Understanding the roles that attachment and shame play in our stories is the key to healing self abandonment
I'd always thought that healing was about putting the past behind me, forgiving the people who had hurt me and becoming more independent. I thought it meant learning not to need so much, not to feel so much, not to be so affected by other people’s behaviour. Learning to trust myself, to be more confident in my decisions and to stop seeking external validation and reassurance.
But both my professional experience and my own lived experience have taught me something different. Sometimes, the way forward from self-abandonment isn’t learning to survive on my own. It’s learning that you can be in connection with another person without having to abandon yourself in the process.
And this is where I've learnt over the years and from helping others that attachment, emotional attunement and our early relational experiences are the key to unlocking your sense of self.
The connection between self abandonment and attachment
For many of us, self abandonment begins much earlier than we realise. As children, we depend on our caregivers not only to meet our physical needs but to help us understand and regulate our emotional world. We need to feel seen, heard, understood and accepted. We need someone who is curious about our feelings, interested in our experiences and able to sit alongside us when things feel difficult.
When emotional attunement is inconsistent or missing, we learn to adapt. Perhaps you grew up with a parent or caregiver who was emotionally unavailable, unpredictable or preoccupied with their own needs. Maybe you learned to read the room, anticipate other people’s moods, minimise your feelings or become the child who didn’t ask for too much.
Over time, you may have learned that maintaining connection meant adapting yourself to someone else’s needs, rather than being able to express your own. You tell yourself you're easy going and even that you just don't feel anger - but a sense of resentment and injustice is bubbling away under the surface but you've learnt that expressing anger is unsafe and scary.
This is one of the ways we learn to abandon ourselves. Not because there is something wrong with us, but because adapting was once a way of maintaining connection and feeling safe.
Shame and self abandonment
Another important part of healing from self abandonment is understanding the role of shame in our early attachment experiences.
As children, when our emotional needs aren’t consistently met, or we experience a distant, unpredictable or even abusive caregiver, we don’t blame that parent; instead, we internalise that experience and feel it must be our fault, that there's something wrong with us.
We learn to contort ourselves, becoming more agreeable, accommodating or less demanding in an attempt to be accepted and maintain connection. We learn to make ourselves more palatable to the people we depend on.
And somewhere in this process, shame takes root. A sense that we’re somehow not quite good enough, that our needs are too much, or that being our authentic selves might mean losing love or connection.
These beliefs can follow us into adulthood, woven into the stories we tell ourselves, our relationships and the ways we continue to people-please and abandon our own needs.
Understanding the relationship between shame and attachment can be a profoundly important part of healing. In therapy, it can involve gently exploring and peeling back these layers of shame, sometimes noticing how difficult or exposing it feels to even acknowledge them.
There can be a real vulnerability in allowing ourselves to look at the beliefs we’ve carried for so long, rather than continuing to avoid them or accept them as the truth about who we are. But underneath those layers is the opportunity to reconnect with the parts of ourselves we learned to hide, suppress or adapt.
When safe love doesn’t feel safe
So what happens when this child grows up and seeks a relationship? You finally meet someone who seems to tick the boxes: they're kind, consistent and reliable, interested in getting to know you.
You might then ask: Can I trust my gut? Why do I feel uncomfortable when someone is actually being kind to me? Why do I feel overwhelmed or want to pull away when someone is consistent, interested and emotionally available?
There isn’t a straightforward answer and it’s important never to dismiss feelings of discomfort or assume that every difficult feeling is an attachment response.
However, one thing worth understanding is that safe love can sometimes feel unsafe when your nervous system has learned to associate closeness with uncertainty, rejection or the loss of yourself.
If you’ve spent much of your life managing other people’s emotions, anticipating their needs or adapting to keep relationships stable, someone who is genuinely interested in you can feel surprisingly unfamiliar.
Being seen by another can feel exposing. Consistency can feel uncomfortable. Kindness can trigger overwhelm or even an urge to withdraw.
Sometimes, being understood feels more threatening than being hurt, at least initially.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the person is wrong for you. It may mean that your nervous system hasn’t yet learned to recognise this kind of connection as safe.
Healing is learning to stay connected to yourself
Attachment work helps us understand these patterns, rather than simply judging ourselves for having them. It allows us to become curious about why we respond in certain ways, why we might feel drawn to familiar but emotionally unavailable relationships, or why receiving care and expressing our needs can feel so difficult.
And importantly, healing isn’t about overriding our feelings, forcing ourselves to trust people or learning to tolerate relationships that don’t feel right.
It’s about developing the ability to recognise what is happening within us, distinguish between past experiences and present realities, and make choices without automatically abandoning our own needs.
We also need new relational experiences. Experiences of being listened to, understood, respected and emotionally met. This is why the therapeutic relationship can be such an important part of healing. Over time, you can learn that we can have needs without being too much, express our feelings without losing connection and allow someone to get close without having to become someone else to keep them there.
Finding your way back to yourself
Perhaps one of the most important things I’ve learned, both personally and professionally, is that the opposite of self abandonment isn’t becoming completely independent, forgiving everyone who's hurt me or learning not to need anyone.
It’s connection; but a connection where there is room for you, too. Where your feelings matter, your needs are welcome and you don’t have to continually adapt, please or make yourself smaller to feel loved.
Healing isn’t about becoming someone who never feels uncomfortable in relationships or never experiences doubt. It’s about learning to stay connected to yourself while allowing yourself to be connected to others.
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