How To END Self-Abandonment (With Clear, Actionable Steps)

So if you are somebody that had an abandonment wound growing up, it's very likely that you have become somebody who self-abandons. You struggle to say yes to the things that you really want, express how you feel, express what you want, what you need, say no to things that are not of interest to you. So in today's video, what I'm gonna be diving into is what causes self-abandonment, what causes the abandonment wound in the first place, how it shows up in your life today, and specific strategies that you can start to deploy today in order to stop abandoning yourself. Because one of the things that I see time and time again with a lot of the men that I work with is that, especially in their relationship, they are continuing to abandon themselves and it is causing a collapse both within themselves and their relationship. My name is Connor Beaton. This is the ManTalks Show, and we're gonna dive in. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you aren't already. It goes a long way to the algorithm, you know, putting this out there, but also making sure that you can find Find my content again in the great abyss of the internet. So with that said, let's dive straight in. So let's talk about understanding the abandonment wound and what forms it. The first thing that I want you to know is that this is way more common than you might think. So many of the men that I work with have a fear of being abandoned, have a core wound of abandonment. And because of that, they are consistently abandoning themselves. Now, what forms an abandonment wound? Well, an abandonment wound really forms when, as a kid, you experienced some type of disconnection, some type of abandonment. It could have been physical, it could have been emotional, it could have been both, right? But maybe it was a parent leaving. Maybe there was a divorce. Maybe one of your parents was constantly gone because of work. Or maybe they were just emotionally unavailable. They were there all the time, but there was nothing to hold onto emotionally. And so anytime that you brought up your emotions, there was just this kind of disconnect. Maybe they shamed you, maybe they shut you down, maybe you got punished for feeling or feeling too much, or maybe you just felt like how you felt didn't matter at all. Like people weren't really interested in how you felt, what you wanted, what you were interested in. And as a result, of this, there's a kind of wired-in layer of shame. You can think of it as like a heavy blanket that has surrounded your sense of self. It has surrounded your real, what Carl Jung would have called your deep self, who you really are at your core, what you really need, what you really want at your core. And what emerged, what you keep coming in contact with, is the version of your identity That is really entrenched in the belief that you're broken in some way, you're defective in some way, your wants, your needs, your desires, all of those things are somehow inherently defective. And that at your core, that your feelings don't really matter, or at the very least, other people do not want to know about them. And that shame that you experienced and that you continue to experience shows up later in life as a whole bunch of symptoms. And that's what I wanna get into next. So let's talk about the side effects of an abandonment wound. And the big side effect is that we externalize our sense of self out into other relationships and out into the world. And so, because when we are abandoned very young, what we learn through that abandonment, and again, it could have been a parent who was an addict, an alcoholic. It could have been a parent that was chronically overworking, you know, the 80 to 100-hour work weeks. And so you didn't really feel like that person knew who you were, mom or dad really knew who you were. What ends up happening is that your identity, your sense of self, orients towards the outside, and it is constantly seeking validation that it is okay. So you are constantly seeking in a kind of chronic, repetitive way for other people to validate that how you feel is all right, that what you want is okay, what you need is okay, that when you want to say that if you don't wanna do something, that that's okay. And I remember working with a client where anytime he had a decision to make in his life, he would immediately text me, email me, try and call me. And a lot of it was he had a decision, a choice to make, and it could have been small, it could have been big, And he was struggling to make that choice and decision. And what he would do is he would call a whole bunch of people in his life, friends, sometimes family members, and try and get them to confirm and validate that the choice that he wanted to make was okay. So for the person who was abandoned growing up, the biggest thing that I want you to know, and the hardest thing to overcome, is that when we are abandoned growing up, it becomes the way that we interact with ourself. later on in life. So the biggest side effect and sort of symptom of an abandonment wound in childhood is self-abandonment in adulthood. So you end up becoming a man who abandons himself at most turns, right? Like pretty much every opportunity, not because there is something wrong with you, not because you are defective or you're bad or you're broken or— No. What you want or need or desire is somehow inherently faulty, but because the wound that you experienced shaped so much of your identity that it told you that how you feel, what you need, what you want, who you are at your core is somehow defective. Because for a child, their whole sense of self-perception is relational. Meaning how they feel about themselves is predicated off of the interactions that they have with their caregivers, with their primary caregivers. And so for kids, whether we like it or not, they're largely little bundles of ego. They're largely little bundles of identity formation and identity forming. And so they're constantly looking out to mom and dad to see, do I matter? Does what I feel matter? Can I throw this tantrum and you be okay? Is, can I, Want something and be okay? Can I say no to something and not get yelled at and punished or disciplined? Is it all right for me to just be me? Is it okay for me to be me? So the side effects of this, when we don't get that, when we are abandoned in some way, shape, or form, again, whether it's physically or emotionally, psychologically, et cetera, the side effects of this are pretty clear. So I'm going to list them out. And what I want you to listen for are the ones that you find yourself really defaulting to. Okay. So the first one is an oversensitivity to feedback or criticism, an oversensitivity to feedback or criticism. So somebody says that they're disappointed in you. Usually this is amplified in your relationship, your intimate relationship. They say, you know, I really feel like you missed the mark with X, Y, and Z, or I feel like we haven't spent enough time together, or it feels like you've been distant lately and bam, that feedback, that little hint at criticism or disappointment on their side feels like a huge threat to your system. Oh no, I'm doing something wrong. For sure, I'm going to be left and abandoned. The second thing is a kind of overreacting to conflict. So conflict starts to happen, and either you go into big rage, reactivity, anger, frustration, or you go into massive collapse and shutdown. So people that have an abandonment wound at their core, have a hypersensitivity to conflict and oftentimes have a predisposition, let's say, let's call it, to overreacting. And part of that is, again, it's usually learned and it's usually something that is because of this abandonment that happened in childhood. All or nothing. So very black and white, very universal levels of communication, extremist tendencies are all a part of the abandonment wound. So you'll hear yourself using what I call universals or absolutes all the times, right? So, you never, you always, you'll hear that type of language from yourself when you have an abandonment wound. And part of that is because for a kid, their sense of, their temporal sense, their sense of time is very, very different. It's not developed. And so a lot of the times, if they experience, or if you experienced abandonment, especially early on in life, that will have felt like forever, right? An hour to a kid who's just been left alone at 5 and is scared and is afraid feels like a lifetime, right? An hour to a child who had a little bit of a tantrum and then is locked in his room for an hour or 2 can feel like a lifetime. So it feels like forever. And what ends up happening is that you become an adult who plays or And when you're really reactive, when you're kind of emotional or you're sensitive, you move into this very absolutist space, right? You never do this, you always say that, and the accusations become these sort of universals. Things like ghosting can be very prominent at the sign of abandonment. So people that have been abandoned, this is a very odd thing, but people that have been abandoned have a much higher predisposition towards abandoning other people before they can get hurt. And so, it becomes a defense strategy. So, you might find yourself in relationships where at the first sign of any sort of issue or conflict, like, you bounce immediately. The next thing is jealousy, self-doubt, envy, and insecurity are pretty rampant within people that have this abandonment wound. And then, People pleasing. People pleasing is a really, really big one. You just say yes to things that you're not interested in. You are constantly trying to cater to other people because that's where your sense of self comes from. And it's not just your sense of worth or value, it's— that's where the majority of your sense of self comes from. When we are abandoned early on, our sense of self doesn't fully form and develop. It's kind of interrupted in a way. And because of that interruption, what you learn is, I need to reinforce my sense of self by getting other people to do it for me. Because in a healthy relationship, I mean, I don't know if we want to say it's healthy, but when we are growing up in a healthy dynamic between a caretaker and a child, that child is going to experience Being prioritized. And what that reinforces is their sense of self. I'm okay, my needs are okay, my wants are okay, it's okay for me to be emotional. And when that is established, then you can become an adult who says, my needs matter, what I want matters, when I say no, it matters, and it's okay for me to say no. But when that sense of self is interrupted because we've been abandoned, What's replaced is what I need, what I want, what, what I'm not okay with doesn't matter as much as other people's. And so if I feel something, if I want something, if I don't want something, I need to try and get other people to reinforce whether or not that's okay, whether or not I have value, whether or not I'm all right. And so people pleasers very, very, very often have a core abandonment wound. Now, obviously, I was gonna say why this, you know, why this work matters, but this work matters because until you start to do the things that I'm about to list out, you will continue to perpetuate that abandonment wound. So the sort of insidious part of the abandonment wound is that we become somebody who then abandons ourselves. We then continue on. It's kind of like an inherited legacy. And a lot of the times with the men that I've worked with over the last 12 years, there's a lot of anger, there's a lot of grief, there's a lot of sadness. There can sometimes be rage towards the people that abandoned them. And a lot of the times that same anger, rage, and grief is self-directed. So it's called retroflexion. It's really retroflexed back onto ourselves. So sometimes you might find yourself really being angry or really being sad about your caregivers, your mom, your dad, Abandoning you in the way that they did. But for sure, what I have seen in so many men that I've worked with is that there's a huge amount of what's called retroflexion. And what that means is that a lot of the anger, a lot of the boundaries, a lot of the energy that you would normally use to say, no, I'm not interested in doing that, no, I'm not okay with that, no, I don't really want to do that, yeah, I want to go on this vacation, I want to go on that date, A lot of that energy gets stolen and repackaged and directed at us. So you end up directing all of this energy that's usually going into boundary setting and communicating what it is that you want, what you value, what you need, and it gets directed at you in the form of criticism, contempt, self-loathing, self-hatred. So, at the core of you as an individual who has an abandonment wound is this perception that there's something wrong with you. And when you feel like there's something wrong with you, you're constantly in this state of hypervigilance, looking for the ways that you have screwed up to then beat yourself up to reinforce this wound. So, let's talk about how we begin to flip the script, okay? Because like I said, when we have an abandonment wound, what we end up doing is abandoning ourselves. So we need to end the self-abandonment. Now, how we begin to do this is, first off, we have to start to address the shame and the fault. For the majority of people that I have worked with that have a very deep abandonment wound, there are 2 main things that need to be confronted immediately. The first one is the, the level of shame that you likely have. Something's really wrong with me. Something's really defective in me. I'm bad. I'm broken. Yeah, I'm just bad and broken, and I don't like who I am. And that is the case for so many. This is what I experienced when I started this work. I really hated and did not like who I was. And this is a real game changer for starting to heal self-abandonment and that abandonment wound, is that you, you have to realize that the shame that you feel And the meaning that you've been giving to it and what happened had nothing to do with you. It actually had nothing to do with you. Your parents' divorce was not your fault. A parent leaving was not something that you were responsible for. A parent being abusive was not because there was something wrong with you. A caregiver who couldn't emotionally connect with you didn't mean that you were defective. And so in starting to do this, what you can do is you can write down, what am I ashamed about myself for? What, what do I carry shame about with regards to myself? And then the follow-up question to that is, and where did that originate from? Where did I learn that? Because the shame that you as a person with an abandonment wound carries is something that you inherited. Okay, I'm going to say that again. The shame that you as somebody with an abandonment wound carries is something that you inherited. It's a false narrative. It's a false story. It can feel very real. It can feel very true. Something's wrong with me. Something's broken, I have to figure it out, I have to root it out, I have to, you know, I have to kill it off, this is the biggest problem that I have to solve. But what we have to start to see is that the shame that we experience about ourselves, I'm broken, I'm defective, something's wrong with me, something's wrong with what I want, something's wrong with what I need, how come I can't ask for what I want and need? Why can't I say no? All of those things are predated and preloaded and inherited by the dynamic with usually your caregivers. Okay. And it can be other people. It can be grandparents. It can be family members or coaches and whatnot, but it is inherited. Okay. Nobody comes out feeling like they're broken. It's just not, it's just not how it works. Okay. Nobody comes, nobody comes in the form of a, of an infant and enters into the world and is like, oh, I'm defective. That's not how it works. Okay. We inherit that perception. So the first thing that we need to do with shame is to understand, where did I actually inherit this shame? Who installed this shame? When did I start to believe this shame? And that is the very first step that we need to do. So part of it is allocating the origin of the shame to its rightful source, because what people with abandonment wounds do is they say, I'm ashamed of who I am, And that's my fault. I'm ashamed of who I am, and that's my fault. I'm broken, and that's my fault. I am hurting, and that's my fault. Something's wrong with me, and that's my fault. Versus, I'm hurting, and that's my responsibility to tend to. Not, it's my fault. Or, and you're never broken, right? You're not, it's not, you can't, you're not broken. I think that's the one thing that I just need to say right out the gates. And I remember feeling like I was broken for a very long time, and then starting to realize where all of the shame that existed inside of me had come from. And it had come from interactions with caregivers and family members and friends and circumstances that had happened and divorce and da da da da da. And I started to realize, oh, I've inherited a lot of this shame. It was passed down to me. Or it was given to me in this example, in this interaction where I was told that, you know, I was a useless POS, you know, or I was told that I would never— I was stupid, or I'd never amount to anything, or whatever it was that I heard. And so, we need to start to look at, when did I experience this? And what you'll notice is that the shame you carry is directly correlated to the abandonment that you experienced. When you are abandoned as a child, You do not have the consciousness and the sort of logical understanding or the emotional awareness to say, it's because mom's just got her own shit. It's because dad's going through his stuff, or he's, he doesn't, he's just like, he won't open up. You know, he just won't connect. A kid can't think that. So anything that happens to a child, the child interprets as something wrong within itself. Yeah. But as an adult, part of the work is being able to say, oh, you know what? Dad left. And that actually just didn't have anything to do with you. You know, that dad left and didn't have anything to do with me. That wasn't about me. It wasn't because I was wrong or broken. So we start to see where we inherited the shame. The second thing that we need to do with the shame is that we need to start to separate personhood from— personhood and our sense of self from our behavior, okay? Personhood from behavior. For people that are abandoned, the first thing that happens is we start to ask ourselves, what did I do? What did I do to cause this? What's wrong with me that, that, that I caused this, that I brought this onto myself? What could I have done to not get abandoned in the way that I did, to not be emotionally left or neglected in the way that I did? And so your sense of self, your personhood, personhood becomes enmeshed and dependent on your behavior, on what you do, because the illusion and the false story that the shame tells you is that you should have been able to prevent the abandonment. And that is incorrect. That's incorrect. That's the lie. That's the false story that keeps the shame active. So we start— we have to start to separate personhood from behavior. And I'll give you some examples of this. So with my son, I'll say things to him like, you're a great kid and that choice wasn't good. You're a great kid and that action wasn't great. You know, you're a great kid and hitting your sister, that behavior is not okay. You're a great kid and throwing your yogurt across the room on the floor, not the best choice. So in doing that, we start to separate You are inherently good. That choice, that decision, that behavior, that, that's what we need to look at. That's what we can shift. That's what we can improve on. And for people that are abandoned, they do not have separation between those 2 things. So you can start to say to yourself, I am good. I'm a good man. I'm a good husband. I'm a good partner. I'm a good boyfriend. I'm a good employee. And that choice wasn't great. Let me look at this decision. I'm okay. Nothing's wrong with me. I just made a bad choice. I just made a decision that isn't aligned with who I want to be. Okay, let me go look at that decision. Let me go look at that behavior. Let me go look at that choice, but I am inherently good. And so we start to separate those 2 things. The last piece about this is we start to shift The fault of, I deserved to be abandoned. Now, for some of you, this part is not going to resonate, but for some of you, this is going to really hit hard. Okay? So for some people who end up getting abandoned, what they feel inside is, I deserve that. I deserve that. There's something wrong with me, and I deserved being left, being abandoned. And This is a really kind of toxic shame. And this is the narrative that you did something so egregious that caused your caretaker or whoever it was to abandon you, versus the fault, as we can say, being placed in the right place. Okay. It is never A child's fault for being abandoned. It is never a child's fault for being abandoned. And I really want you to let that in. I want you to let that do something to you, because for the majority of people who have been abandoned, some part of them is trying to figure out why they were. Some part of them is usually saying, it must be because there's something wrong with me and I'm defective. And for some people, it goes a step further, and they start to take on this feeling and this belief that they deserved it, that they, because they were bad, they were broken, they were wrong as a child, they deserve to be left, they deserve to be abandoned, they deserve to not have emotional connection. And that's usually for the people who had experienced a lot of very direct shame growing up. You know, you heard really bad things you saw, some not good things you experienced, some not good things. So we have to begin to place the fault of the abandonment in the correct place, and that is always with the adult. That is always with the adult. Now, what you do is your responsibility with the pain, with the hurt. You are responsible for, for ending the self-abandonment, right? It's not your dad's job or your mom's job now that you're an adult. But to place the fault where it belongs, that, that was because of them. And sometimes that's going to open up a lot of anger or frustration or rage or grief or sadness. And that's okay. It is meant to. Now, I'd like to end the video with a couple specific things that you can begin to do outside of the stuff I've already given you, that you can start to deploy, that is really going to support in you ending self-abandonment, period. Okay? The first thing is that I need you to start to build what's called interoceptive awareness, interoceptive awareness. And another way, a very simple way of saying this is notice the body before you override it. For people that have been abandoned, and the reason why you continue to abandon yourself is that you ignore the signals inside of yourself that say, I don't wanna do that, I'm not interested in doing that, or yeah, I really wanna go do that, or here's what I need, or here's how I feel about that. You override the signals. And so interoception is just the ability to have inner understanding of what you are experiencing. And this is specifically about Body awareness, beginning to notice your gut, right? The intelligence of your lower voice, your heart, and what your body is trying to say. Because there are signals. You might notice that somebody says, hey, do you want to go play pool on Friday night? And you're like, you know, you get tense and you're like, no, I don't want to do that shit. What I really want to go do is see this latest movie, or I really want to go just grab, you know, beer, a beer and pizza and watch the UFC fight, right? I'm just kidding. I'm just giving examples. But when you ignore the data that is inside of you, your own body sensations, you are going to continue to override your own beliefs, your own wants, and your own needs. So as a practice, 3 to 5 times a day, I want you to start to anchor into the body. You take a breath, When you're drinking your coffee, when you're driving home, when you're brushing your teeth, and you take just 60 seconds to scan the body, the jaw, the chest, the gut, and you start to just name one sensation that's in there, right? Ah, it's a little tight in the jaw, or I feel some buzz in the chest, or, you know, there's— it feels like there's like a lot of heaviness in the gut, you know, or there's a lot of like power in the gut right now. And so, you start to tune into what is actually happening inside of you. And as you do this practice, you're building up an awareness of what's happening from a physical side, from a sensation side, from an emotional side, and from an experiential side in your body. Because for people that were abandoned, the reason why you continue to abandon yourself is that you ignore the data that is happening experientially. I call this your direct felt experience. You ignore your direct felt experience that's saying, no, I don't wanna go do that. No, I'm not interested in that. And you ignore it by fixating on the fear that is present. So we have to start to acknowledge the deeper sensations. The next thing that I want you to focus in on is install a pause before you respond to anything. Install a pause before you respond to anything. Your girlfriend asks you to go on a date to a movie, pause. You know what? Give me an hour and I'll get back to you. You install a pause before your, you know, when your boss says, hey, Would you mind taking on this project? And you're like, let me, let me take a look at my workload right now and get back to you within the hour. I'll let you know ASAP. I think I can, but just let me, just give me some space to look at this. And you start to install this pause so that you have time to really feel into and discern what it is that you want to do. Now, the next part of this is you're gonna have to let yourself fail. You're gonna have to. To let yourself get it wrong. This is not about making the perfect right decision every single time. This is about beginning to have an orientation and building a compass towards what it is that you truly want, need, desire, are wanting to express, and how you feel. So it is not about getting it right every single time. time. It is about learning to read and understand the data of your own inner truth in a more effective way. Because when we are abandoned, we have that abandonment wound. The reason why— part of the reason why we continue to self-abandon is that we just don't know how to read the data, right? Your partner, your girlfriend, your wife says, hey, do you want to go do this on Saturday? And your immediate response is kind of like a Freeze up. You're not really too sure what's happening inside of you, and because you don't want to disappoint them, you just acquiesce and say yes, right? And then an hour later, you're like, "Oh man, I really wanted to go do this thing over here, and I totally forgot about it." And da da da da. So create the pause before you respond, before you agree to anything. Pause. Give it some space. And I still practice this today when my wife asks me to do anything, to make a decision about anything. She knows now, it's like an ongoing joke where I'll say, give me 5 minutes, you know, or let me think about it tonight and I'll let you know the first thing tomorrow morning, or let's chat about it tomorrow afternoon and I'll have an answer for you. And then I'll sit with it for a little bit because I really want to make sure that I have a connection to what is true for me so that I am not abandoning myself in making decisions in our relationship, for the family, for myself. Et cetera. Now, the last practice I want to give you is very practical, something that you can implement very quickly, but it is a 14-day challenge of self-prioritization. Okay? It's a 14-day challenge where you are going to practice operating from a place of not self-abandoning, not self-abandoning, but actually self-prioritization. So the question is as follows: If I was prioritizing myself first, my needs, my wants, my desires, what would I do? What would I say? What would I choose? And what would I say no to? Okay, what would I do? What would I say? What would I choose? And what would I say no to? So for 14 days, I want you to really focus on saying no to the things that are genuinely, genuinely a no. I want you to choose things that are a hell yeah. I want you to say the things that you are experiencing and feeling and would normally withhold. I want you to do the things that you genuinely inside you want to go do. You're like, I want to wake up in the morning and go for a hike or go to the gym or go to yoga or like whatever it is. I want to go do photography. Start to say yes to yourself. Now, the caveat here is expect resistance. Okay? Expect the resistance, expect the fear, be afraid, do it anyway. Have the resistance, do it anyway. The only way out of self-abandonment is to start to self-prioritize. There's no other way around it. There— you could watch all the videos in the world. You could gain all the information in the world. You can gain all the knowledge in the world. I could break this down for hours and days for you, it will not change unless you start to prioritize yourself. And you cannot prioritize yourself without confronting the fear and the resistance. The big mistake that so many people have, if they've done all the work previous in the video, the big mistake that people have is that they expect that there's not going to be— it's like, there shouldn't be any resistance. Well, if I was doing it right, there shouldn't be any resistance. There shouldn't be any fear. Wrong. There absolutely should be resistance and there should be fear. So do it afraid and do it with the resistance. And that resistance and that fear is there because you have been living for however many years, however many decades, overprioritising what other people think and feel about you, overprioritising their validation of what your life should look like, and underindexing and underprioritising— What you want. How you actually feel, what you actually want, what is actually a no for you. So the last piece of this is 14-day self-prioritization challenge. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you found a ton of value in this. If you did, don't forget to like, subscribe, share the video with somebody that you think really could use it. Maybe this is something that you go through with somebody else. And as always, this is Connor Beaton signing off. I'll see you next week. Bye.