Recognizing Self-Abandonment and Taking Steps to Meet Your Needs
“You aren’t alive if you aren’t in need.”
If you had asked me 10 years ago, a year ago, even a month ago, if I have a habit of abandoning myself, I’d say, “Not at all. I take good care of myself.” But most recently, it occurred to me that maybe this not-so-little obstacle has been living in my subconscious all along.
I was having a conversation with a friend about my mother’s struggles with abandonment, having been abandoned by her parents at a young age, and how I continuously feel abandoned by my mother because of that. After a long pause, my friend asked me: “Do you ever abandon yourself?” The question stumped me for a few seconds. While I wouldn’t have hesitated before in answering, this time, I saw it from a different angle. “Yes, I think I have!” It was as if my vision had widened and I discovered something wicked hiding in my blindspot this whole time.
Everything became clear to me on how I had behaved in nearly all of my relationships in the past — I have always hesitated voicing my own needs and was ready to sacrifice them for the relationship. But something shifted in me last year, leading up to the willingness to see this for myself. And now, I can do something about it.
Ways we abandon ourselves
Abandonment doesn’t just come in a physical sense; it can also take form in an emotional sense. While it’s plain and simple to identify physical abandonment — someone leaving us without an explanation or not showing up in our time of need — emotional abandonment is often invisible. That is why it’s so hard for us to see. We’ve probably all felt it at some point but we might not even associate it with abandonment.
Emotional abandonment is leaving our emotional needs unattended, often without acknowledging or addressing it with a response. That can leave us feeling confused, unsettled and unloved for a long time. If we were constantly neglected emotionally growing up then we can begin to see our emotional needs as unworthy and routinely ignore them as adults. It is in this way we can self-abandon, and in turn, be prone to emotionally abandon others.
Self-abandonment can often look like this:
Putting everyone else’s needs before your own
Hiding or keeping your needs to yourself
Unwillingness to recognize your needs
Escaping from attending to your needs
Giving up on having your needs met
Taking steps to be there for ourselves
Regularly ignoring our needs can take a serious toll on our self-esteem. Unmet needs can also cause stress and anxiety in our daily lives. When we perceive our needs as unimportant, we attract those who also see them as unimportant. Or worse, we condition everyone who enters our life to treat our needs as unimportant, by showing them how poorly we regard ours.
The longer we ignore our needs, the harder it will be to raise their level of importance in our habitual mind. So don’t wait, start practicing being there for yourself today!
Reconnecting with your own needs
To reconnect with your needs, you will first have to admit that you have needs. As I often have to remind myself, admitting to being human does not make you any less spiritual. In fact, the comfort in acknowledging your needs right now is precisely what will ultimately transcend those needs. Make a list of all your unmet needs and gently give them a nod of recognition. Treat your needs with compassion, without judgment, even if you think they sound ridiculous. For now, just explore and release any unmet needs you may have suppressed and bring them to the surface. Diffuse any frustration associated with those needs and trust they will be met one day.
If some of those needs have painful experiences attached to them and feel incredibly urgent, be sure to take some time to journal your thoughts and feelings for as long as it takes, until you feel the urgency subside. Repeat as often as you need to.
Expressing your needs
This is often the most challenging step. It is really a practice because it will take mindfulness and courage to make self-love a daily habit, especially if you were raised to keep your needs to yourself.
In order to sufficiently express your needs, you must let go of any guilt associated with your needs being important. You cannot articulate your needs to others comfortably if you feel you are causing trouble or are an inconvenience to others. Sometimes, the letting go process can take a long time. If that is the case for you, give yourself plenty of compassion but continue to be persistent in acknowledging the importance of your needs, even if no one else appears to agree at the moment. When you change your perception of your needs, they will too.
If communicating your needs to others feels uncomfortable right now, you can simply practice saying what you need out loud to yourself. You can begin the sentence with “I need…” then continue the sentence for as long as you need to, until you run out of things to say. This is a simple yet powerful exercise to get comfortable using your voice to express what you need. Then take baby steps and ask someone for something small at first, such as tea instead of coffee, or to turn down the air conditioning. As you build trust and confidence, gently and gradually communicate other needs, such as setting comfortable boundaries in your relationships.
Tending to your own needs
Let’s face it, not everyone will tend to every one of your needs — that’s just reality. As you continue to escalate the importance of your own needs, you will soon realize that other’s needs are important, too. They also need to tend to their own needs when you’re not able to be there for them.
We are likely to have many needs that will not be met by others, so we need to acquire the right tools to tend to our own. That is quite possibly what we are all here to do — transcend our need to have the external world fulfill our internal needs. Being able to tend to your own needs is not only a useful tool, it is a powerful skill to possess.
First, you must learn to manage disappointment in others not coming to your rescue in your time of need. Regardless of their response, intention or relationship to you, don’t let disappointment distract you from your responsibility toward your own needs. Learn from the experience, then move forward with other possibilities to take care of your needs in the best way possible.
This can look very differently for everyone. For some, it’s being able to talk about how you feel; for others, reading, journaling or meditating. Explore all the tools until you find your favorites and build on them until they become natural. If there is a specific need you feel deprived of, be sure to do plenty of self-reflection in finding the source of this unmet need. Is it from childhood? Is it from a traumatic experience? Is it from a health condition? Finding the root cause of an unmet need can often reveal multiple layers of why you have suppressed that need and self-abandon in the first place.
The most important tool in tending to our own needs is being present. The ability for us to hang in the present with our own unmet needs is a deeply spiritual experience. It can be at times uncomfortable, even painful. But as we practice being present every single day, we will become more and more comfortable with the uncomfortable. When discomfort turns into objectivity, we will either realize our pressing needs only exist in our mind, or we will be able to swiftly take care of those needs with the utmost clarity.
