4 Ways to Stop Self-Abandoning in Your Relationships
The path to self-abandonment in dating is slow but slippery. Not one action causes us to lose ourselves, but a culmination of sequences. Moreover, if you have self-abandoned once, it’s likely you’ve done so numerous times before.
It’s unnerving and uncomfortable to lose autonomy over your own emotions, and that is exactly what self-abandonment does to you. It’s the continuous setting aside of our wants, needs, emotions, and desires in favor of someone else to a point where we can no longer source joy by ourselves.
From there, our relationships become dependent — a state that is detrimental to the wellbeing of the relationship as well as our own.
Love and Attraction
Dating is a rife area for self-abandonment due to the natural pull that comes with being attracted to someone else. Whilst not — yet — recognised in the DSM for its addictive potential, attraction occurs within the same brain areas that are triggered in all addictions: The reward pathway of the limbic system.
When we lack a solid foundation in ourselves, in friends, and in personal hobbies, we leave ourselves vulnerable to being pulled away from ourselves and into external sources of pleasure — the affection of another being one of these things.
With this in mind, I wanted to go through 4 ways to stop ourselves from self-abandoning with new romantic partners in your life.
1. Continue Investing In You
When we meet and begin falling for someone new, the high we experience from the flood of neurotransmitters that accompanies our new attraction can motivate us to invest all our time and energy into this new, wonderful, person in our lives — and there’s nothing wrong with this until there is.
It’s good to want to spend time with someone new and it’s good to nurture the blossoming relationship between the two of you, but issues arise when we do this at the expense of all the other plants we have in our garden. When the orchid that resembles our own self-care begins to wither and the oak tree signifying our friends and family wilts, this is a problem.
No ecosystem is defined by one single organism, but a combination of all organisms — big and small — that work together to create the optimal condition for life to thrive. Be aware of this when pursuing a new relationship, as a failure to nurture other areas of your life will result in an overall decline in your wellbeing that will eventually impact the relationship, too.
The feeling of resentment is a great marker of this self-neglect. That feeling of knowing you should be tending to something of your own, but placing it aside in favor of desire.
This moves us onto our second point…
2. Distinguish and Be Aware Of Your Desires and Needs
Many of us make the mistake of not knowing where a need ends and a desire begins. As love can be addictive, just as something like sugar is, desire can continue long on after our needs have been met, despite what we may feel.
For example, you may spend many nights with your new partner and feel compelled to spend more — neglecting plans with friends or your own projects in the process. In these moments, you don’t NEED to spend time with them, you DESIRE to spend time with them.
Desire and needs differ in that desire can last long after the need has been fulfilled. You may have met your daily sugar requirements but that doesn’t mean your brain doesn’t still crave sugar. This is due to the nature of our reward system — it is there to motivate us to continue consuming the things that make us feel good.
Unfortunately, we fail to realise that too much sugar will rot our teeth.
As Steven Stosny, Ph.D. says in this Psychology Today article,
“The habit of interpreting preferences and desires as “needs” vastly distorts subjective experience.” — Steven Stonsy, Psychology Today.
It’s good practice to bring awareness to the origins of what is driving you to want to see someone so much. Is this a desire, or is it a need? Most likely, it’s a desire. When we recognise that we require other relationships and hobbies to fill our garden, we can begin to see that what we truly need is time with friends, time spent on a project we enjoy, or even time to ourselves.
3. Take Love Off a Pedestal
Some of us are quick to self-abandon as we hold unhealthy beliefs around love’s value and our own self-worth. We believe that in order for us to feel wanted, liked and even whole, we must have someone else’s approval.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
When we place too much credence on the attention of others, we will begin to self-abandon as we see our own life as less valuable than the one we have with another. Moreover, some of us lack our own lives, to begin with. We don’t have hobbies, we don’t have a job or career we enjoy, and we don’t have friends we can trust. The problem turns from not nurturing our garden to not having much of a garden to begin with.
Not only does having our own hobbies, lives, and friends stop us from over-relying on others to fulfil needs they aren’t there to satisfy — but it makes us more attractive, too. It’s good to know someone has their own life and that they aren’t dependent on our continuous attention to feel good in themselves. It’s claustrophobic and heavy for the relationship to hold.
Ensure you have a life of your own and that you enjoy it, too. This is a process in itself that extends way beyond the realm of self-abandonment. Self-abandonment is merely one of the many consequences of lacking a life you enjoy.
Love can not, and should not be, a fix for your dissatisfaction in life. Otherwise, we will self-abandon and we will be willing to sacrifice ourselves for someone else’s approval — even if that means losing parts of ourselves in the process.
4. Remember All The Times You Self-Abandoned In The Past
If you’ve self-abandoned once for someone, you’ve likely done it before — if not several times before.
Remind yourself of how this felt. How it felt to neglect your own wants and needs in favor of attaining something outside of yourself. How it felt to chase the high of an attraction at the expense of your own hobbies. How it felt to not see friends and how your friends felt losing you.
How maladaptive the process was in abandoning your own needs, becoming reliant on the relationship, and suffocating it of all the air it had. How it felt to be dependent on someone else’s attention in order to feel good as you’d forgotten all the good you had whilst you were single.
Remind yourself of all of this, and more.
Self-abandonment is the short-term chase of something that feels good at the expense of ourselves.
As Brené Brown so brilliantly puts it,
“True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are”. — Brené Brown.
And I couldn’t agree more.
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