In this excerpt from a therapeutic coaching session, Speaker A (the client) repeatedly acknowledges a recurring pattern of attracting people who trigger feelings of abandonment. When prompted by Speaker B (the facilitator), A identifies the physical manifestation of this abandonment as tension in the throat and chest, describing it as a lock that prevents authentic self‑expression. B reframes this fear of expressing oneself as a form of self‑abandonment, and A affirms this insight. The dialogue highlights the link between relational patterns, somatic sensations, and the concept of self‑abandonment as a target for healing.
I attract people that make me feel the want of the abandonment.
So you attract people where there's some form of abandonment? You feel abandoned?
Yes.
And is that a pattern that keeps coming up in your life over and over again?
Yes.
When you feel that abandonment in your body, where do you feel it?
Oh my God.
Um, take a deep breath real quick. Let it go.
My throat and my chest, and like it locks down, like it doesn't let me talk, doesn't let me be myself.
There's some form of tension. Is it tension?
Yeah, it's tension. It's basically I lock. It's like I don't want to be myself anymore, like, and I hide again.
The funny thing is, is that when you feel— when there's that fear of expressing yourself, isn't that sort of a form of abandonment? Self-abandonment?
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
So in an interesting way, part of the cycle is that by not expressing yourself, you are also abandoning yourself, which then also leads to— because you, the way that you treat you is the way that other people are then trained to treat you. Does that make sense? So if you don't choose yourself or if you're afraid to express yourself and you're not, you're abandoning yourself by holding yourself back, what many times will happen is people will mirror that energy back to you. So what if this abandonment that is the fear of— what if the key is in the actual expression of that energy? And by expressing it, you are then no longer abandoning yourself.
