Stop Abandoning Yourself
Here’s five things you can do right now
Yesterday, I scheduled a meeting crammed right up next to my dentist appointment for next week. If you were in my head while I was doing it, you would have heard: I know that meeting is going to go over. There’s no way I’ll get to the dentist on time. If you were on the text stream, you would have read: “Sure, Monday at 3:30 works great! See you then!”
Exclamation points always make you sound confident and cheery.
If we’re lucky, we only have to go to the dentist twice a year. Two times. About 45 minutes each. Yet they’re so important that we schedule them three—sometimes six—months in advance. We get reminder texts. We get cheesy postcards in the mail with Garfield holding a toothbrush. We get the nice receptionist we’ve known for 15 years leaving a voicemail we will never listen to.
And still, I acted like it didn’t matter.
The dentist is a loaded topic for me. As you know, if you’ve been following me this last year, I’ve been increasingly open about my multiple relapses into disordered eating.
Every time the dentist opens my mouth it feels like he’s opening the stall of a dingy bathroom to find me there in my worst moments—purging, or crying, or possibly praying for it to stop. And when he gets out the tools to scrape, I feel the digging up of my history: my shame, my piles of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrappers.
I really don’t want to sit through that horror film. If you’re someone in recovery from substances, anxiety, depression, a health challenge, people pleasing, loss—if you’re a human—you know what that feels like.
And you know why avoiding this nightmare doesn’t work.
As Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals:
Rationally speaking this kind of avoidance makes no sense at all…The more you arrange your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious the more likely they are to develop into serious problems.
Self-abandonment usually starts small: you eat lunch at your desk because it’s just easier, you let resentments brew and don’t take a pause, you cancel your therapy appointment because that project seems more urgent, or once again you don’t plan anything you really want for your weekend—and end up feeling sorry for yourself.
It feels familiar. Comfortable. Easy to put your self—your body, your needs—aside.
It’s harder to meet your self, your body, your needs face to face in the mirror.
Brianna Wiest says it this way in The Mountain Is You:
Ending self-abandonment will cost you the identity that survives by being needed, pleasing, productive, and ‘fine.’ It will disrupt your comfort zone and confuse your sense of direction at first—but that disorientation is part of becoming someone new.
If you want to live a full life, a life of integrity, health, values, friendship, creativity, and if you want to share your genius energy with others, you are going to need to stop abandoning yourself.
Get Curious, Open Up, and Focus Your Energy on What Matters Most
Here are a few practices that draw from my Wise Effort Method that you can do today.
1. Get curious and track it
Start noticing and tracking the times you override your system—biological, emotional, existential. Your wise mind whispers: You know that saying yes here isn’t really going to go well for you. Your body’s tired, but you keep pushing it. Or you keep ignoring: What I really need to do right now is take care of myself. There’s information there. And you’ve gotten used to tuning it out.
So first: bring those signals into the foreground. The simple act of noticing and recording a pattern increases conscious awareness and self-regulation—making change more likely even before you “do” anything else.
Wise Practice: Start mentally monitoring or tracking in your phone every time you abandon yourself. Be on the look out for:
Emotional abandonment
Physical abandonment
Existential abandonment
Relational abandonment
2. What don’t you want to feel?
There are lots of reasons we abandon our needs. Maybe it’s shame, fear of conflict, fear of vulnerability, discomfort with stillness. Maybe you were never taught how to take care of yourself. Or you fear what might happen if you decide to take more agency in your life–there are things you may need to let go of, relationships you may need to disrupt, or dreams that feel too big to tackle. There’s a responsibility that comes with caring for yourself.
Wise Practice: When you notice the urge to abandon yourself, pause and ask: What dreaded experience am I trying to avoid right now? What am I avoiding thinking, feeling, exposing myself to?
3. Be willing for it to feel bad, so it can feel really good
It feels bad for me to go to the dentist. I text my husband or a friend in the waiting room. I cry in the dentist chair. I plug in Tara Brach or my favorite mantra mix to tolerate it a little more. After all these years, it’s gotten a little better—but it still feels pretty bad. But when I do it—choose to take care of myself in this way—I leave feeling great. I deserve the free toothbrush.
Wise Practice: Try finishing these sentences:
“When I take care of myself, I’m investing in…”
“Integrity for me means…”
“When I abandon myself, the cost is…”
“When I stay with myself, I have more…”
4. Stop faking it
Self-abandonment works partly because you make it look normal. You sound enthusiastic about plans you don’t want to keep. You excuse the yoga cancel as a scheduling issue instead of what it often is: choosing productivity over body care. You act agreeable while building a private stash of resentment about how everyone is taking advantage of you.
This incongruence sends mixed messages to others—but even worse, to you. How can you trust yourself if what you want and need inside doesn’t match what you prioritize and say out loud on the outside?
Wise Practice: Catch the incongruence (fake smile, automatic “sounds great”), pause, then choose one congruent action:
Let me get back to you.
I can do X, but not Y.
What do I need right now? Act on that.
5. Focus your energy: Start being there for yourself
Secretly, we all wish someone will rescue us. I kind of wish the receptionist would come pick me up and drive me to the dentist. Or that the person I’m double-booking with would say, Wait—are you sure that works for you? Check in with your heart.
But the reality is: no one will. Not every time. A few friends might remember your tendency to fake-smile and double check, “Are you ok?”—but not when they’re busy, caught in their own lives. Ultimately, you’re the only one who’s with you all of the time to the end (sorry for the downer, but it’s true).
Wise Practice: Choose one small self-loyal action:
Protect your body
Tell yourself the truth
When you catch yourself self-abandoning, repair fast
Your (and my) Wise Effort practice is to keep choosing yourself in small ways, repeatedly—so you become someone you want to spend the rest of your life with, someone you feel proud to be, and someone who deserves the free gift at the dentist.