first questions to ask ourselves is: Where are we focused on them? Where are we fixated on their issues, behavior, or on analyzing them, explaining things to them, wanting them to change, trying to get them to work on themselves or see something in themselves, or figuring out ways to navigate them?

Perhaps all we can do for a little while is notice how often we do that. We may not yet be ready to discover what happens when we stop figuring them out and stay with what is happening in us. And that’s OK.

But eventually, we may begin to ask: When they do x, y, z, what happens inside me?

Not simply, do we get hurt, sad, frustrated…while remaining fixated on their behavior.

Maybe we even notice it’s very hard not to turn our focus back onto them: Yes, I am hurt. But they ARE avoidant! They ARE the ones that need to work on this! They DO need to stop being so defensive!

And while all those things could be true, the helpful movement, for our own development and freedom, is back into ourselves. 

Where we plainly and more challengingly begin to find the distilled experience within. Embodied and direct, as if a weather report:

Does it make me move toward them? Pull away? Does it hook me in, and what happens then?

Does something in me open? Contract? Go quiet? Get hungry? Who in me gets hurt, and what’s my first response to that discomfort? Do I want them to change, do I want to explain? 

Where do I want something else to be true, that isn’t? What am I scared of losing or risking by staying with what might be true?

Maybe if I can get them to change the thing I don't like, I don't have to sit in the uncertainty of what it means that I dislike something so much about them.

Trying to resolve our own conflict through them can feel much easier than sitting with the experience inside ourselves.

But becoming hyper-vigilant about the other person can take us just as far away from ourselves as blindly over-accommodating them can. 

It’s just the flipside of the same issue. The new third way is to ask ourselves: What am I experiencing in myself, while in contact with them and reality as it is? What is the impulsive action in me when I experience that? And what helps me stay facing myself instead?

Take these two breakup stances:

I ended it because they were avoidant, weren’t doing the work, bad at communication, we were incompatible, I couldn’t do it anymore.

And:

I ended it because I didn’t want to continue with them. They were appealing to me in many ways, but their limitations turned me off. I realized I wanted a full meal, and they were offering a snack.

The words though, are less important than the inner-stance.

The first locates the reason for my movement in them: They are unavailable, therefore I must or should leave. I’ve been studying them to determine what I should do, as though their behavior is forcing my hand.

The other reorients back to our own selfhood: This is how I experience you. This is what happens to me in contact with who you are. And from that, I choose how I respond.

This stance is paradoxically what allows their behavior to become not only experiential, relational information about reality, but can allow the potential for real intimacy and collaboration, rather than something that keeps us psychologically organized around them.

I can be affected and stay with myself. I can stay close to the pared down reality of myself and them. And then choose: Share my experience. Lean in. Lean away. Decline. Leave. Change my mind. Get curious. Let something unfold. See what you do. Be disappointed. Sit together with the uncertainty of what we do with the conflict of what I want and who you are. And remain findable to myself and capable of navigating it all.

Because if all of my attention is on determining who you are, what you are doing, what I want you to be doing, or whether you are good for me, I can spend the entire relationship fixated on you, all while thinking I’m taking care of me and being empowered and relational. While barely in relationship with myself at all.